Life Sentences
Longevity has been on my mind of late. My daily perusal of online news stories turned my attention to the most recent calculations of human life expectancy in each of our 50 states. It did my heart good to see that our average life span continues to increase, with 78.8 years (the average between 81.1 for women and 76.1 for men) quite a jump from the 65.6 year estimation when I was born. And since my wife and I now live in Colorado, it was gratifying to learn that our new home state is among the top ten places where people have the best chance of celebrating an eightieth birthday.
Of course these are merely statistical probabilities calculated from the raw numbers detailing when lives are lost across the timeline of human possibilities. So when we read that life expectancies used to be much lower, it is more an indicator of higher mortality rates for infants, children and younger adults in the past than is true today. People have been living well into their elder-hood for as long as people have had the inclination to leave markers of their longevity in parchment and stone. So when we read the biblical psalmist’s measurement of our possibilities at three-score years and ten, it is a reminder that people have been making it to old age for as long as there have been people on this earth.
A few years ago it dawned on me that I had exceeded my own life expectancy. Realizing that I had reached what the odds makers had predicted for a male born in 1951, I concluded that I must now be living on borrowed or bonus time. And if that helped me look at each new day with fresh eyes and a new sense of good fortune, then the realization has been a good thing. It has awakened me to a new sense of blessedness and gratitude at the sight of every sunrise, every inhalation of fresh air, and every step I can take on my morning walk. Locating myself along a timeline in which my expected and possible longevity can be laid out adds a sobering note of urgency about what life may yet hold for me. If you don’t quite follow what I mean, I encourage you to try this exercise in life location.
First, draw a line across a piece of paper, with dots at each endpoint. Mark a “O” above the left one, and, over the right endpoint put the number of years you think you’d like to live to see. For reasons that are more sentimental than scientific, I’ve thought 86 would be a good age to call it a day, providing me enough time to get a few more bucket list priorities accomplished. Yet I hope it wouldn’t be so old as to render me fully dependent on others to make it through each day. Time will tell how realistic this proves to be. Then write the actual year under the endpoints of your line. Finally, segment your timeline into 10-year increments marking your decades.
By now you’ve discovered the sobering part: where you are in relation to your projected finale. The older you are when you first do this exercise, the longer will be the timeline on the left of your “now” moment. This can be quite an awakening to us older folks. By comparison my high school students’ timelines stretched far ahead of the present, helping reinforce their adolescent feelings of immortality. For people like me, the short off-ramp that remains to be lived puts things in a much different perspective.
I always find it interesting to then see where my birth and actuarial life expectancies fall on this line.
As it turns out, both my (86) and the actuarials’ (83.7) best guesses are in relative agreement as to what lies ahead for me. Fortunately, human lives—mine and yours—are not written by statisticians or prognosticators. That responsibility lies within each of us, our voices, actions, and choices largely telling the tale.
All of these musings about my own life have been tinged with sadness this week as my wife and I share in the grief of her mother’s recent passing. A child of the Greatest Generation, she far exceeded both her birth and actuarial life expectancies in surviving into her 96th year. But to each of her four children, 11 grandchildren and 17 great grandchildren, her life was far less about her many years and far more about her many graces. For she was spirit and inspiration, tenderness and joy, refinement and frivolity, dependability and faithfulness to those whose lives were touched each moment they dwelt in her company. She will be greatly missed, that’s for certain. But she will never be lost from the memories of those whom she loved, those whose love she received with such sincerity and openness.
Each of us perceives life through different lenses of meaning and interpretation. For some of us it is a journey from an origination not of our choosing, to a terrestrial or heavenly destination, the determination of which resting largely upon us. Others may see it as a game of winners and losers, gamblers and dupes, survivors and casualties. Some people look at life with a treadmill in mind as they struggle to make sense of the recurring trials, frustrations and absurdities with which they’ve had to contend. And others find it to be a stream of many tributaries in which they swim with or against the current, or perhaps a novel of many chapters in which the the drama of their existence plays out in comedic or tragic episodes.
My experiment as a writer has brought me some solace in regarding life as a sentence that we may compose in both simple and complex construction. Our sentence begins the moment we utter our first, air-gulping cries. Some of us write lives in clean and uncomplicated subject-predicate simplicity. I worked; I served; I enjoyed; I loved—that’s all she wrote! Others embellish their living with a host of subjects, and a variety of verbs—both transitive and intransitive—detailing what they did, where they went, how they felt and who they were. In the modern era in which mobility and diversity punctuate our days, many of us compose sentences that are highly complex, with dependent clauses and parenthetic asides, colorful adjectival descriptors and prepositional qualifiers. Metaphorically speaking, if words strung together may serve as an apt evocation of a human life, then the sum of our living—from the shaking of infant rattles in our crib to the shudders of our last deathbed breath rattles—is really a life sentence that is uniquely our own. Genetics may determine whether our sentence holds the possibility of length or brevity. But we, and we alone, are our own scribe and final editor. We determine what gets published for others to interpret, and what will remain hidden from anyone’s eyes to praise or critique.
It has been said that our earthly existence is ultimately reducible to the dash that separates the dates of our birth and death engraved on our tombstones or listed in some genealogical record. But under microscopic gaze each of those dashes reveals the wealth of experiences, achievements and disappointments, loves fulfilled and lost, dreams and nightmares, friends and enemies whose lives intersected our own. In this oh so meaningful but unavoidably terminal experience we call living, each of us has a story to write that others may choose to ignore or forget, or discover worth reading and passing on to others in tribute or rebuke.
What a blessing it is to find in our own longevity the opportunity to write our lives in such a way that someone else may ever wish to read it. My mother-in-law wrote such a life. My best hope would be that, before my timeline brings my sentence to an end, I may be able to do the same.
