For the love of god stop being weird about aging

a plea from a recently-christened 30 year old.

I love that this is the second time I’ve used this image on my Substack. You know what they say about femoids—we’ve only got one thing on our mind, and it’s the creeping reality of our mortality.

There’s a lot that’s not ideal about losing parents, especially when you are young when they go. One of the shittiest gifts my dad’s passing gave me was irrepressible thoughts of death. Surprise, surprise, right? It also seemed to me at the time that none of my peers were also thinking about death. Certainly, some of this fixation on death was in a passively suicidal way. Hard not to feel that way in the wake of such an ending. I did get treatment for that. But some of it was in a more, “how am I supposed to live with this reality” sort of way.

I found no solace in religious answers to the problem of mortality. Dangling the carrot of a perfect afterlife where I would be rich and would get to be with all of the people who had gone before me in death seemed to only engender passivity and lack of care for the mortal world in both myself and my Christian peers.

It seemed to not matter to them at all that the natural environment was crumbling or that there was hurt and suffering in the world, because as long as those who were suffering believed in God, they had a perfect afterlife to look forward to. The world was fallen because of the devil’s temptation and human’s folly. We may as well not care about making earth better for the least of these because Heaven was going to pale in comparison to anything us tiny humans could do. This ethos isn’t helpful for a 16 year old staring down the possibility of life without her dad who understood her much better than any other adult figures in her life. What was I supposed to do, other than fixate on wherever he may or may not have gone after dying?

There also was no solace among my non-religious peers. I wanted to talk about death, not in a suicidal way, but in a “how do you think about this, let’s share our experiences” sort of way. I tried to talk about it as a younger person. I remember pulling a Barbie several times at sleepovers and at the end of dinner parties. I didn’t do it much more gracefully than Barbie, I just asked my friends how often they think about death. Since there’s no good way to start that conversation other than just starting it, I was understandably met with very uncomfortable silence and responses of “Oh, uh, well I try not to think about it.”

I get why people respond that way and you can’t fault them for it. It’s not exactly a lively topic of dinner conversation. But at the same time, I was left with a feeling of “Oh okay cool conversation over I guess!”

Skip ahead to me being on the cusp of my 30th birthday. All of the sudden, existential crises are not only in, they are a bit expected to have on your 30th birthday! It’s notable to me that a solid 80% of my peers asked me if I was dreading turning 30, or if I was going to have an existential crisis over it.

One thing about turning 30, to those of you who haven’t crossed this threshold yet, is that people love to volunteer their anxiety about this decade marker and ask if you share that anxiety.

My answer is a technical no. I don’t share in a newfound anxiety about aging, because that existential dread has been with me in some form or fashion since my dad died. That’s just the truth of the matter, and I am so painfully aware that it comes off as “oh well I’m an old soul so no I’m not like you, I’ve been contemplative about death for a long time now.”

I can’t win in this respect though. Either I am isolated and lonely because I have long thought about death and mortality, or I am isolated and lonely because I do not share the transition my friends are going through in their 30s because I went through it when I was 16. I didn’t choose to be this way. I’ve just wanted to be able to calmly and rationally talk about death and how it informs our life and it is so ridiculously hard to do that.

At this juncture, I do feel it’s necessary to say that this pontificating is relevant more to me turning 30 than it is to my mom dying recently, though it’s certainly informed by her death. I want to note that since she has died I have been on the receiving end of an outpouring of support from friends and family that I am very grateful for and do not take for granted at all. I spend this time thinking about how we talk about death and aging not because I wish my support system looked different in the wake of Mom’s death, because my support system has been very good.

I’m just more interested and confused about why that support doesn’t always translate into wanting to talk about aging and mortality as it relates to those of us still living.

Maybe the answer is simply that it’s scary to think about your own death? Or the death of your friends and family? Maybe it’s just that it feels pessimistic to dwell too long on your own mortality? That all could very well be the case.

But as someone who has lived with the constant thought of death and impermanence for 14 years now, I can promise you it won’t prevent you from enjoying life to think about death. It might actually have the opposite effect.

For me, thinking about death informs a lot of my practicality around end-of-life planning and being financially responsible. I have a hard time seeing white-collar folks who have the privilege and opportunity to be financially responsible and plan well for their end of life not do so. Or worse, think that having kids will mean their end-of-life will be fine and provided for.

First, expecting your kids to provide your end-of-life care is a terribly selfish burden to place upon them. Some kids may feel ready and willing to provide some level of end-of-life care for parents, but some may not be financially or physically able to do so. The fact that my family was able to provide so much support for my Mom was due in enormous part to the financial planning that she did and her conviction that in end-of-life, her needs would be provided for by her assets and her kids would only have to think about visiting her regularly, which we did.

Second, I have just spent more time in nursing homes than I ever care to again, and I can attest that having kids in no way guarantees that you will have caregivers or even visitors in end-of-life. My family members and I visited mom about once a week each, on different days, so Mom had a pretty steady stream. We were told constantly that our level of support was extremely rare in end of life.

My own thoughts of death mean I spend a good amount of time preparing financially for end-of-life, because it is a terrible legacy to not think about it and to leave that mess for your friends and family to clean up. Your death will leave some mess, to be sure. But I believe strongly that it is your responsibility to plan for your end-of-life care as much as you are able, and to not just blindly hope that someone will help you when you are no longer able to care for yourself.

Thinking about death makes me practical. Sometimes it does make me feel isolated and lonely. It’s sort of silly that this is a side effect, because death, especially death of a parent, is a universal fact of life. It strikes me that this is the last thing that should make me feel isolated and lonely, and yet it does. That one I have a hard time explaining, other than that I just feel like a bit of a bummer bringing it up, whether or not that’s a reasonable thing to feel.

But also, a lot of the time, thinking about dying makes me very, very grateful for what I have. Your cognitive and physical capacity can leave you so quickly, and for reasons that you cannot control. This is hard to stomach. And it is for this reason that I find myself very appreciative of the frozen, postcard-perfect way that Washington Park looks on a cold morning walk with a friend.

It is for this reason that I savor being able to get up from chairs unassisted and finding new ways to challenge myself athletically, because the day will come when my biggest athletic challenge will be moving from a chair to my bed.

It is for this reason that I savor gatherings with friends and witnessing their life transitions and appreciating what a wide, colorful spectrum our existence is because I simply will not experience it all.

It is for this reason that I say I love you freely and recklessly because I know exactly how much it hurts to not know when you will hear the last “I love you” from your loved ones, and instead all of the sudden you will be telling an unresponsive loved one that you love them, and you won’t hear it back because they have lost their verbal capacity, but you say it anyways because hearing is the last thing to go.

When I am in my clearest headspace, I know that thinking about death a lot actually makes me a happier person a lot of the time, because of the appreciation for life it engenders.

I’ll leave you with a stanza from one of my favorite poems. Thanks for waiting with me through hiatus, and thanks for coming back. See you next week (ideally).

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still

No longer blown hither and thither

The last lone aster is gone

The flowers of the witch hazel wither

The heart is still aching to seek

But the feet question, “whither?”

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than treason

To go with the drift of things

To yield with a grace to reason

And bow and accept the end

Of a love, or a season?

-Robert Frost, Reluctance