Celebrating Like It’s 1999

Celebrating Like It’s 1999

On my sixty-ninth birthday, which occurred this past Wednesday, I was fortunate enough to be treated to a party—serenaded by family, congratulated by friends, and tempted by a mocha torte slathered with whipped cream. Sadly, however, my own celebratory frame of mind was hijacked by several bouts of anxiety, and never arrived at all.

In the weeks leading up to what had been planned as a low-key day, albeit a fun one, I awakened each morning with an uneasy reminder that, numerically, I had reached the edge of yet another decade. Forty-nine hadn’t been so terrible but sixty-nine, whispered a voice in my mind, yikes! Over and over, even before I’d slipped out from under my down comforter, I’d tried— unsuccessfully––to reason that closing in on seventy wasn’t such a big deal; it was certainly no cause for complaint: unlike so many around the globe who were suffering, I enjoyed a life of comfort and could revel in my excellent health.

Adages about the perks of aging also proved less than useful. With age comes wisdom, I’d remind myself, mumbling into my pillow, but a fast rebuke came back at me: That’s just a cliché. If it were true, my inner-critic scoffed, shouldn’t you be a full-fledged sage by now? This kind of thinking elicited only a put-upon Charlie-Brown sigh.

It did not help when my affectionate husband, in an attempt to cheer me up, underscored my dejection that same afternoon over lunch: “Terry, if I didn’t know it for sure, I would never have guessed you were that old!” I was unable to take his comment as the compliment it surely was intended to be, and instead became fixated on what I heard as a confirmation of my emotional downturn: doubtless, it appeared, I qualified as a certifiable crone. Like a balloon with a slow leak, my mood continued to drift to the south.

What is your deal? I was still asking myself, and with irritation, hours after the snuffed-out candles had been plucked from the cake—which was a feat I managed in one breath despite being an oldster––even though I at last admitted to myself that my “deal” had little to do with issues like wisdom or physical appearance. I finally acknowledged that these were solely distractions from the core reason for my consternation. This hard-won insight was so simple after all; my negative emotions stemmed from the fact that I must acknowledge the inevitable: the deaths of my loved ones—and my own as well.

We’re often advised by people we ought to trust that an acceptance of mortality is the key to an enlightened life. It enables us to live more fully without over-analyzing the end of things. This made rational sense as I pondered the idea in the days following my un-happy birthday. Nevertheless, as I raked last fall’s leaves from my vegetable garden yesterday on a chilly morning, it struck me that such “acceptance” might more aptly be described as an aim toward which to work, rather than a goal to embrace and achieve.

As I shoveled my leafy muck into lawn bags, I recalled a terrific line that appeared in Mary Laura Philpott’s new collection of essays, titled, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives (Atria Books, N.Y, 2022). It had nailed the point with which I was now grappling. Describing the value of living with the reality of death while acknowledging that it does not correct for death itself, Philpott wrote: “Show me a person who has lost their most loved human being […] and I’ll show you someone who would trace anything, anything, to get those atoms out of the earth and put them back together as their dear one.”

This challenge—the emotional release of loved ones lost—was a familiar one; it was a fact that, even as an almost-septuagenarian, I increasingly found myself facing as one by one friends and family did indeed pass out of my world. But now, with the events of my most recent natal day hovering in my thoughts, a corollary insight assumed center stage: though my disquietude seemed to be primarily about those who had already died, I now realized that the party called my life—the one we usually call the real bash—might well come to an end before I was ready to exit the room.

Still, I wanted to aspire to accept the reality that I was mortal, with its accompanying sadness about the requirement that I must leave behind those I loved so dearly. With this thought in mind, on that particular morning after my gardening duties were finished, I texted birthday wishes to a delightful friend almost my age, who I hadn’t seen since we were in our forties, but with whom I nevertheless stayed in touch. “Lovely,” she got back to me. “Thank you very, very much.”

We had talked some weeks before and I had asked her then, whether she, like me, felt as if she were haunted by thoughts about loss. “This is normal for us Boomers, right?” I’d asked. “Haunted?” she deadpanned. “I live with those kinds of thoughts.”

I smiled then, and then again, when I recalled the next part of our conversation, which had focused on what we’d come to prioritize in our lives. “For me, it’s kindness,” Marcy said in a soft voice. “Yes,” I agreed. “And gratitude.”

All of which, combined with having just reached a pre-milestone birthday, has prompted me to begin thinking more consciously about the words and actions––the legacy––I want to leave for both my family and my friends. I had snatched up Mary Laura Philpott’s book several days before without giving much thought to its subject matter, a move that had surprised me. But I realize now, that on an unconscious level anyway, my process of reflection had likely already begun.

Riffling through the book once more, I discovered that in the acknowledgements, she referenced many authors of at least a dozen beautifully crafted memoirs, books in which I’d immersed myself over the last few years; they all explored the terrain of dying and death and were purchases I’d made at the time they were published. Now, I saw that my choice about what to read next had been based not only on my simple desire to delve into a book by a writer whose work I admired—it was the topic that had burrowed its way into my psyche.

During my wing-ding on my seventieth party next year, I will—in the manner of what Philpott, in another of her essays, exhorts her readers to do—honor everyone who has ever had a birthday, and particularly the birthdays that come later in life. I know, I know. I can’t invite the whole world to be with me—except, perhaps, metaphorically. Still, want to hear who’s already on my guest list?

If I’m lucky enough to be there with my tribe, I will toast the memory of the inimitable Prince and sing the lyrics to his 1982 hit song, “1999,” one that plays like an earworm I cannot shake: “Life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last.”

And then I’ll celebrate like it’s 1999.