Today Time, Tomorrow Eternity

This morning, June 6, 2025, I received word that a longtime member of our Friday-morning men’s group had passed away. He was just a few weeks before his 86th birthday. I wasn’t surprised, since he had been failing for the last few years. But what made his death more tragic, if I can use that word, was the death a few weeks earlier of his son Mike. I’ll be going to the  Celebration of Life honoring both father and son this coming Father’s Day Sunday, June 15th.
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At 85 ½ I am now the oldest member of our group. Most of the other men are in their 70s, with our “baby” in his late 60s. So the image of the three-meter diving board comes to mind. The person at the end is, metaphorically, the next to take the trip into the Great Unknown. Meanwhile, at a certain age we begin to place ourselves on the steps going up to the board, where the Angel of Death greets each new arrival with the word “Next!” Oy!...

What has recently augmented my focus on death is the recent passing of our beloved 16-year-old calico cat, Zoe. While my wife and I were away in Europe and North Africa on vacation, she stopped eating and became skinnier and skinnier. We prayed that she would wait for us to get home before dying. Gratefully, she did. During our post-return week, she mainly lay on her side and breathed with difficulty. Toward week’s end, though, her meowing suggested that she was now in pain. Based on that, my wife and I took her to the vet to be euthanized.

This thinking about mortality obviously gets stronger as we age. When we are little kids we go to birthday parties. As teenagers and into our 20s it’s bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, confirmations, and  graduation parties. Then, from our 20s till the late 30s and beyond, we go to weddings. Once we’re seniors, however, more than anything else it’s funerals, spun positively as celebrations of life. For us elders the Latin proverb thus has special meaning: Timor mortis conturbat me, freely translated: the fear of death scares the living daylights out of me!

In 1955 Sloane Wilson published his novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The protagonist, whose name I have long since forgotten, had been a paratrooper in World War Two. Before each jump he would always say to himself, “Here goes nothing.” “It doesn’t matter anyway.” And “It will be interesting to see what happens.” After the War, as a Madison Avenue sales executive, he continued to use the same mantra in his life as a Mad man.
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To be sure, there is an upside to mortality. For example, the Buddha is quoted as having said, “If we were truly aware of the fact of our own death, we would settle all our differences peacefully.” Or much more recently, the Yaki Indian medicine man in Carlos Castaneda’s novels, Don Juan Matus, advises his mentee, presumably Carlos, to “take death as your ally.” In context what he seems to have meant is if we realize how finite our lives are, we’ll have a better chance of using them wisely and well. So let’s not waste our short sojourn here but make the most of it. Onward while we’re still doing time!

Our dear cat Zoe (R.I.P.) and a sleeping friend.