Sunday, April 05, 2009

Snowball in April

A friend suggested that it would begin to happen more frequently now. My parents died more than a decade ago and surely they would have been dead by now if they hadn't. A very close friend's older sister just died. Now a school classmate has cancer and is undergoing chemo.

For the first time in my life, I'm older than the president. My father died "young" and I will soon be older than he was at the time. Then what?

I've been at the top of the hill for a while now and I'm beginning to feel that that plateau in which one is at one's prime is running out. All I can say is that I wish myself and my contemporaries a swift and painless death, whenever it comes.

10 comments:

Andy said...

Ah, perhaps that explains the last post?

Cecilio Morales said...

Interesting. I thought they were unrelated. But quite an insight.

Andy said...

See what we can do for each other? :-)

Andy said...

Further, I knew (know) a guy whose father died of a heart attack before he was forty. The anguish and re-evaluation of life that he went through until he survived that age was amazing. I think, although I don't know for certain, that he was convinced he would die around that age too!

You are NOT your father, whatever someone might say.

Cecilio Morales said...

Thanks, Andy. I appreciate your thoughts.

Diane in DC said...

The President before the current one has the exact same birthday as mine in. I won't name him since we are all sick of him after 8 years.
But he was definitely the same age as me since he was born the exact same year. This is something I am not proud of but had to mention since you are talking about President's ages relative to you.

Anonymous said...

Cecilio

The good die young! You're pretty safe!

heartinsanfrancisco said...

I am now older than my father was when he died, but when my mother left us 24 years later, there was no longer a buffer between me and eternity. I am now the oldest generation in my family.

I am hoping that my immaturity and habit of procrastination will allow me to stay on longer as clearly, my work is not yet done.

As for your father (and mine,) we should use their examples to make different life choices where possible. Besides, you can't go anywhere. You'd be missed, and I simply won't allow it.

Anonymous said...

I prefer the one you wrote three years ago on the same subject: "Where 's my ice floe?" that you put on the "Definig posts of the past". On the point of view of literature, it was more dramatic, more poignant.(maybe you should ahve gone on your ice floe then when it was not yet too late? :))

Last week, I wrote a post on the same idea: "Le saviez-vous?" about trimming raspberries : the old dry branches must be cut away after serving to hold straight the new ones that embrace them.

Cecilio Morales said...

Wow! I should write more like these, it seems. It just came to me and wrote itself. I'm into one-screen posts, you'll notice, ever since my "customer survey."

Thank you, Andy, I thought that was it, so I responded immediately.

Diane, I knew there was something of a dissembling war-starter about you. The secret is out!

Anonymous hit it on the nail, of course.

Heartin, thank you for not allowing my demise. News about it has been premature, as Mark Twain once remarked.

Geneviève, there is a difference. Back then, I may have been depressed (I was, in fact, doctors say), but I was not writing in sadness. I was simply analyzing the notion of the art of aging, which we have physically brought about with all the new medicines. We remain unable to perform this art gracefully and perhaps the ice floe is an alternative.