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Onward — 34 Comments

1. Things started falling apart for me two years ago when I hit 58. On the plus side, I’ve gotten serious about weight loss and am down 100 lbs in the last six months.

2. Neo says, “I know it’s to be expected as we get older, but it’s still hard.”

   Untimely decline and death also visit the young (and relatively young). When I was in high school, we had to read A.E. Housman’s collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896). One of the better-known poems in the volume is “To an Athlete Dying Young”:

   The time you won your town the race
   We chaired you through the market-place;
   Man and boy stood cheering by,
   And home we brought you shoulder-high.

   Today, the road all runners come,
   Shoulder-high we bring you home,
   And set you at your threshold down,
   Townsman of a stiller town.

   Smart lad, to slip betimes away
   From fields where glory does not stay,
   And early though the laurel grows
   It withers quicker than the rose.

   Eyes the shady night has shut
   Cannot see the record cut,
   And silence sounds no worse than cheers
   After earth has stopped the ears.

   Now you will not swell the rout
   Of lads that wore their honours out,
   Runners whom renown outran
   And the name died before the man.

   So set, before its echoes fade,
   The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
   And hold to the low lintel up
   The still-defended challenge-cup.

   And round that early-laurelled head
   Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
   And find unwithered on its curls
   The garland briefer than a girl’s.

   I first felt the force of that poem the summer after I finished high school, when one of my classmates died in an auto accident less than two months after graduation. And I have thought of it again with the reports of drug overdoses and lockdown-related increases in suicides among teenagers since 2020. And like Millay, I am not resigned.

3. Time by Pink Floyd.

4. I like this poem by Millay…

   Conscientious Objector by Edna St. Vincent Millay

   I shall die, but
   that is all that I shall do for Death.
   I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
   I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
   He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
   business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
   But I will not hold the bridle
   while he clinches the girth.
   And he may mount by himself:
   I will not give him a leg up.

   Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
   I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
   With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
   the black boy hides in the swamp.
   I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
   I am not on his pay-roll.

   I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
   nor of my enemies either.
   Though he promise me much,
   I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
   Am I a spy in the land of the living,
   that I should deliver men to Death?
   Brother, the password and the plans of our city
   are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.

   Another poem/song is by Laura Nero – And When I die…

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvwDjgKPoc

5. Regarding another fragile elderly person: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has had “a worsening [of health] due to advancing age,” according to a Vatican spokesperson. “At the end of his customary Wednesday audience with the public in a Vatican auditorium, Francis departed from his prepared remarks to say that Benedict [who turned 95 in April] is ‘very ill’ and asked the faithful to pray for the retired pontiff.”

   https://www.fox29.com/news/retired-pope-benedict-xvi-health-worsening-vatican-says

6. Sad.
   But fight.

7. When I am dead, my dearest,
   Sing no sad songs for me;
   Plant thou no roses at my head,
   Nor shady cypress tree.
   Be the green grass above me,
   with showers and dew drops wet,
   And if thou wilt, remember,
   And if thou wilt, forget.

   I shall not see the shadows,
   I shall not feel the rain,
   I shall not hear the nightengale
   Sing on as if in pain;
   And, dreaming through the twilight
   That doth not rise nor set,
   Haply I may remember,
   And haply may forget.
   —Christina Rosetti

   From too much love of living,
   From hope and fear set free,
   We thank with brief thanksgiving
   Whatever gods may be
   That no life lives forever,
   That dead men rise up never,
   That even the weariest river
   Winds somewhere safe to sea.
   —Algernon Charles Swinburne

   I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
   Nature I loved, and after nature, art;
   I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
   It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
   —Walter Savage Landor

   Done with the work of living, done
   With all the world; the mad race run
   Through to the end, the golden goal
   Attained and found to be a hole.
   —Ambrose Bierce

   Babies haven’t any hair;
   Old men’s heads are just as bare.
   Between the cradle and the grave
   Lies a haircut and a shave.
   —Samuel Hoffenstein

8. bof:

   A couple of facts about that William Savage Landor epitaph poem –

   He wrote it when he was 74 but lived to be 89.

