Pop!

Am I increasingly aware of the human deaths around me now because I’m at more of a sensitive-to-these-things age of 70, or are there more deaths around me because my peers are mostly my age?

Chicken or the egg?

It’s much like popping corn. Silent at first, birth to 60 or so, and then the first pop among our peers. The starting gun. You think: “How can that be? Larry looked so good when we ran into him last week!” Some go earlier, bad driving, guns, drugs, or perhaps faulty construction to begin with, but in America, the average life expectancy is 78. Top of the bell curve. Most of us get to age 60 or so without much popping in our immediate age range, but of course the pace picks up. By the time we get to the middle of the timeline, all hell is breaking loose. The years between 74 and 84 are like a theatre popcorn machine right before the feature presentation. Sounds like the grand finale on the fourth of July.

By age 70, or even earlier, every time you feel a sharp pain or some physical anomaly, you think to yourself “So this is how it ends…” The same pain 30 years ago would barely register. You would pay no attention and just keep on running.

That’s what I tell myself to do.

Someone has to be last though, the final pop in any particular batch of corn. They’re the Kirk Douglas’s of the world, he’s 101. That person would be the only one left in their group left to hear it, and their hearing becomes disabled when they themselves release their own pop.

A tree falling in the forest with no one to hear.

When she was 94, my mother said: “Everyone I ever knew is dead.” More nostalgic than morbid.

Now I’m just starting to understand how that may feel when I’m also 94.

It will be even stranger if I pull a Kirk Douglas, and at 102 I’m the last silent pop among my peers, none of whom are alive to see…the last tree to fall in what used to be a huge forest.

Pop!

(Disclaimer: Carla will live to be 127. She’s too healthy, smart, and scrappy to succumb to normal human disease, but she’s 9 years younger than me and I don’t consider her to be in my age group.)