I recall reading that life can be viewed in 25-year clusters. In a long human life, we only get a few. Logic would say that, heading toward the midpoint of my fourth cluster, I’d have a pretty good grasp on things and be well along my bucket-list checkoffs.
You would think. But it’s not my experience. The best metaphor I have for this cluster is the sense of sitting in a roller-coaster seat, making that yawningly slow ascent to the pinnacle, and then lurching forward with enough G-force to separate the fillings from my molars. They call it the airtime hill, followed by freefall.
That’s my life today. Having summited, I’m floating and plunging, too fast, too pressured to think. All that was normal and reliably routine, isn’t. The shift affects my day-to-day functioning, the attention I give tasks, my endurance, my ability to plan. There probably are psychological terms for these conditions.
I am not convinced though, that another visit to my shrink is what’s called for. Me — the person having these experiences? Well, I have been a well-established, solidly functioning pillar of society, a model citizen, a proper member of the community in good stead with the law and with my neighbors, and everything else you’d cite as benchmarks of “normalcy.”
But lately I’ve left normal. I am that plummeting roller-coaster rider screaming his head off as the floor falls out of his being.
There is a double fear in this ride too. One fear seizes the rider hurtling down the track as if dropping off a cliff, gut following behind. The second fear is a dread that the human being within the rider will not retrieve the awareness that had buoyed him earlier in the journey of life as he swaggered along the boarding platform, gamely taking his seat in the roller coaster car, looking around with that “what-me worry?” smirk native to one confident he always walks on solid ground. This second fear is a procedural one.
The end of this ride signals a profound turning point in my state. In my fourth turning, a new state of being. This new state carries new challenges. I am facing the trials of offering care and support to a spouse who, after more than four decades together with me, is struggling with that “emperor of all maladies,” with its cyclic perturbations — changes in medication and their side effects, visits to doctors, courses of treatment. I am pressed to sandwich this responsibility into bursts of attempts to maintain a life of work, family, pets and some level of social continuity.
There are numerous bumps as all this unfolds. I forget words, names, dates. Mangle schedules. Drop entire events from my radar. With time has come some physical limitation in strength, durability, sharpness. The plumbing breaks — bigtime. I worry. The heating fails. I worry. A friend’s car is beyond repair; is mine next? And the worst of all this is my fluttering confidence, the doubt that I can rebound.
As I death-grip the coaster’s safety bars, entire scenarios from past clusters play in my head. The first 25 years ended with my return from Southeast Asia, where I’d been drafted into an expeditionary force dedicated to “preserving the democracy” – well, we won’t go there, except to note that that ride glided to a stop. The next 25 began with tan chinos, a buttoned-down Oxford, and grad school — my big toe into adulthood, then came marriage — a short one and a long-term one with a child and a respectable career that ranged from blue-chip employment to an entrepreneurship of my own with blue-chip clients.
The third ride was a doozy, full of bunny hops and camelbacks. The wisdom I’d always expected of my crack at seniority was overshadowed by fluctuating physical, economic, social, emotional and other wobbles that arose in its course.
Now, in the fourth turning, I’ve entered a 25-year period that is definitively final. But wait! I am not ready to tie off the experience as wisdom wrapped and sealed.
Back on the coaster, I’m gasping for breath as I careen down this airtime hill, frightened, yes! But at the same time, alive!
Teeth chattering. Vice grip on the restraints. G-force increasing. Only being remains. The car pitches and yaws as it levels out on the track, the joy of living glows and I warm to the pleasure of discovering what’s next.
Oh boy!
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