This is not a “pleasant” topic. That’s why we old people don’t talk much about being old. We make jokes about it instead. In the Middle Ages, philosophers kept a skull on their desks as a constant reminder of their personal mortality. We find that sort of thing macabre now in modern times, but when we’re old, we rather wish we’d kept a skull on our desks when we were young…

I am not “getting” old. I am old. I’m 70. There are things about being old that old people just don’t mention. We see, literally, in the mirror, the actual decaying of our bodies in that one exposed and largest organ, the skin. Other people see it, too, but they don’t have that gnawing awareness that this visible organ reveals what’s also happening to the invisible: We don’t like the term “decay,” but it’s the correct one. People often say that we begin dying the day we’re born. Yes, but dying doesn’t become actually visible until we’re old. We think about a facelift and chide ourselves for our vanity until we realize that it isn’t vanity—it’s denial.

We think a lot about moving, too. We say we’re “downsizing,” moving from a multi- bedroom home to a little condo. Again, that’s the visible part. We are changing “houses.” And we begin the great disappearing act: We throw out or give away so much stuff that we’ve clung to for so long, asking ourselves why on earth we hung on to this or that—old photos, knick-knacks, precious trivia, the souvenirs of our lives. We will move soon to very small quarters indeed—no room for all this stuff. We make a will or even go ahead and sign the house over to our heirs, saying that we’re avoiding tax or probate problems. We become minimalists. We become sensible. We know. We know things we always knew but never so well as we know now.

Love—say the sentimentalists—is the only thing that lasts. Well, no, it doesn’t, not as we’ve experienced it anyway. It lasts in the conscious memory of those who remain after the sundering of the beloved, but only for a while, maybe a long while, but then we realize that we can barely remember them now. And subtly, slowly, sadly, we know that what we love is not them, but our memories, and we let go of them…like everything else, like the extra sofa-bed we hung on to, the savings account we kept, the pathetically out-of-fashion clothes or shoes in the back of the closet, the files, the letters, “just in case”….

In case we should ever need them in the future. But the only future we have is now. Of course, we always knew that, but, like so much else, we never knew it so well as we do now.

There is a period during which some of us become acutely conscious of “health.” We start doing things like obsessing with nutrition, or running five miles a day. “I calculate that I’ve added two years to my life,” said a friend who developed a take- charge-of-your-life outlook, referring to her five miles a day. Yes, but she spent

them running. And it didn’t work anyway; she developed breast cancer and died a few months later. An obsession with health does not make us healthy (read young). Just as the anti-aging creams don’t work, neither do any of the anti-aging regimens, beliefs, diets, products, or practices. Trying to gain life, we lose it, wasting precious time.

Time, the only true measure of life, adds a suffix, -span, and shows itself to be ultimately quantitative, after all—never mind how that reality offends us. But truth, ever paradoxical, informs: It’s only by acknowledging its quantitative limitedness that we can possess any qualitative measure. If we deny the limits, we live the time left to us very poorly, like spending it all in running.

We discover, against our will, not seeking it, the meaning of detachment. From things we love, people we love, and finally, from love. And paradoxically again, that’s when we discover love for the first time. It seems we find only by losing.

I don’t mean it’s all about carpe diem. On the contrary. Carping doesn’t really have anything much to do with the diem. Things come. And they go. Let them. Small achievements and big failures, big ideas and little opinions, great desires and small joys. All tragedies, our own and others’—no exceptions—fade, lose substance, in a great sea of divine will, into which all things dissolve, never to be grasped, or held as one’s own. Like love. Love grows up in detachment. Refined in the fires of loss, it is finally real only if we let go of its dross, the bondage of attachment which we imposed. It was never really our own. I rather think the same may be true of life.