Two birthdays ago I officially entered the period of Borrowed Time. According to verywellhealth.com in 2021 I reached my ‘sell by date’ for white males in the United States. Covid-19 had knocked almost three years off the expected life span of my pretty privileged cohort. Indigenous people took a bigger hit. Black Americans too. Long and short of it? All males my age are now living on ‘borrowed time.’

Of course, if we are alive and eat healthy food, and get some kind of exercise, get regular check-ups, stay away from tobacco and serious hard liquor, we can expect to be around for another few years. Let’s put a cymbal clap on the word few. Because the odds that the new ‘Four Horsemen’: Heart Disease, Cancer, Accidents, or Stroke will pay a visit sometime in the next few are pretty good. It will be unpleasant, but it won’t be a surprise,  or an injustice, or a betrayal by a deity who is supposed to take care of those who are good boys and girls.

So I take stock and look at the stuff doctors tend to say is ‘normal for people my age’: bumpety-bumps in my ticker, blebs in my gut, skews in my vision and hissing in my ears; and all those ‘senior moments’ that make me wonder if the main computer has a short here or there. Then there’s the insignificant  stuff: a bit more huff and puff walking back from the drug store; thinner skin that does a little dance when I lift my arms; a knobby knuckle; a reluctant pecker; gas.

What does all this tell me? It tells me I am dying. Oh, don’t back off. I’m not trying to be melodramatic or clue you in to my immediate exit. I am observing what nature is telling me. And it is simply telling me that my body is failing. Systems that used to work without a hitch have several hitches.

For many years my beloved wife practiced medicine as an oncologist. That means she saw hundreds of people living with, and dying from cancer. She can talk in elegant terms about morbidity and mortality and life expectancy if a person has certain lumps in their body. She knows about oncogenes that seem programmed to give certain people certain cancers. (And of course critters get them too.)

And as she has said many times, “Cancer is largely a disease of old people.” And the human race gets older all the time. Which suggests that if nothing else has zapped us by the time we get to the last quarter our own cells will begin to fail; lose their ability to replace themselves without making mistakes.

If we went back to 4 BC when a certain Yeshua Ben Yosef, aka Jesus of Nazareth, was born, the life expectancy of a kid like him was about 35. Now that was because the odds of a kid like him surviving to adulthood were not so good. Maybe forty percent of all children died before they reached 15. There was really no medicine of any kind and there were lots of diseases and accidents and food shortages to kill off a kid early in life. Eating kosher and having three rich guys bring you expensive presents at your briss probably helps you survive. Being seen as a future king might help you stay healthy too. Being a builder in a growing kingdom could provide a pretty good living. But still, the odds against living to three score and ten? Not so good.

And a lot of young mothers like Mary would also leave this world giving birth to their children under circumstances even more lowly than a stable.

But the curious thing is that Jesus was already approaching the ‘sell-by’ date for men like him when he began his second career as a preacher and healer.

So by the time I was born in the middle of the last century the life expectancy of a guy like me had about doubled his. (No other comparison with Jesus is meant here.) That survival rate is due primarily to better ways of keeping little kids alive. Better nutrition and jobs less likely to get a person killed. But even when I was born, there were relatively few medicines. Penicillan was first used just a few years before my birth, a couple of years too late to save my grandmother who died of an infected finger.

My uncle lived his life with polio. I got a shot. My dad was told there was no cure for his tuberculosis, just bed rest and fresh air; until a few years later when a ‘cocktail’ of new drugs knocked it out of him. In China only four of my mother-in-law’s brothers and sisters lived to adulthood. Believing that you can survive by the Intervention of Doctors rather than the Grace of God is something that happened within my lifetime.

Scriptures and customs and taboos and food prohibitions were set up to increase the odds of survival in the millennia when we didn’t really know what was killing us. Evil spirits? Bad attitude? A hex by an enemy? Survival worked better if you ‘played it safe’ or were meaner than the next crew over. But medicine changed that. Now we can not only fix that ‘hex’ before it kills you we can prevent it from getting you in the first place.

So ‘borrowed time’ is relative. It really depends on when you live, where you live,  and who people think you are. What resources do you have to buy some days, months, years? But it is important to remember it is borrowed time, not purchased time. Sooner or later Nature calls….

I had an insight about cancer, about disease, and about death in general.

Nature needs us dead. If you take a trip away from the sealed boxes we live our lives in you will begin to notice that every living thing depends on every dying thing for survival. Why are ruins and fossils often found so far under ground? Because the ‘ground’ is the accumulation of natural things that have died over centuries in order to fertilize the earth for the next round of plants and animals. And of course we all eat each other in one way or another every day.

One of my touchstones is a fossil of a single leaf. It had fallen into the silt, which had hardened to make a capsule around it, printing its shape for preservation over millions of years. One leaf from a plant untold eons ago. But even though it was a unique fossil it had immortalized only one of billions of leaves that fell that year, and every year for millions of years after that until it was cracked from its time capsule. And of course it is emblematic of the millions of other creatures of all sorts, even our forebears, that also followed it into the ground.

At some point nature needs to ‘put us to bed’ so our cells can dream into being untold multitudes of new lives. 

In the mean time…in the gentle time…we who have lived past our due date can enjoy the grace; the grace of a sensorium that allows us to experience the amazing diversity of human experience; experience as a living creature; and the grace of watching ourselves die; knowing that we are fulfilling a deep need by the planet to nourish itself.

In that light, we need to think about the consequences of the human quest to be immortal. I do understand, there is a deep mystery of being a creature who can fit the universe inside its own skull; echo it; mirror it; celebrate it in so many ways; explore so many of its mysteries; look outward and inward to its limits. It does seem nonsensical to gather and organize all that into the uniquely complex organism that is me, only to throw it all away after a brief time. But complexity and beauty is not unique to me and mine. It is a deep attribute of every living thing…and, yes…of the vast complexity of non-living things.

As I write this, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the generations that were born with me, and afterward for several decades, are beginning to fade. There is fear among the young that the world will be decrepit and doddering for years to come. But the good news is that we are dying. The inflated population that we represent is thinning out. There will be more to go around for the surviving population.

Don’t scramble too hard to replace our numbers. The Earth needs a smaller coterie. Virtually all the worst ills of humankind are due simply to too many people. Wars, epidemics, famines, mass migrations, global warming, border disputes, ‘racial’ conflicts, ‘religious’ conflicts, capitalist or communal conflicts. All these conflicts beat less loudly when people are not shoving each other for elbow room.

It might not hurt to be quiet and listen for a bit to us folks in the last quarter. And don’t forget: Your last quarter may have already begun; long before you thought it would. Jesus was well past his when he began his ministry. When I look at the new paintings I am making I am grateful I have the sisu to begin some things anew even as the leaves fall around me. I also know it is time to figure out what is important to pass along and what is well to fall into the soft mulch of a vast future.