   And he “strove with”tons of people:

   Landor’s biography consists of a catalogue of incidents and misfortunes, many of them self-inflicted but some no fault of his own. His headstrong nature and hot-headed temperament, combined with a complete contempt for authority, landed him in a great deal of trouble over the years. By a succession of bizarre actions, he was successively thrown out of Rugby school, of Oxford and from time to time from the family home. In the course of his life he came into conflict deliberately with his political enemies – the supporters of Pitt – but inadvertently with a succession of Lord Lieutenants, Bishops, Lord Chancellors, Spanish officers, Italian Grand Dukes, nuncio legatos, lawyers and other minor officials. He usually gained the upper hand, if not with an immediate hilarious response, then possibly many years later with a biting epithet.

   Landor’s writing often landed him on the wrong side of the laws of libel, and even his refuge in Latin proved of no avail in Italy. Many times his friends had to come to his aid in smoothing the ruffled feathers of his opponents or in encouraging him to moderate his behaviour. His friends were equally active in the desperate attempts to get his work published, where he offended or felt cheated by a succession of publishers who found his work either unsellable or unpublishable. He was repeatedly involved in legal disputes with his neighbours whether in England or Italy and Dickens’ characterisation of him in Bleak House revolves around such a dispute over a gate between Boythorn and Sir Leicester Dedlock.

   I guess some were worth his strife.

9. PA+Cat:

   Sorry to hear about Benedict. I was glad he retired when his health started to go back in 2013.

   I recall a great funny blog post when he was elected Pope in 2005:
   ______________________________

   Verdict On Pope: “Too Catholic”

   The disappointment in the voices of the anchors during CTV news coverage was palpable. One got the sense they were hoping for an upset, and a politically correct “progressive” papal election angle to pursue.

   “The new pope, Wang Chung One, the first from China, standing alongside his same-sex partner as he appeared on the balcony at the Vatican, introducing himself to a billion Catholics by declaring a woman’s right to chooooooose… well, Lloyd, this is a turning point for the Church…”

   http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/001729.html

10. A couple of weeks ago, I got to see my mother for the first time in more than two years. After my father died, I had been going to see my mother in the San Juans islands once a week. She had a beautiful house that my father designed and built, full of beautiful things. During the idiot lock-down she fell and shattered her leg. She was taken away by helicopter to the mainland where she was first in rehab and then in a nursing home. Her house was sold a few months back and her things packed or dispersed among the family. She never returned to her home. I had been denied access because of my vax status. I am in the allergic-might die category. I got sick shortly after the visit and was not yet allowed back in. Meanwhile, the nursing home had a covid outbreak and she was confined to her room. Then she fell on Christmas eve and is now in the hospital. Yesterday a doc said blood clots on the lungs. Today a different doc said no clots.

11. For the departed:

    Time, you old gipsy man,
    Will you not stay,
    Put up your caravan
    Just for one day?….

    Last week in Babylon,
    Last night in Rome,
    Morning and in the crush
    Under Paul’s dome;
    Under Paul’s dial
    You tighten your rein —
    Only a moment, and off once again;
    Off to some city
    Now blind in the womb,
    Off to another
    Ere that’s in the tomb.

    From Time, You Old Gipsy Man, by Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962)

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12. huxley: One reason I’ve always liked Benedict is that he is a cat guy– something he shares with Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and Tony La Russa. Before he became Pope, Joseph Ratzinger was a professor of theology in various German universities. While he was at Regensburg in the late 1960s, he used to go out to the cemetery behind the cathedral and preach to the stray cats who lived in the cemetery (like St. Francis preaching to the birds of Assisi . . .). As the following article indicates, the future Pope continued to befriend the local cats after he moved to Rome in the 1980s:

    http://petslady.com/article/vatican-kitties-pope-emeritus-benedict-xvi-cat-lover

    Photos of Benedict with his feline friends at the link.

