Gratitude with Attitude: Thoughts as I Approach Yet Another Birthday I Have No Right To

WARNING: Three a.m. thoughts at all the wrong hours.

In my ruminations over life and mortality in the wake of the death of my brother Steven in November 2017 and the discovery of my cancer the following April, I was reminded how very lucky I am to have been born in the latter half of the 20th century. Otherwise I would have died a most painful death at age 22. 

It’s been over 30 years since then, but I remember it vividly. Appendicitis hurts. I can only imagine what the later peritonitis would have been like had I not been put under anesthesia and had the offending organ cut out. Lucky me, I was born into a family with health insurance in late 20th century U.S.A. Not everyone gets that. 

Thanks to Western medical technology ca. 1984, this child of the South Carolina Midlands lived to see sunrise from the summit of Mt. Fuji in 1997, and this sunset through Colorado wildfire haze last month.

Naturally, I didn’t appreciate it at all back then. As young man in my early 20s, my life wasn’t shaping up the way I’d have liked—or, more precisely, the way I thought I’d have liked it, according to everyone else. While (it seemed, anyway) everyone else was whooping it up, making money and having fun in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, I was struggling to find work with an English degree I soon became reluctant to admit I’d had, as such degrees drew open derision from the even the handymen who worked for the smug little things in power ties and shoulder pads. (It’s even worse, now.)

As I’ve joked with my grown children, they’re here today because I failed at alcoholism and suicide, just like everything else. I met their mother just before I turned 29, and Operation Drink Myself To Death went sideways. For one, I lived past 30.

Having failed at talking their mother out of having children, my life truly began. I even got to relive childhood a bit through the children I was there to raise, and make up for my lost time there. Being a responsible father turned out to be the best therapy I could ask for. Not everyone gets that, either. Given our Endless Youth/Eternal Playtime cultural conditioning of the last 50 years, most people can’t even wrap their heads around the concept. 

To think I might have died at age 22 and never experienced what’s best in a man’s life.

You’d be appalled at what people already think of as normal.

I know people who did all the right things, got all the right jobs, drew all the right money, lived in all the right neighborhoods...and they resent the hell out of me because I’ve managed to stay married to the same woman all this time. You’d think I did it just to spite them.

I got lucky. Trust me, I know. None of this had to happen.

Then again, as we used to say down South, I met my luck halfway, so don’t expect me to feel too guilty about it. We all put in our hours here. Besides, when I think of the neener-neener attitude towards people like me working per hour instead of salary back in those glorious ‘80s, how I was made to feel like a failure because I wasn’t already married by age 25...an old saying attributed to Sun Tzu and his Art of War comes to mind:

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by. And, boy, do they. The mental image I have is that scene from Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds, but it doesn’t have to be that macabre. The bodies might stand for the fads, the fashions, the booms and busts that went with the decades...as well as the divorces, the foreclosures, the men frozen out of the professional market (the great untold story of the last Great Recession was all the once fat-salaried veterans of industries finding themselves permanent wage-slaves after Decades of Dedicated Service®), etc.

All right, so there’s no getting around the macabre part. I realize the following sentiment can’t help but sound like so much hypersweet hey-look-an-ironically-happy-ending rhetorical cotton candy, but for as much as some of these people I knew back in the day rode my nerves, I honestly don’t enjoy their suffering as much as I’d thought I might. A little, sure. Not as much I was counting on, though.

After all, it could just as easily have been me.

Here’s a heady Long Island iced tea of a metaphorical cocktail for you. I watch the bodies of my enemies float by, and it feels like someone just walked across my grave. Again and again.

Death peers out from the latticework. Think I’m being cute? You didn’t see that poor robin it took down last week, or hear its piteous chirps as it was batted around the yard. I probably prolonged its suffering in my attempt at intervention, because by the time I got outside it was clear the robin’s wings were too injured for flight. It was not getting away. All I could do was turn and go back inside and let Ginger Slim and the other cats finish what they started.

I realize I haven’t even touched on the many untimely deaths I knew before I was even 25 years old. The couple in high school who lingered too long at the park after everyone else had left and got murdered by a gang of proto-meth heads. The guy I used to ride with who took the curve too fast in his powder-blue 1967 Mustang. This older guy I knew, when 32 was super-old to me, who was diagnosed with pneumonia. His heart gave out in the course of having the fluid removed from his lungs.

I could go on. I’m sure you have even more compelling stories. 

Ah, to die in one’s sleep. Not everyone gets that, either. Indeed, I suspect it’s less common than we think.

This year, I dealt with cancer, and the inevitability of one day finally sickening and dying. I “beat” the Big C this time, but only because I was diagnosed early, and I got the offending organ cut out before the disease spread.

There will be a next time. We’re wearing down here. Next week I complete my 57th year of existence. I get fussed at on Facebook for talking about getting old, but I embrace the concept as well as the reality. Two of my favorite ex-girlfriends turned 60 this year and I’m not far behind them. Sixty is old. That’s all there is to it. You’re not “middle-aged” anymore.

I hope to live so long, myself.

You know the tagline by now.

I used to say autumn was my favorite season. Now I say, “the next one.” I’m happy for the privilege.

I got the second and third images from strangers on Facebook. The remaining photographs are Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved. Like what you see? Buy me a wholesome beverage via PayPal.