Aging and The Lie of Later

In the first week of my forty-ninth year, all I know for sure is that life is fragile and surrender is hard. In the briefest breath of a second, everything can change. In any given direction.

It was my 49th birthday a few days ago and I was all set to mark the occasion by enjoying a day out with my husband. Since I was pet sitting, we decided we’d keep it simple and head out for breakfast, do some shopping, then come back and spend time with the pups before heading out again for an early dinner and celebratory birthday cake.

I got my first inkling that our plans might be hampered when I saw that there was an excessive heat warning in place in NYC. Being in perimenopause, and having recently noticed an increase in the intensity of my hot flashes, spending time outdoors in the heat and humidity was about as appealing as month old moldy bread.

Then, the night before my birthday, Bobo, one of the two Havanese dogs I was looking after became ill. He’d been a little quiet during the day, but nothing I was unduly worried about. But then I noticed he was off his food and later that evening he vomited.

Things got progressively worse that night with more vomiting and I knew he needed to get checked out. As luck would have it, Bobo already had a vet appointment scheduled for the next morning for a follow up visit for some other issues he’d been experiencing. Knowing it was my birthday, another family friend was all set to take him to the appointment.

As I prepared to head out for my birthday breakfast, I couldn’t have felt less celebratory. Bobo has been in my life for the last 9 years and I first met him when he was 1. He’s the most adorable fluffy bundle of mischief you could imagine. He usually hovers somewhere between aloof and ecstatic to see you. To say he has a big personality would be an understatement. To say that I adore him would be even more of an understatement.

I knew he was in good hands with our friend, Roz, who knows him very well and has also had her own dogs for many years. Still, breakfast was a subdued affair and I kept checking my phone for updates.

Before long, Roz messaged to say that the vet had examined Bobo and thought he seemed ok. They’d suggested maybe he was missing his family and that was possibly why he was moping.

I intuitively and immediately knew this wasn’t right. Instinct told me it was much more serious than that, and I ended up calling the vet and scheduling another appointment for later that afternoon. I’m very glad I did because it turned out to be pancreatitis.

To cut a long (and tearful) story short, Bobo is thankfully doing much better and recovering well. But the entire experience left me feeling shaken and off kilter.

When it comes to life’s challenges, we tend to think that we’ll be better prepared to deal with them further down the line. We imagine a future version of ourselves that will be strong, capable, wise, and calm during difficulty. Our future self will feel ready. They’ll be well equipped to handle everything with ease.

But are we ever really ready to face heartache? Isn’t the very idea of our future self a figment of our imagination that we conjure up as a way of deferring what we don’t want to deal with in the present moment?

I call this the Lie of Later. And I have told myself the Lie of Later many times.

It feels less scary to let myself believe that a future time or date will somehow see me perfectly put together and much more able to glide through times of struggle. (And because I have a vivid imagination I usually have perfectly styled hair and a super cool outfit on during said time of struggle.)

It’s worth saying that the Lie of Later is not the same as permitting ourselves time to organize or prepare for a future situation that may arise. Preparation can be key in helping us feel more at ease in any given challenge and less as though we’re completely spiraling.

But that perfect time that we envision in our minds? It almost never materializes. Later is a lie we hide behind, a means of avoidance. And although it offers us some relief in the moment, it can also prevent us from facing reality.

When my grandmother died some years ago, my immediate thought upon hearing of her death was that we hadn’t had long enough with her. 90 years suddenly shrunk down into a mere dozen or so memories. A whole lifetime reduced to a handful of moments. She could have lived another 50 years and saying goodbye still would have felt too soon.

We rarely reach a point of satiety when it comes to our loved ones. We want to continue to savor our time with them.

I think perhaps I’d imagined that as part of my own aging process I’d be able to bear grief and loss in a different way. That the acquired wisdom from my lived years would cushion me somewhat from the intensity of pain and discomfort. That I’d someday morph into a wise elder who was able to detach a little from heartache, guided instead by a deeper inner knowing of the necessity of change and my small place in the world’s bigger picture.

But here, in the first week of my forty-ninth year, all I know for sure is that life is fragile and surrender is hard. In the briefest breath of a second, everything can change. In any given direction.

When it comes to who we love, regardless of our age or theirs, decades bend into days, and at the end of it all we only really remember how we felt during our shared time together, not the detail of what we did.

I’ll never be fully ready to say goodbye to anyone I love and cherish. I’ll never be quite prepared to see a loved one struggle or suffer. But there’s at least a little bit of liberation in knowing that. I don’t have to place an impossible expectation on myself to have a solely rational response to an emotional experience.

Grief (and joy) intersect with all of life. Nothing can ever truly remain the same. Understanding the impermanence of everything is what simultaneously cracks us open and comforts us. It’s what allows us to live. It’s what prompts us to love.

So, here I am. Learning and unlearning as I begin another trip around the sun. Allowing myself to be in the mess of it all. Figuring out some things and failing at others. And doing my very best to be present to all of it, knowing that someday my own life will be a handful of memories in someone else’s. And hoping that, above all, I was able to make some of those memories meaningful.