The ephemeral present

I’ve been thinking recently about the past, in particular the thirty years I lived in San Francisco before leaving in 2005—memories of spending Saturday mornings at Howard’s Restaurant in the Inner Sunset with my dear friend Len after our long Saturday runs across the city, making up stories about a brave young girl named Alice to tell my elder daughter who was four or five, riding the old PCC streetcars in San Francisco for 25 cents when I first moved there in 1976, having dozens of potluck dinners with my next-door-neighbor Peter and our mutual friends.

When those events happened, I did not understand how fleeting they were, how time changes everything, including each one of us. Len is now in his mid-80s, and we have not run in more than two decades. My daughter is over 40, and our conversations are about ideas and about current events of our lives rather than the stories I made up at her bedtime. The PCC green and white streetcars have been replaced as have been their replacement, and the fare is $3.00. Peter left San Francisco about the time I did and we see each other only every few years.

Caught up in the events of our daily lives, it is easy to forget the inexorable flow of time, to forget that the “present” is fixed only for this moment and is continually changing, from day to day, week to week, year to year, to its last syllable as it fades into a past that is either forgotten or lives faintly in memories distorted by the lens of time.

When I was twenty, I thought that anyone over forty was old. The perspective has shifted as I have grown older myself. When I was forty, seventy seemed ancient. Although I am now past even that age, “old” continues to recede. I can sense that the distance to “old” is closing, however, that I will soon draw even, and that I and my new companion will continue on together hand in hand. Because it marks the end of the life of one person, death is usually a source of fear or sadness. In reality, though, it is ordinary, commonplace, unexceptional, prosaic, the finish line everyone must cross.

As I age and as my friends, relatives, and acquaintances die, I pay more attention to the obituary page in the newspaper than I did as a young man, when death hardly crossed my mind, the age when a sense of immortality lures young men into joining the Marine Corps for duty, honor, and country, terms which are increasingly ambiguous to me. Obituaries are interesting reading, short often semi-fictional accounts in which euphemisms are almost universally used. They rarely state that someone has simply died. Rather the deceased has met her Heavenly Father, joined Jesus, passed, passed on, passed away, passed from this life, was welcomed into Heaven, was called home, joined his loving wife, took her sentimental journey, etc. There are many more. Then there are the adverbial phrases about the nature of the dying: in his sleep, peacefully, after a brave struggle, unexpectedly, at home, after a sudden illness, with her family by her side, and so on. I think it interesting how the dead have lived more noble lives than the rest of us. Obituaries are like resumes, offering only a limited and somewhat distorted view of someone’s life. I suppose they are the final resume, Linked In for the afterlife.

In addition to obituaries, it is customary to mark a person’s death in a more permanent manner, to establish a memorial of sorts, for most people a tombstone. Yet that memorial is hardly permanent. A visit to an old cemetery shows that graves soon are neglected and worn down by time. Spouses and children often come to visit them, bringing flowers, and clearing away the weeds. Sometimes grandchildren do as well. But after that, it is hit or miss. Weeds persevere more than memory. Weather is stronger at last than carved stone. Soon there is little to note our time on this earth other than a fading and weathered tombstone or sterile public records such as census information, birth certificates, death certificates, faint tracks soon covered by the dust of time. “Loving memory” is damned short.

For a person facing his or her own death, the end of life is sobering. Yet, just as we inherit our birth, so do we have a debt to pay at the end of life. Here are a couple of haiku I wrote about that—17 syllables in three lines, five in the first and third, seven in the second:

We buy each day on
credit, forgetting that the
bill always comes due

Indeed the bill always comes due.

We begin each day
with hope while ignoring the
inevitable

In his famous meditation, John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…. [A]ny man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” I particularly like Donne’s point that in reality no one is exceptional. We are all ordinary, all part of the main. On one hand each of us is unique, but on the other we are just a brief stop in a genetic flow from parents to children.

Most of us have a paradoxical view of our relationship to other people. Looking out from our own psyches we believe intuitively that our life is singular, that each of us is special as is our family. Yet at the same time, we cannot ignore the inevitability of our own death, the certainty of which intrudes on our minds with each passing year and even as we look into the mirror each morning and are often surprised by wrinkles, age spots, and increasing resemblance to our parents. One of the secrets of attaining contentment, I think, is to come to terms with that paradox.

So if we are each ordinary and if our time on earth is soon lost to memory, how should we make sense of our life? How should we live? What difference does it make how we spend our days? Or does it make any difference at all? In the closing words to Walden Thoreau writes. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

The first sentence is the key. The Present is what comprises our life—it is all we have. The Past is gone, never to be recovered and soon to be forgotten. The Future is unknowable, uncertain, and of course tenuous. Yet if we truly are awake, each new day offers another opportunity to live, even if that day is our last.