Like falling from airplane, life speeds up as ground approaches. But parachutes help
While waiting with two friends for our exercise class to start, I blurted out my brilliant insight.
“Growing old is like falling out of an airplane,” I said. “The longer you fall, the faster you go.”
The three of us — I nearly 90, another just over that mark, and one fully 95 — are identical in our decrepitude, nearly the same in the speed of our fall. But consider the contrast between age 40 and 50 and 60 and 70, all the way up to where we authentic oldsters hang. People fall apart fast and faster. I thought my jumping-out-of-an-airplane notion expressed that well.
“Yeah,” the 90-year-old said with a sigh. “Haven’t I heard that one before?”
So it’s not original. It’s just another way to think about what’s coming for all of us. As a long-ago Kansas City Star reporter, I saw some dead people, though never at the instant of death. Not so bad was the sight of veterinarians over the years “putting to sleep” with drugs several of our very old and sick basset hounds. They died calmly, even sweetly.
I sat at bedside in a Tulsa hospital while my father, at age 72, was dying of colon cancer. Until that day my sister, June, had been estranged from our parents and me. When June suddenly, surprisingly, appeared in our father’s room with tears in her eyes, the estrangement ended. Not 30 minutes later, my father stopped breathing. His death welded the rest of us back into a family — one helpful benefit of mortality.
Three years later I stood at the graveside of my brother-in-law as an American Legion bugler played “Taps.” Then my aunts Mable, Georgia, Lyda and Ollie died, then my sister, then my mother. Families empty out, and fortunately fill up again along the way, as in the case of my daughter, Julie, who popped out four babies — all now adults and enjoying life. My sister’s daughter, Coral, birthed two babies herself. Like their mother, they still walk the earth and themselves have children.
Then, too, you can be plunging headlong out of that airplane when a parachute blossoms suddenly over your head to slow your fall.
During the 2017 final illness of my wife, Lenore, several times she told me, “Women will like you.” I had only the vaguest idea what she meant. After she died, my bafflement lasted three years before I met Patricia, one year younger than I, in that same exercise class. Slowly we learned to dance again, just ballroom on Fridays at Meadowbrook Community Center. Then I understood. This woman at least, as my wife had predicted, liked me. After death, new life can emerge.
Strangely, virtually the same thing was happening at the same time to my best friend, J. Harry Jones, who soldiered beside me long ago as a reporter for The Star. After his wife, Jo, died in the same Chicago retirement home where Harry now lives at age 93, he happened on a book of poetry titled “Crossing: A Caregiver’s Journey.” He wrote an admiring letter to the author, Leota Ester, a widow just months older than Harry himself.
Since then, each of them has been by turns sick and well, two elderly romantics — as I said above — falling fast and faster. They are more than friends now, together writing a book composed of their email correspondence. In one note Harry says he visualizes his wife up on a cloud watching him and imagines what she would say:
“So, you think you’re falling in love with a 93-year-old widow? Well, go for it old man. She seems like a great lady. I just want you to be happy.”
Soon in one of those emails Harry was writing: “I have fallen in love with you, Leota. But don’t let that scare you. I’m not proposing marriage or even ‘living in sin’ together as they called it in the bad old days. I’m not even talking about holding hands in a stroll through the park, since we both rely on walkers. What it does mean, is that I want to be with you again as soon as we are both healthy.”
Now they are healthy again, fully alive and together at every possible opportunity.
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com
