One Thing or Another: The Back of the Line Looks Better Every Day

One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

Age has a strange effect on time: the more we have of one, the less we have of the other.

When my mother died twenty-four years ago I told someone that losing our parents meant we were moving closer to the turnstile. Then my father died, and the parents of everyone I knew who was my age or near it. The truth became inescapable that we were next: our siblings, our friends, people we looked up to and people we looked down upon. Everyone, it seems, is destined for the same fate, and it was quickening its pace. Each loss takes us nearer to our own jumping off place, and with the departure of every friend, peer and acquaintance comes the uncomfortable sensation that we really, truly, may be next.

It’s not maudlin to stare at the shortening line and see the rollercoaster coming round the tracks for us. There’s the sense it won’t be long now, and pretty soon—whether it’s a year from now, or ten years, or twenty—I’ll be fastened into the tiny car, have the bar pressed into me and locked for safety, and rocket off into the unknown. It’s a ride we all must take alone. There will be no one seated next to us screaming with delight as we plunge into … wherever it is we go, or don’t go. I’m not personally invested in the next ride, if there is one, or the next. Heaven can definitely wait for me, since I’ve never had any interest in going there. My hope, and belief, is to flicker out, having lived as bravely and as brightly as I could. Beyond that, just drop me back into the ocean, it’s fine with me.

The older we get, if we manage to, the more milestones we reach and pass, sometimes wishing it had taken longer. Age has a strange effect on time: the more we have of one, the less we have of the other. When we’re young, those milestones seem so far away, even when it was just the summer vacation we longed for during the school year. Many people have children, anxious for them to get old enough to be less demanding, then sad to see them walk off into adulthood and take their own places in line. I couldn’t wait to get my first Social Security payment, which I took at 62, and then, the big one, Medicare at 65. What a relief! I didn’t have to work for health insurance anymore. The trade off is that I was 65. Most of our lives are behind us by then, and all the ‘age is just a number’ platitudes do not change the physical realities of aging.

Once I got my Medicare card, I longed to stop having birthdays. Can’t I just stay this age, and live with the bodily consequences? I’m creative, and active, and we travel quite a bit. But there is also the sense that, ‘Now is the time.’ Let’s take those cruises, and visit those friends, and go to those places we want to see. Yes, it’s because we have more freedom to do those things now, but it is also undeniably because time is running short. Let’s take these trips before we need a walker, or a cane, or a wheelchair. Let’s climb these stairs while we still can. Let’s spend time with friends and family before each of us, inevitably, finds ourselves at the front of the line reaching for the turnstile because absolutely no one can refuse. The back of the line looks pretty good from here.

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