Ever since I was a very young child I wanted to be old. Not “older”, but old. There was something about old people that was more than just a fascination with how their skin was like tree bark, or how a particular one or another limped, or how they spoke with some gravel in their throat. They were mystical, magical people who, it seemed, were alive but were somehow living in two worlds.

As I got older, I recall somewhere around my junior high years, I wanted to be dead.  My desire to be dead wasn’t a morbid thing, nor as I recall, was it a descent into the abyss of a clinical depression or serious suicidal thoughts. I hadn’t experienced any childhood abuse or any such thing. I had a good life as a child though I didn’t always think so in my adolescence and 20’s. But as a child there was a weariness in my bones of what I knew of life even then, and a deep intuition that in death there would be a mysterious, mystical joy and if not joy, at least a respite.

My desire to be old or to die never left me over the decades. I’m old now, and over the years my world weariness and desire to die grew ever deeper even though I’ve experienced a lot of goodness and joy in my life. I have to say, being old hasn’t disappointed me. After 64 years I’ve seen a lot of things, most twice or even a dozen times, so I don’t live on the brink of perpetual emotional meltdown about people. I’ve lived through dozens of international world crises and “ends of the world as we know it” prognostications so I don’t live in perpetual fear of catastrophic global disasters. I’ve weathered losses of family, friends, money, hope, and even God. And the best thing about being old is, I can say just about anything now and people either think I’m wise and listen or dismiss me as an out of touch, crotchety old man, which is not the end of my world if they think that. I actually love being old. The physical pain trade off for the existential benefits is a no brainer for me.

That said, my longing for death has taken on a lot of faces over the years. I’ve been through depressions and had suicidal thoughts, but no one has had to talk me out of an attempt so they were more like a suicidal delusion or fantasy. I’ve done really stupid things that would be on youtube under “hold my beer, watch THIS!”, I don’t wear a seat belt or a dust mask, I ride a motorcycle, I eat the wrong stuff, and generally have ignored 6 out of the seven warning signs of a fatal disease until I can’t work or eat then I go to a doctor. Over the years I’ve always thought that if I knew I had a fatal disease or condition I wouldn’t tell anyone and just pass on quietly and naturally. Even though I knew that could be seen kind of as a default suicide, at least it was letting nature take its course and, I reasoned, it’s not like putting a gun to my own head. And yes, my wife is fully aware I live with a “death wish”.

So, I turn 65 this year. I will be applying for Social Security and Medicare next month. I’ve lived longer than I believed I would. 65 is an existential crisis year in our culture. I’m technically done as a contributor to society and am now to be taken care of because I’m past usefulness, though I don’t believe that, however I am tired and could use a break. I look in the mirror and I’m that person I wished I could be when I was young, with the trembling hands with veins like a brown, fall leaf quivering in the autumn wind, the time eroded face with bumps and splotches and rivulets carved by Arizona summers, drywall dust and paint, worries, laughter, and tears, a shuffle instead of a march, tired but twinkling eyes, and wild gray hair, what’s left of it. My body is breaking down and my mind seems like it is running on Windows 98. I can tell you now, being old is cool, but it is not for the weak.

Looking back on my strange desires, I believe that God was woven into them from an early age. When I was about 50 my mother told me I was born blue and dead with my cord wrapped around my neck and was I revived. Whether or not I experienced some kind of near death experience or suffered brain damage is up for debate. When I was about 4 years old, my uncle brought some gifts to my mom from Italy, a crucifix and a carved bust of Jesus with a bloody crown of thorns that sat on top of the TV console. My mother told me a few years ago that she used to find me sitting in front of the statue and staring at it. That, I think, pretty much summed up my unconscious spiritual life as a child, a constant awareness of suffering and a knowledge that death is something God was deeply involved with. When I was seventeen I left the Catholic Church and became a Bible church Protestant. I read the New Testament for the first time. And I sat and stared at Philippians 2:21: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain”.  I read 2 Corinthians 5:8 “I prefer to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord”.  Romans 8 spoke of the longing through the Holy Spirit for a release from this futility and corruption into freedom and wholeness. I read of Moses who told God, “If you love me, kill me now.” I felt that my intuitions about life and death and God finally made sense. But now I know it was only a partial sense. Something crucial in my understanding then was missing. Crucial, as in the crucifix. Crucial, as in love.