13. Chases Eagles:

    I’m so sorry.

    Other commenters here have had parents who suffered from the lockdowns, too. I sometimes think the lockdowns were cruelest to the very elderly, and also to school-age children in states where schools were closed for a long, long time.

    Also to anyone living alone, because it became harder for them to experience any in-person social connections. Then again, people who didn’t get along and were trapped together in the same home had big problems, too.

    Lockdowns were a horrible horrible problem. And I know a few people who still will not be in the presence of other people indoors – people who never were anxious about anything like that before COVID.

14. Neo’s comments on the cruelty of the COVID lockdowns and the suffering caused by the unnecessary hardships imposed by politicians reminded me of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems:

    After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
    The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
    The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
    And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

    The Feet, mechanical, go round –
    A Wooden way
    Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
    Regardless grown,
    A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

    This is the Hour of Lead –
    Remembered, if outlived,
    As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
    First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

    I still feel oppressed by the heavy leaden hand of state and local government almost three years after the “emergency” was declared in 2020. I hope that Chases Eagles had a comforting reunion with his mother and that both will make a full recovery.

15. Tomorrow I attend the funeral of my kind, smiling brother-in-law, whom I never heard complain about anything, including the prolonged suffering that ended only with his departure. I think of the epitaph of the great Robert Lewis Stevenson, who powered through his brief life despite being cursed with lousy health. It’s engraved on his tomb in the Samoa he came to love so well:

    Under the wide and starry sky
    Dig the grave and let me lie
    Glad did I live and gladly die
    And I laid me down with a will

    This be the verse you grave for me
    Here he lies where he longed to be
    Home is the sailor home from the sea
    And the hunter home from the hill

16. Some musings of an old pilot.

    How did I get so old? I don’t know. I didn’t expect to make it this far. Have faced sudden death a few times and joked about wanting to die young and have a good-looking corpse. I’ve accepted that it’s not going to happen.

    A few days ago, one of my lifelong friends and high school classmates passed. He had dementia but seemed to be doing well. Then suddenly it was over. What wonderful memories I have of our childhood. One of the great treasures of my life – memories, cherished memories.

    Our Christmas card list has shrunken. So many have passed on. Why them and not me/us? There’s no explanation, only a resolve to be happy to still be sitting up, talking in nourishment, and having loved ones close. It’s a blessing.

    When a pilot dies, we say they have flown West. West is where all our old comrades are and where we will someday be together again. A reunion to look forward to. But not yet.

    The end of the trail is in out there, but the ETA, like airline travel these days, is unknown. So, my flight plan is to stay on course as much as I can, keep my co-pilot as comfortable as possible, and hope for a smooth landing at the final destination.

17. People expect old men to die,
    They do not really mourn old men.
    Old men are different. People look
    At them with eyes that wonder when…
    People watch with unshocked eyes;
    But the old men know when an old man dies.
    —Ogden Nash

18. “But the old men know when an old man dies.”

    An aged man is but a paltry thing,
    A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
    Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
    For every tatter in its mortal dress,
    Nor is there singing school but studying
    Monuments of its own magnificence;
    And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
    To the holy city of Byzantium.

    –W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

19. 2022 saw the death, for my husband and me,of a vast swath of mostly elderly relatives. It started with my husband’s mother in Oct 2021, but eventually took almost all the nonagenarians and octogenarians remaining: my last aunt, my husband’s last aunt, etc. About nine in all. A distressing several had nothing wrong with them, and opted for “medical assistance in dying.” This included husband’s aunt, who had not left her apartment in two years, from fear of Covid (none died of, or had had Covid). Another several had medical conditions which they or their family decided not to treat.

    Only my husband’s mother had a funeral, and that at my husband’s insistence — and with resistance from his brother. Only one other even had a “celebration of life.” Even the tradition of calling relatives to tell them of a death seems to have atrophied — several of these deaths we found out from Facebook, when in a earlier era we would have been somewhere on a telephone chain. Most had no other notification of any kind.

