2203 52 Card Project: Week 44: Mortality

Sometimes, coming up with the theme for the digital collage of the week is easy.

This wasn't one of those weeks.

The problem, I reflected rather gloomily as I mulled over the question, was that I have already done collages about all the most obvious things. This week, I read fanfiction, obsessing over my favorite fandom. I exercised. I wrote fiction. I mulled over new career directions. I practiced French. I cooked, trying out healthy recipes. I could talk about Halloween, and the tarot reading I'd done, but I've done that as a collage before, too.

I'd spent last week trying to go out and do different things I hadn't tried before. But now it seemed that I was back doing the same old usual routine.

Did I truly have nothing new to say? What WAS this week all about?

One small thing did happen this week, that has been niggling at the back of my mind:

My mom told me, on our usual weekend visit, that she was making arrangements to bring her cello to a musical instrument consignment shop.

I've mentioned with pride before my Mom's devotion to music. She just had her 95th birthday, and she has played the cello for 85 of those years. What an extraordinary accomplishment!



But her eyesight has been growing worse, and she's becoming more frail. Hefting a cello and driving to orchestra rehearsal is not in her wheelhouse anymore. And so, soon the cello will be gone, hopefully to someone who will be delighted with it and who might play it another half century or more.

One of the things I have always admired about my parents the most was the way that they continually stretched themselves to stay engaged with the world, getting out and doing things as they grew older. When my Dad was 82 years old, he went to the Dominican Republic to install bio-sand water filters to give poor people clean drinking water--he'd spent the previous year raising $40,000 dollars to fund the project. My mom continued traveling, playing music, and socializing into her 80s and 90s. They have been a downright inspiration to my siblings and me.

The natural tendency for many people, I have often thought, is for their lives to become smaller as they age. I had been rather shaken, as I reported a few weeks ago, by some physical setbacks. I could see how it would be easy to reason, 'Well, I'll just ease up on things a little. Not go out as often. Skip the walk around the lake. That lecture looks like it might be interesting, but I'd rather stay at home." Little by little, if I let myself, my life could get narrower and narrower.

Maybe it's partly losing Rob, and the memories that always come back this time of year. I still have years of healthy living to look forward to, but I can feel the press of time, and even my own mortality. I am sensing that the event horizon is not infinite.

I will not be able to read all the books I intended to read before I die.

I was brooding over all of this when I met my friends Eleanor Arnason, Naomi Kritzer, and Lyda Morehouse for Zoom coffee, as we faithfully do every Friday. I do my weekly collage during these Zoom coffee sessions, and this week, more than usual, I spoke with them to help me pin down my thoughts about my worry that if I am not careful, my life could become more and more constricted. They instantly understood what I was struggling to articulate.

"It's more than one thing you're talking about here," Lyda pointed out. "There's having a regular routine that you follow because you have to maintain your life--or because you can't think of anything else to do. But you also repeat things because they have become ritualized, because repeating them brings you comfort."

That was true, I realized. I have often thought that the passage of time may seem like a wheel, as in the wheel of the year, but it is also like a spiral, like a nautilus shell. You come back around again, but you are in a slightly different place, because you have changed in that year, and you are not exactly the same person.

A life can become more constrained as you age, as you begin to face your mortality. But the trick, as my parents knew, is to live your life as adventurously as possible as long as you possibly can, so that when the natural constraints of aging come, it's still a pretty damned wonderful life.

I got my karate black belt at age 51. I don't practice karate anymore because my knees gave out. But damn it, I have a black belt, and no one can ever take that away from me. How much smaller my life would have been if I reasoned at age 43 I'm too old to be doing karate.

My mother is giving up her cello. But she played that cello for 85 years, and she has a lifetime of wonderful memories to hold close to her heart, not to mention the admiration of the countless people (including her own children) who heard her play. Her dogged determination to keep playing music for so long is doubtless one of the reasons she remains so sharp and acute into her old age. Even now, at the age of 95, she exercises, socializes with the others in her senior unit, enjoys time with her family, and goes out to concerts. She is living a full life.

I will have more adventures in my future. I still have to figure out what they might be. But with my parents' example to follow, I am sure I will live a fully realized life, too.

(I really like how this collage came out aesthetically. There are only three elements to it, but I think it's beautiful. The way that the curve at the cello's base echoes the curve of the nautilus shell's inner divisions is very satisfying to me.)

Image description: Background: A stylized nautilus shell shape set against a richly hued dark blueish-green background. Overlaid over that: another nautilus shell, cut away to show the spiraling inner compartments. Overlaid over that: a cello and bow.

Mortality



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