What comes after aging? Most likely the finality of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch: ’E’s kicked the bucket, ’e’s shuffled off ’is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! This is an ex–aged male!

Considering that alternative, getting old isn’t so bad. But it’s out there—the inevitable farm waiting to be bought. One of the existentialists—Martin Heidegger, I believe—said something to the effect that a person really doesn’t get in touch with his existence until he fully understands that it’s not enough to say, “One dies,” but that it must be, “I will die.”

Sure. But me? I know many people who have died, been close to a number and actually been present at the moment of death. Still, I get up every morning, drink a cup of coffee, read the headlines and the comics, clean the litter box, check my email, and perform the rest of my daily rituals as if I’ll be doing them forever. A somewhat rational being, I know it can’t go on indefinitely. I can’t go on. But Heidegger would be disappointed in me. I don’t live with the overriding consciousness of my nonbeing. Yet I think about it from time to time.

Obituaries

When reading the morning paper, somewhere between the Mets box score and the editorial page, I scan the obituaries to see if anyone I know or know of has left us, an occasion to shake my head and tell my wife, “Guess who died.” And I also check the ages of the deceased.

On one recent day, among the four full pages of obits, 62 names, I mentally sorted the dead into three categories. Donna was 44; John, 47; Todd, 55; poor Calvin, only 17; and, even sadder, Joseph, only two and a half. These and others make up the group younger than I, strangers I have the perverse satisfaction of outliving. Benedict was 95; Marie, 88; Carmine, 86; Joe, 94; Florence, 93. This group gives me a certain amount of comfort, the expectation of possible years ahead. If Benedict and Florence can do it, why not me?

What brings me up short are all those in my age range: Doris, 74; Vincent, 73; Audrey, 73; Martin, 65; Elizabeth, 68. There I’d be—Walter, 72, my ended life summed up in five or six column inches, a handful of people shaking heads and tapping the arm of a partner. “Guess who died.” Then the paper discarded for recycling.

Photos

Our northern New Jersey daily often prints photos with obits, pictures provided by the family, the subject usually smiling at an age years younger than that at which he or she ceased to be. It must be the way loved ones want to remember them, not gaunt and gasping as they were on their deathbeds.

That’s usually the way it is with other people—friends from the past, acquaintances, celebrities. The image in our memories is fixed in time, how they looked in their prime. For us their identities are static, and we’re often shocked to see them different, the classmate you last saw when he was twenty now an elderly man. But in our relationships with ourselves we’re always in process, our state at the moment what matters most, our understanding of who we are, the past like a novel we once read, most of it far less vivid than the book on our nightstand.

In my wallet I carry a university ID with a picture taken around twenty-five years ago. On the rare occasions I’ve looked at it in the past, I’ve thought to myself that I hadn’t changed all that much. My glasses are different, tinted aviators long out of style now. But recently I decided to compare that photo with the very recent mug shot on my credit card. That certainly turned out to be a reality check. No doubt about it. I’ve been transformed into an archetypal aging male.

Funerals

Over the years I’ve attended many funerals and memorial services and on occasion joined the cavalcade to the cemetery for the interment.  Funerals tend to follow a pattern, people entering the church or hall or tabernacle in nervous, hushed silence, making quick eye contact with others they know, then sitting with folded hands as they wait for the service to begin, occasionally whispering to the person next to them. The coffin rests at the front of the assemblage, often surrounded by wreaths and flower arrangements and photos of the deceased in happier days. All the time mournful music drones in the background. Finally, the priest/minister/rabbi enters and the service begins. Prayers, hymns, eulogy. Often, at least in my experience, friends and relations get up to say something, the designated adult offspring choked and nervous, fighting back tears; next, someone not so close voicing regrets and telling anecdotes about the decedent, eliciting smiles and then laughter, everyone relieved now, at ease with the occasion. Death isn’t so bad. He/she had a good life. Remember the time.

After the last hymn and the final prayers, everyone stands to line up for handshakes and embraces with the surviving family members. Kisses on cheeks, hands touched, pats on backs. Then people mingle, glad to see old friends, smiling openly at each other now, sharing memories of the dead one and asking about people who aren’t in attendance. Sons, daughters, parents, siblings. It turns into a social occasion, an excuse for some to have traveled miles, plans made for dinner, promises to get together soon. Hugs and happiness.

The corpse in the box shrinks to the back of everyone’s attention, the coffin already a familiar object in the room, something the eye passes over that barely registers. For all but a few, the dead one is already history, a memory of someone they once knew, not nearly as interesting as the breathing beings around them, people who have a future in their lives. And why not? We’ve got to move on, have a drink, eat a sandwich, stop at the supermarket on our way home to catch the end of the ball game.