    These people were pretty much on the “blue team,” and I hope the other team’s experience is somewhat different. But our society has been wounded in ways we are only starting to realize.

20. I mostly don’t get poetry, never have, but I do know that time and gravity take their toll.

21. We had a neighbor pass away in a matter of months he had stage 4 cancer and had just recently discovered it he was a career navy officer even had a small role in that gregory peck inchon later he was a private investigator

22. Well this thread has turned morbid, hasn’t it? Perhaps it should have been titled “Outward.”

    Death is a constant for those of us on this planet, animal and vegetable alike. I have pondered it, only sorry that my children (and a few others) will be saddened by my passing. I would have them avoid that sadness if it were in my power, but remember how I was saddened by my own father’s passing.

    I remarked to a fellow mourner at a friend’s celebration of life several years ago that I was saddened by his passing. The other person told me that his faith taught him our departed friend had merely passed to a better place. I reflected silently that my faith taught me the same, but I had somehow forgotten until reminded by a Zoroastrian who was celebrating with me, a Protestant, the life of a Jewish friend!

    So let us all get beyond the morbidity and remember the hopeful words of a random Zoroastrian I met once.

23. Death be not proud.

24. I’ve oft thought that the Irish had the right idea…

    (At least, generally…)

    …So let’s raise a glass…and celebrate the LIFE of…

    (Alas, no, that’s not always possible. But maybe preferable…maybe…)

25. It is not just people who age and die, it’s sometimes cities; a case in point, Baltimore.

    We used to stop by the Inner Harbor on trips, to eat at the waterfront restaurants, to wander around—window shop the two harbor side malls, check out the large Barnes & Noble, and enjoy things like the Aquarium.

    But, as time went on, the crowd there was getting younger, was often less well dressed, and more rowdy, and I started to detect a subtle air of menace.

    Then, more and more stories started to appear about rising crime in Baltimore and, in particular, at the Inner Harbor, with tourists being attacked and robbed.

    So, we stopped going there.

    Recently YouTube has videos showing both of the Inner Harbor malls being deserted and mostly boarded up, and one mall was closed last month. The large Barnes & Noble has also pulled out.

    Most major cities (all run for many decades by
    Democrats) are declining, with things like rising taxes, rising crime, and homeless encampments making them increasingly unlivable.

    Meanwhile, it is said that many people are “voting with their feet,” and moving to the suburbs, or to more hospitable states.

    Factor in, as well, more and more people working remotely.

    At the same time, though, we see stories about how small towns— especially in the middle of the country—are also declining, becoming depopulated, and dying.

    What, then, will the new emerging landscape and settlement patterns look like?

26. P.S.—In the course of my genealogical research I’ve read how many of the major East coast cities started from very small settlements and how—over the course of many generations of struggle, dedicated hard work, ingenuity, and solid business acumen—the cities rose to become major economic engines and prosperous population centers.

    Now, it appears, all of that human effort is to be squandered in an epidemic of ignorance, stupidity, and fecklessness, leaving all of these cities in decline.

27. I mostly don’t get poetry, never have, but I do know that time and gravity take their toll.

    windbag:

    I sympathize. I sure didn’t get poetry when I started. I was intrigued by the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, so I went to poems and it was tough.

    The trick was to find poems I did get and work with those because there are poems just about everyone gets. Ogden Nash, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman’s “O Captain!” etc.

    Of course you may not be interested in poetry and that’s fine too.

    Here’s a modern poem on mortality I found in a big anthology by someone I had never heard of, but I caught it on the first bounce. It remains one of my favorites:
    ___________________________

    Question

    Body my house
    my horse my hound
    what will I do
    when you are fallen

    Where will I sleep
    How will I ride
    What will I hunt

    Where can I go
    without my mount
    all eager and quick
    How will I know
    in thicket ahead
    is danger or treasure
    when Body my good
    bright dog is dead

    How will it be
    to lie in the sky
    without roof or door
    and wind for an eye

    With cloud for shift
    how will I hide?