The thing I knew intuitively as a child was that death would be a release from life’s futility, what little I knew of it. As a young man I knew more of the futility but I also learned from the Scriptures about the love of Christ, the Cross, and the resurrection, but it was only in theory and theology. What I suspected as I grew older was true: in reality, getting through life is the hard part of dying because being alive means learning how to love, and love means sacrificing in THIS life, and only in the sacrifices made in this life does love overcome death. The thing I didn’t grasp in Philippians 2:21 “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” were verses 22 through 24:  “But if I live on in the flesh this will mean fruitful labor for me, and I don’t know which to choose: I am hard pressed from both directions, having the desire to depart and be with Christ because that is very much better, yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake.” I knew those verses intellectually. I grasped the part about desiring to depart. I knew that sometimes life demands that we “man our post” and do the right thing. But St. Paul is not talking about duty, which is certainly virtuous in a fallen world, he is talking about a love which is other worldly. This is the divine love of Philippians chapter 3 that doesn’t count the benefit of something as cosmic as being God as something to be held on to but is given up for an ordinary life of certain pain in order to love.

You see, we are born in the image of that God who loves in human flesh, and we are born into a fallen world. We are a mixed bag of love and self-centeredness, angels with a six pack of cheap beer. We thrive on love, but serve our selves. Because God is love, love is at the core of our being. So because we are bodily beings we can only love in reality, in true bodily actions, not merely in theory and spirit, just as God did by becoming human flesh. So for me, childhood and adolescence were exploring the landscape and gathering evidence for what I suspected to be truth. By adolescence, I had an intuition of how love should go, and I had an ideal in my heart I hoped to live up to, but in real life over decades I wasn’t always good at it in practice. I often failed miserably at what I knew to be true love. I could not sacrifice my self even as an ordinary human duty much less love like Christ loved. It has been in my 45 years of marriage (but not in a row), a Brady Bunch of six children, and my current life’s circumstances taking care of my parents and living with 4 generations in our home, that I’ve learned a little about love. I can tell you that it is an arduous and humbling undertaking to learn to love, and like all things in life, we KNOW better than we DO. Our self perception is always an imaginary person that is far more skillful than our true self is. Life and relationships are our classroom and sometimes we get an “F”, but if we at least showed up and paid attention, they can still teach us something valuable.

As human beings we usually only learn the hard way. We learn by doing, and sometimes by not doing. We think we know something, but we don’t really know what we’ve learned until we are tested. Life is a classroom and we are always put to the test sooner or later. Sometimes it’s a pop quiz and we are surprised at our own response. Sometimes something happens and there is an act of accidental heroism, a super-human act of physical or emotional strength, a mindless knee jerk virtuous response to a situation that we had no conscious preparation for but manifested something within us that had grown and taken root in our soul. 

So, life recently handed me a pop quiz and this is my surprise. I discovered that I know Philippians 2 now, I got all of it, or at least a lot of it. I know it down to my very soul. I’ve been having chest pains for over a month now. I suspected it was something I needed to pay attention to since my Dad had his first triple bypass when he was 51. Instead of doing what I always imagined, that I would say nothing and hope I would just quietly die and finally go home and be at peace, I told my family about it and went to a cardiologist to see what can be done to prolong my life. You see, I have a wife, children, parents, grandchildren, and a church community that I have learned to love more than myself and more than death.  As the Song of Solomon says, “Love is as strong as death”. The Spirit of God calls us to Himself beyond this life and death, and the Resurrection removes the fear of death. But the Incarnation and the Cross are the manifestation of love in human flesh that we are called to participate in. Our birth and burial are the parentheses within which we live in the flesh as God did and learn to love as God loves. I still have classes to take before my graduation so, as the Facebook meme says, “If I had known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself.” But, here I am still, and by God’s grace here I will remain until I have learned to love and God lets his servant depart in peace.