Wonderful

"I won't lie to you ... dying was unpleasant. But death? It's wonderful." 

--Buckeye, Patrick Ryan

That's just the thing, isn't it? As an aging man in my final years (any way you look at it), the dying itself does not seem like bad news. It's the unpleasantness of getting it over with that one would prefer to skip.

And as I reach this point of no return, as must we all, I am torn between regret and relief. Strangely enough, for all the pains of age that we suffer, for all the bother of full body arthritis, for all the embarrassments of progressive memory loss and even more progressive clumsiness and ineptitude, life begins to take on a new sharpness of focus - - not through the eyes, mind you, but through the soul. Color that has faded through the years, as if through simple neglect, begins to return, and how wonderful the world seems once again. We find ourselves, ironically, with time on our hands - - time for kindness, time for love, time for patience, time for forbearance, time for appreciation, time for empathy, and time for growth. Growth! Of all things, growth, at this age. And we can't help but wonder why we didn't do it sooner. 

We find ourselves with time, I say - - and yet, not much. We have but little time remaining and so very much to do and to be and to become. We cannot possibly finish, and yet we are nearly finished.

Lest, however, I paint too bright a picture, what we find before us as well is ruin, heartbreak, decay, failure. Not in ourselves, if we are fortunate enough to have lived not too badly in our time, but in the world, for which we once had high hopes. I will admit that I am no longer able to watch the news. It is simply too tragic. I attempt to clean my algorithms, so smudged with the dirt and shit of my country's relentless decline. I suffer every day from what I see and from what I hear of my old home even though I am not even there. Even though I've not been there in 15 years. And yet I am there. My heart is there, my soul is there, my mother, my father, my son, all of my family, albeit all in the grave. We are there, I am there. It cannot be undone. It is in my blood. No tree exists separately from its roots.

This wonderful world, in the end, as we cannot help but acknowledge, is no more than a hopeless wasteland. And so I say, Enough. I'm done. And so I am relieved to be relieved. No more of this. My heart cannot stand it, my soul longs for better things than a fallen world which will never rise. It was always meant to end, just as I am meant for an end.

And what then?

And then I am there.