    –May Swenson (1913-1989)
    ___________________________

    Chills.

28. It seems to me that when the traditional Judeo-Christian morality which was omnipresent, taught in many direct and indirect ways, and woven into the fabric of life was, first, slowly subverted and has now greatly diminished, its decline has and is taking a great number of things down with it—a whole worldview, moral structure, expectations and code of behaviors, and way of life.

    The spreading decadence and attendant decline of our culture and of cities merely one of many such declines in all too many areas of life here in the West.

29. I am no poet but last spring we held the 56th reunion of my medical school class The 50th reunion was in 2016, when I still lived in California. We had plans for a 60th but the organizers were concerned about how many would be able to attend. So, we had it early and about 12 or 13 classmates showed up with wives. Several others planned to come but health issues prevented. Our class was 66 members and 1966 was when we graduated. Much has changed since then.

30. A good friend of my elementary school years died of cancer when we were high school sophomores. I mourned for him, but I am grateful for all the years and experiences I have been granted.

    I trust the Lord will receive me when it’s time, and forgive me my failings. Very few of us have notice of when our own endings will be.

31. Oh, by the way, add people’s—especially many young people’s—“work ethic” to the values/behaviors that have been reduced, sometimes completely, as a consequence of the decline of the Judeo-Christian teachings/background of our society.

32. Not poetic, but I’ve always found this passage from “Marley and Me” poignant.

    “A person can learn a few things from an old dog. As the months slipped by and his infirmities mounted, Marley taught us mostly about life’s uncompromising finiteness.

    Jenny and I were not quite middle-aged. Our children were young, our health good, and our retirement years still an unfathomable distance off on the horizon. It would have been easy to deny the inevitable creep of age, to pretend it might somehow pass us by. Marley would not afford us the luxury of such denial. As we watched him grow gray and deaf and creaky, there was no ignoring his mortality—or ours.

    Age sneaks up on us all, but it sneaks up on a dog with a swiftness that is both breathtaking and sobering. In the brief span of twelve years, Marley had gone from bubbly puppy to awkward adolescent to muscular adult to doddering senior citizen.”

    One lesson I’m learning from my old Lab, take it a day at a time and enjoy good food and good friends.

33. I’m approaching seventy-eight. When one is in this age group and still has, mostly, his health, and in my wife’s case, her health, there is a constant, low-level of surprise when an age-mate acquaintance or friend passes. That, I expected as my age increased.
    What I missed was the number of people who aren’t as capable as they might have been. A neighbor with mobility challenges needs help here and there, in addition to her housekeeper. When retrieving her mail, the cars coming from the blind curve on her left give her four seconds to clear the lane and she can’t do it. So, others fetch her mail. Or help her shovel snow or something.
    And on and on. Somebody’s husband is in ICU, can you walk the dog? Sally’s in ER with a stroke, can you go to the waiting room? Sylvia fell down the dune, her husband gets around with a cane and weighs 300 pounds, can you get her up? The church’s prayer chain and Meal Train app are always busy and it’s almost always the elderly who need a hand.
    Mrs. Jones needs a ride to four different medical appointments in the next two weeks, her family’s eight hundred miles away. But make sure the staff at assisted living give you a full oxygen tank. Not like the last time….
    When the phone rings for my wife, I’m always reaching for my shoes or keys or something until I hear I don’t need to.
    Not that we are heroes. We are healthy and….retired. What is the big deal is the cumulative amount of help a relatively small number of people, our acquaintances or co-congregants need.
    Miriam’s husband died. She gets by okay but when passing look to see if there’s anything amiss.

    As to the poetry provided by our hostess and the commenters…I don’t get metaphor as well as I would like to, I guess.

34. @ Aubrey > “I don’t get metaphor as well as I would like to, I guess.”

    you don’t need metaphors when you make poetry out of the real thing —

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