A Different Perspective: 8/28/2024

I last talked about my reunion with a college classmate from sixty years ago. I’ve kept in touch with several others, including a couple from grade school, through all these years and the many changes we have each been through. I was just reading an interesting article about the current state of life expectancy and found I am nearly two years past my expiration date.

Statistically, the average American male in my pre-Baby Boomer class will last 77 years and five months. The ladies, generally more cautious and not doing most stupid things guys are prone to, live 81 years and two months. Averages are the middle ground, so many of our peers are no longer with us, and it remains to be seen when we and others will contribute to the statistic.

Chatting with my friends, we all have more or less age-related problems. Everyone suffers from aches and pains, with the accompanying physical limitations and memory gaps. We are at the “reality bites” age. It certainly will if it hasn’t drawn real blood for some of us. 

All young people see the old folks around them as somewhat alien objects rather than their future. Old is very relative and perspective-driven, probably anyone in or past their twenties for children. Some people think their youth is gone when they turn 30. Or 40, or 50, …. There are innumerable pithy sayings, “Age is just a number,” “You’re only as old as you feel,” etc., right up to, “When did that happen?”

It’s pretty disturbing when you first experience entering a room and forgetting why you went there.

Then it gets worse, and you really start to wonder if dementia is setting in, only to find out all your friends have the same problem. Unfortunately, some continue to slide into another existence, and that fear is always in the back of the minds of the rest of us.

One of my friends is putting together his recollections of our early times at the School of Mines and sending the rest of us drafts to comment on. To put it kindly, some of the things he remembers are blurry, and a few are seemingly products of his imagination since the rest of us have no recollection of that happening. Some of the responses are equally mystifying, but just examples of human differences in perception. Since I’m the only one still living here, I generally remember the names and places (although sometimes only after days of searching my mind) better than the others.

At the same time, this friend has been through physical hell, with multiple issues, any one of which would have killed someone with less resolve to live. It’s a recurring topic in our talks and correspondence: why so many of our contemporaries have passed on and we remain. Some brought it on themselves with drinking or other excesses, but many were just proof that life isn’t always fair.

Among our fellow survivors are those who took care of themselves, were genetically blessed, kept themselves too busy to die, or a combination of all three.

Miners, especially the old hands, tend to be pretty fatalistic. They believe you’re not going to die until your number’s up, and then it’s going to happen no matter where you are or what you’re doing. We don’t get to see the countdown, but we live with the certainty that it will catch up to everyone sooner or later.

Until that happens, make the most of every day and all your special people.