The Social Security Administration has been reminding me that I’ve come to the time of life when I have to make some decisions about retirement. Making those kinds of decisions leads to thinking about how I’m going to live in old age and where I’m going to die.
That last one surprised me…
It’s astonishing to realize there are more birthdays behind you than in front of you.
I’m in great health, still ride my motorcycle everywhere and feel like I’m in my mid-30’s. Getting old and dying is years away. When I tore open the envelope from Social Security and a Medicare card fell out I thought someone had made a mistake.
Nope. It was for me.
I had the same reaction to the steady stream of offers from AARP when they found out I turned fifty. Must have the wrong guy.
Nope. Right name, right address, and sadly, right birth date.
I’ve spent forty years in Tucson and loved every minute. It’s a great place to live. Great climate, incredible melding of cultures and races surrounded by desert that is beautiful beyond description.
I’ve been delighted living here, but dying here brought me up short.
Don’t get me wrong…
Like everyone else, I have to die somewhere and Tucson seems like a good place for the same reasons it’s so great to live here. It would be so depressing to think my last sight of earth might be something cold, fog shrouded and rainy. Dying on a warm and sunny day seems like a much better way to go.
I never had much fear of death…
Fear of dying in pain and terror, sure, but not of death. It’s just a part of life. A biological necessity. A world in which nothing died wouldn’t last very long. Eventually all of us have to be on our way to make room for all that is coming next.
It’s been my experience that events stop being scary once they start happening. That’s the way it was on my first day of kindergarten, my first week away from home at college, and right after the last step of my first skydive.
I came to terms with death a long time ago.
When you stop and really think about it you realize how many people you know have gone already.
In the 3rd grade, a teacher carried a girl named Tracy out of the lunchroom. She was wearing a dress — the kind popular for little girls in the 60’s, and I remember how her legs looked like little sticks dangling back and forth.
She was so very small even for a third grader.
She had childhood leukemia; the teachers must have thought we were deaf the way they whispered about it among themselves in the weeks before her death.
In the 6th grade, Mark Weldon stopped coming to school. A drunk woman killed him while he was riding his bicycle one afternoon. What was once his bike became a front-page picture of tangled metal tubing and elliptical bicycle rims.
A year or two later my mother’s best friend died of cancer. The same kind of cancer my mother had a few years before, but the doctors cut it out of her before it could metastasize.
Another year or two and Robert Rogers was killed on the way home from the senior party and Randy Herman, so smart and handsome, was killed a few months later coming home from his first term at Oregon State University.
Then I started skydiving…
In only about 18 months, Cathy, Catherine, Smitty and Tommy left us behind. I saw each of them leave.
Skydiving is how I met my best friend of the 1980’s, Paul Simonetta.
Paul loved people and loved kids. He sat on the school board in Wilkes Barre Vermont, his hometown. His obituary says he had a big heart. He delighted in the kids and parents he met while waiting for his plane at the same gate as Flight 93. He told me about it. His heart wasn’t big enough to carry their memories, though. He died of a massive coronary three years later on the day after 9–11.
In 1994, Kona came into my life. He was a lost dog when we met in Kapowsin, Washington. He was exactly the dog that I had described to a girlfriend a few months earlier — a big Shepard mix, well over 100 pounds, but not so big that I couldn’t control him.
We were meant for each other. Strangers would comment how handsome he was and that it was obvious that we shared something special.
For more than a decade, Kona was my best friend. Like Paul.
I made a couple of thousand skydives. Started a couple of businesses, earned an MBA, published an academic research paper and almost completed a PhD program.
Taught Business, Management, Psychology and Statistics part time at a community college for about fifteen years. Loved it.
I had a ball.
Still am.
The odometer on my motorcycle is about to turn over 100,000 miles. I’ll ride it to the Grand Canyon next summer.
I have Medicare and I’m contributing to a 401(k). My tax filing will get a little more complicated. But everything else will pretty much stay the same. I still have my books, and I’ll still write essays.
I have to make out a will to make sure a few close friends get souvenirs. I also need to fill out a living will to make sure those same close friends aren’t burdened if I’m unlucky enough to have a long drawn out final illness.
But I just bought a spare engine for my motorcycle in case I outlive the one that’s in the bike now.
But I think we both a lot more miles ahead of us.
Eventually I’ll go through that final process and maybe meet up with Kona and Paul. Or maybe just nothingness. One way or another I can look forward to dying in Tucson.
And that’s not a depressing thought at all.
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