What is a good day for you?

The unbearable lightness of accepting impermanence

I am sixty-three and I am starting to sidle up to the notion that I am indeed going to die. Sometimes I’m practical. Yes, I will now look at a keychain made of braided plastic by a grade school friend, the keychain that I have moved from the basket by the door to the junk drawer in my bedroom to the bottom shelf in my desk, and toss it because my children won’t know or care about its significance after I kick. Sometimes I’m more philosophical. Now, instead of packing my days with social engagements that are my reward for hard work, I purposely leave days, sometimes a whole week, free of plans so that I can slow the fuck down. I don’t want my days to go fast any more. I want the world to exist inside a second. That’s the way you get to forever.

I am preparing for my probably-not-so-imminent death by first accepting the notion. This is no easy task because I have only barely accepted being in my sixties. My fifties were fine. Fifties are in the middle of things. I was still raising children. We could have stopped right there. But the sixties steamrolled into my existence, bringing with them – the death of my parents, the decampment of my sons, the loss of our family home, and several friends’ deaths.

It was impossible not to see a trend. While the double negative here is clunky, it is accurate and far more descriptive than, “I saw an obvious trend.”

Recently, I met a hospice nurse (not on the job) who said that Americans think of death as optional. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Hollywood. This is where I take a brief break in the essay to personally exhort famous beauties to stop making themselves look like porcelain ducks with ropey necks, simply to squeeze another five years out of their already lustrous careers. One can say that they are more age-averse than death-averse. But I would argue that the two aversions are so connected as to be the same thing. If one can cheat the physical manifestations of age (and I would argue that you clearly can’t/see Netflix’s The Perfect Couple) the thinking goes, then why not death itself?

It sucks to get older. But not in the ways you might think. I can give up my youthful figure and boundless energy. I can give up a brain so agile that it could retrieve names of places and people and titles of movies and obscure vocabulary intended to dazzle, without missing a beat. And I can give up any attention that was leveled at me simply because I was pretty (in fact, losing some of that attention has been a damned godsend).

These are relatively small losses, many of which can be mitigated by Siri.

What really sucks about aging is coming face to face with impermanence every day. And the biggest realization of all: that at the end is the jackpot of all impermanence, your own demise! If I were a Hollywood executive listening to this pitch, I would say, “Are you out of your mind? It’s gotta be aspirational? Where’s the heart? Who are we rooting for? Nobody’s gonna watch a show so hopeless!” (For those of you outside the business, the words “aspirational’, ‘rooting for’, ‘gonna’ and ‘gotta’ are mandatory in pitch meetings, extra points for using them all in a short paragraph). The point is, it’s no wonder that we’re looking more attractive options than devoting time to accepting our own deaths.

I haven’t found them yet, in case you’re reading for answers.

All I can do is to learn how to slow everything the fuck down. An old friend (old in all the ways), who has twenty years on me, has told me that as life gets shorter, it gets wider. Which I have found is true, as long as you slow the fuck down.

In this pursuit, I’ve been reading and listening to great thinkers. One is the physician Atul Gawande who wrote “Being Mortal”. He feels that as we get closer to the end of our lives, family and friends and helpers and professionals tend to ask the wrong questions. Questions that revolve around how to extend our lives. When we should actually be asking “What does a good day look like for you?” The idea being that once we think about what is important to us, we can start to figure out how to keep the good things in our lives for as long as we can. This is the kind of work he has done with terminally ill people. But I think it’s a question worth asking often, as soon as you get to the point where you’re like, “OK. OK. I fucking understand. I’m not getting out of this – so how do I make such radical impermanence bearable?”

I think it’s interesting that Gawande says “good” day instead of “great” day. I assume he is saying that each day can’t be a wedding or the day you got into the college of your choice. Great days are great partly because they’re rare. But a good day -- we can have plenty of those.

My good days often begin with sitting in my living room alone, with my tea and oat milk, looking at how the light streams through and hits a painting that I love. One of my mother’s paintings. Jesus, what a marvelously simple thing. The joy I get out of simply looking.

There are other things that make a good day for me. One of which is a day in which I have a meaningful and intimate conversation with a human I like. I crave this level of deep connection somehow.

Also, I revel in a creative pursuit that I don’t have to drag myself away from for some practical reason (should I simply say “job” here?).  This third element is the hardest to come by. But it is certainly within my own control. Especially when I count cooking as a creative pursuit – especially for a novice like me.

When I consider these three things that make up a good day – along with relatively simple enhancements like lying in bed with my husband (and, yes, fooling around), a funny text exchange with my kids, a good meal, and the perfect song coming up on the radio – good days seem not only doable right now – but also doable for years to come.

And here’s something far more elusive. What makes a good day for me, is a day when I’m aware that all of it is ephemeral and I sit in that perfect moment of having and losing. When the day feels like it’s shimmering in time, less the sum of its enjoyable parts – the breakfast with one of your kids, the walk through the Farmer’s Market, and the cat sitting on your lap – and more, the awareness that it will all fade -- but it is here now.

The light. Oh, the light.

“We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment , sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.” 

― Patti Smith, M Train