Depending on the denomination, during the service the clergy person may speak of the life to come, redemption and bliss. Evoking the afterlife.

Afterlife

Unlike the majority of Americans, according to opinion surveys, I have no expectation of any form of existence to follow this one, adhering to the philosophy of the old beer commercial: you only go around once, so grab all the gusto you can. (I’ve often wondered why the millions who oppose stem-cell research never rose up in mass protest over the blasphemy of that slogan, or at a minimum urged a boycott of the beer.)

Sure, it would be nice to see my parents and my brother and sisters again, my cat of 16 years’ presence, Mookie, my dog of childhood, Rex. But for all eternity, time everlasting? We’d run out of things to say to each other, get sick of repeating the same memories of life on earth over and over. I can envision us muttering under our breaths, “Get a life,” oblivious to the irony of that impossibility. Even Rex would tire of pats on the head, Mookie of rubs under his chin. They might even, after a century or two, snarl and snap. And I wouldn’t blame them.

Here’s an unrhymed terza rima from Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Paradiso:

 O grace abundant, by which I presumed

 To fix my sight upon the Light Eternal,

 So that the seeing I consumed therein!

It has some appeal, I suppose. Instead of Mom and Pop, cat and dog, I’d ascend to a vision of Light Eternal. But then what? Wouldn’t even that pale after a millennium or two?

Gym

I work out, try to make it a priority to spend time at the gym at least three days a week, a ritual I started about ten years ago. Most of my life I’d never been one for systematic exercise, probably a reaction to my uncoordinated youth, when if I did get into a pickup baseball game, I’d end up in right field with a fifty-fifty chance of catching the rare fly balls that came in my direction. Then there came a time when men my age were advised to keep in shape.

My start was tentative, just time on a treadmill, a bit embarrassed to be in the midst of all those student athletes decades younger, women with cute tattoos on the smalls of their backs who could run for hours on the treadmill next to mine, bulky guys with thick biceps bearing images of chain links and elaborate crosses who hoisted heavy barbells high over their heads. Me wondering what would happen if I raised the pace on my machine above four miles an hour.

Now I’m on the elliptical trainer, tugging on the weight machines, pushing back on the head and neck extender, no longer thinking that this is no country for old men, no longer wondering if the young, taking a break from being in one another’s arms, consider me a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.

Some days, especially during summer break, most of the men in the gym are geezers like me, a couple looking as if they were retired drill sergeants, bald heads tanned and gleaming. On such days old men have taken over the country, pumping and stepping and lifting in their defiance of mortality.

Diet

I’m fortunate to have a wife with long experience as a medical writer who is nutritionally informed and wants to keep me around. Over the time of our marriage, she’s informed and reformed me. We eat healthily, with zero tolerance for trans fats, while minimizing saturated fats and opting for whole grains, yogurt, fresh salads, green vegetables, fruits and nuts. Salt and mayonnaise are anathema to me.

I take vitamins and supplements too, every morning like clockwork: a multiple, calcium with more D, 81-mg aspirin, beta sitosterol, omega-3, glucosamine/chondroitin. I’m working at it to keep my joints lubricated, my bones firm, my triglycerides in check, my circulation whooshing along.

Blood

But like my late parents and siblings, I have a tendency toward high blood pressure, mine medicated as soon as it reached 140 over 90. After trying various combinations, my doc settled on HCT (the standard diuretic that keeps me going and going day and night) and a generic ACE inhibitor. They work, keep my pressure artificially normal.

Feeling the call to some version of public service, I started donating blood several decades ago, in total gallons of it. That’s how I realized my blood pressure was rising, when the nurse checked me. The first couple of times I assumed it was an aberration, then saw the doctor, who checked me sitting up and lying down and fifteen minutes later. I’d reached a stage in life where I needed pills.

Even medicated I was still able to donate—that is, until I fainted. Not at the blood center but that evening after a pot luck dinner with a group of friends. The blood center had called lamenting severe shortages, people in need, even for my mundane O-positive, I considered the donation an excuse to eat a Twinkie, a concoction of sugary pulp I don’t even like. Drink plenty of fluids, the nurse advised. Avoid alcohol for two hours.

My intention was to drive home and relax with chilled glasses of flavored seltzer. But a half mile from the blood center, the “Check Engine” warning flashed, followed by a message about a brake-light problem. I ended up spending the afternoon sitting in the dealer’s service area listening to the inane cell-phone conversations of the woman next to me. That should have been a clue that this wasn’t going to be my day.

