On Mortality: The Trench

 

In the Trenches, World War I Museum. Kansas City, Missouri. January 2010. Credit: Mzuriana. 

My mortality. 

I've been thinking of this, of late. 

Neal Stephenson, in Fall (or Dodge in Hell), described the process of such thoughts for some of us.  

"He saw life as a trench in the First World War sense of that term, dug very deep at one end but becoming more shallow as you marched along, gradually ramping up to surface level. 

Early in your life you were so deep down in it that you didn't even know that shells were bursting and bullets zipping over its top. 

As time went on these became noticeable but not directly relevant. 

At a certain point you began to see people around you getting injured or even killed by stray bits of shrapnel, but even if they were good friends of yours, you knew, in your grief and shock, that they were statistical aberrations. 

The more you kept marching, however, the more difficult it became to ignore the fact that you were drawing closer to the surface. 

People in front of you died singly, then in clusters, then in swathes. 

Eventually, when you were something like a hundred years old, you emerged from the trench onto open ground, where your life span was measured in minutes. 

Richard still had decades to go before it was like that, but he'd seen a few people around him buy the farm, and looking up that trench he could see in the great distance - but still close enough to see it - the brink above which the bullets flew in blazing streams. 

Or maybe it was just the music in his headphones making him think thus."

With both of my parents now dead, I'm at the head of the line. A sobering thought. 

Until very recently, my goal was simply to enjoy a good quality of life for as long as possible, and as independently as possible, without placing an unrealistic burden on my descendants. 

But a few days ago, I thought to put a number on it. 

If I look at the longevity of both my maternal and paternal parents, grandparents, and blood-related aunts and uncles - plus my generation's better nutrition, access to health care, advances in health treatments, etc. - I had a vague assumption that my early 90s would not be unrealistic. 

Some of that is magical thinking, to some extent, because my father died in his mid-70s and his mother died in her 50s. 

I thought to put a number on it because I wondered: How many years do I have left, really? 

And if I put a number on how many years I have left, how will that guide my allocation of time and other resources to: 

• Achievements I still want to accomplish? 
• Experiences I want to have? 
• Relationships I want to nurture?
• Relationships I need to let go?
• New relationships I want to find? 
• For my descendants, leave a legacy of love, a current and past family history, connectedness, memories, and investments in their and their descendants' futures, whether tangible or intangible. 

So I've applied the WAG method to come up with a concrete number for myself. 

86 

So if I make that 20 years from today, that's June 13, 2042. 

42. 

 Oh my gosh. 

42. 

The answer to the question in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: 

What is the meaning of life? 

42. 

It is poetic. 

Inshallah.