After several hours of conversation and sampling the food—including a glass of white wine, now that far more than two hours had passed—I was standing at a kitchen island listening to a man explain the talks he gave at mathematical conferences when I realized I couldn’t think of a single intelligent comment to make, not that I’d have much to say about advanced math in the best of circumstances. But this felt odd, my mind bogged down in mental sludge. Within seconds I was drenched in a cold, clammy sweat, suddenly nauseous.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor, a young woman I had never seen before taking my pulse. She was, I soon learned, the daughter of a guest, an emergency medical technician who lived two houses down and had gotten there in a flash during the time I had been unconscious. About a minute, according to those hovering over me. “I’m going to throw up,” I announced; someone handed me a plastic pan, and I did. My wife began applying wet paper towels to my forehead, and cold water ran down my shirtfront.

“I think we should call the rescue squad,” the EMT daughter told the huddled group. They nodded, seconding the motion. So, despite my protesting that it was just my lack of fluids, I ended up in the hospital for several days, my heart continuously monitored, my carotid arteries checked with a Doppler test, my ticker evaluated with an echocardiogram.

I was fine, released after great expense to Medicare. But my doc told me to stop donating blood, assuring me that I had given my share, and, besides, I was a man my age.

Hospital

Every time I visit someone in the hospital and see the friend or relative stretched under a white sheet, a plastic ID looped around a wrist, needles in each arm, drip bags suspended behind them, machines blipping, I get the sense of otherness. The person has been transformed into an object to be poked and tested and wheeled about by medical professionals. Strangers performing procedures on you. Volition is gone and, with it, the dignity of being a functioning person. After each visit, I wondered how I would feel when I became the patient.

Until my fainting, I hadn’t been in the hospital for decades. At ten I had pneumonia, at 16 an ear infection, conditions that would be treated at home with drugs these days. In my thirties, I spent a couple of days in for tests. Now here I was delivered by the local rescue squad, lifted from gurney to bed, all the time thinking, This is a mistake. I don’t belong here. I want to go home.

In fact, I was only a few days from a flight to Europe and felt compelled to give that information to anyone who tended to me—doctors, nurses, technicians, the women who delivered meals. Even though I had to wear a down, I kept my pants on, my socks, too, poised for a quick getaway. Fortunately, the last nurse assigned to me had just returned from a trip to the Amalfi coast. We chatted about places, and she sympathized, got me released right after the echocardiogram results cleared me.

Of course, it’s quite likely that I’ll be a real patient someday, too sick to resist, the nurses grim, my doctor asking if I had prepared a living will.

Nursing Home

That prospect is even scarier than the hospital. I’ve visited in bad ones and good ones. In the bad, the residents were lined up in wheelchairs outside their rooms, eyes closed, chins on their chests as if they were drugged, as they probably were. The place smelled of disinfectant and urine. In the good—good in the sense that it cost a great deal, didn’t smell and had a location in a very affluent town—when you walked down the hall, you saw many of the residents comatose in their beds, white hair wispy, pale flesh brittle, jaws dropped. Those awake were aligned in front of blaring TV sets gaping at programs so far removed from the state of their existence that they could have been beamed from Mars. Or they might be in a dayroom where chipper entertainers were trying to lead group sings of turns like “I’m Looking Over a Four-leaf Clover,” all sound emanating from the people at the piano, a few toothless mouths barely moving.

In my limited experience, by far most of the residents were women. Aged males must be kicking off before they reach that state. Lucky them.

Symptoms

With my blood pressure under control, my doc tells me I’m in good shape for a man my age. How long can that last? Every once in a while I get a pain in my gut or a tightening in my chest. I’ve had them before, and they’ve always gone away. A bug in my system, heartburn, gas. But someday I’ll have a pain, a throb, a clutching that will be for real. It may be a harbinger of a long decline or a sign of sudden termination. Like all aging men, I’m going to die.

The Moving Finger

       In these modern days, we have to update Omar Khayyam and say, “The Moving Finger keys in.” Still, having keyed in, it doesn’t save; it still “Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” I have a fantasy about moving aging fingers on my own deathbed, propped up with an elevated mattress, a minicomputer in my hand or maybe a cell phone for text messaging, and me able to articulate and record all the sensations of my death throes, down to the last instant, entering the very last period of my writing career just as breath stops and rigor mortis begins. “That’s all she [in this case, he] wrote.” The device pried from my cold, dead, ex–aged male hand.