Thoughts on Nearing 89: A Bagatelle

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

If I survive the coming election about which I have a sense of anticipatory dread and then continue to live for another month or so, I shall reach the end of my octogenarian decade and turn, unless I can find a way to turn back, the age of 89, an age that I find entirely rebarbative.  The reason it so repels me is not what you may imagine.  No, it has to do with one of my many quirks – a hatred of prime numbers ending in nine.  It’s easy to think of them – 19, 59, 79, and the worst one of all, 89.  There must be a term for this, as there is, for instance, for the fear of the number 13, which as any literate person knows is called triskaidekaphobia.  Well, my webmaster, Kevin Williams, who knows everything, just told me.  I am a primonumerophobe .

Living so long also makes me wonder what I am still doing here.  My spiritual friends, never loath to resort to the nearest cliché, keep telling me that if I’m still here, it means that “my work is not done.” To which I think, though I will rarely utter the word aloud, “balderdash.”  

For years, I have joked that I have already entered my afterlife, that my life is over, and I now exist in a kind of interminable epilogue.  I mean, consider:  I can no longer hear well, my vision is even worse, and, having been crippled for years by a progressive case of spinal stenosis, I can no longer walk either.  Well, I can.  I do totter about my house being very careful not to fall, but I can’t really go anywhere.  A trip – hoping I don’t – out to my patio is about the limit of my excursions.  I haven’t been able to travel anywhere for years, and even going out to a restaurant is fraught with risk.  

Worse in a way is that I can no longer do any meaningful work.  I published my last two books earlier this year, and my blogging life is about to come to an end.  Partly because of my bad vision, but mainly because I have run out of ideas what to write about.  It’s hard for me now to read the kind of books I used to, which would not only provide fuel for what’s left of my brain, but give me topics, such as animal cognition, I used to love to write about.  No more.  I just can’t hack it.

So, what’s the point, Alfie? From my point of view, I am just marking time, like a prisoner waiting for his sentence to end, scratching off the days on the calendar on the wall of his cell.

Some of you know that when I was in my early eighties, I wrote a little book of mostly humorous essays I whimsically entitled Waiting to Die.  The conceit of that book was my goal of living to the age of 1000 – months.  That would get me out of here at the age of 83.  No such luck.  I blew past it and just kept on keeping on.  I sometimes joked that I just didn’t have the knack for dying.  I don’t understand why it’s so easy for so many people.  But where death is concerned, I seem to be an abysmal failure.   If I were to write a sequel to that book, I would have to call it Still Waiting.

I’ve always thought about when I would die – and always found myself disappointed when I didn’t.  My father died at 41, so after I turned 40, I thought the time of my demise was might be drawing nigh.  I remember spending a lot of time listening to the late quartets of Beethoven, thinking it would be the last time I would ever hear them.  Wrong again.

After that, but still thinking I might die young, I imagined that I might die at the age of one of my literary heroes at that time, George Orwell, who had died at 46 (though I mistakenly thought his death occurred when he was 47 – another one of those primes I love to detest).  But 47 came and went, but I didn’t; I remained.  I was beginning to lose faith in my ability to forecast when I would kick the bucket.

Eventually, after many years had passed without my having done so, I thought that I might die in the year 2012, at the end of which I would be 77 – a good time to die, I thought.  I actually had many reasons to think my time would come by the end of that year.  But I left feeling somewhat crestfallen at another failure to attain death.

I was beginning to think that, in this respect at least, I was like Freud who was very superstitious about death and, like me, had kept imagining he would die much sooner than he actually did (it was he who would die at 83).  He eventually came to fear that he wouldn’t die until he reached his mother’s death age, which was 95.  Well, I won’t have to worry about living to my mother’s age if I make it to 89.  She died at 88.

With the exception of my maternal grandfather, all the men in my family (at least on my mother’s side, and, to the extent I know, also on my father’s side) died young, none of them living longer than their mid-sixties.  What’s wrong with me?

I grew up a member of a quartet of male cousins. Two of them died around the age of eighty, and the third, the cousin to whom I am closest, is now 84, but has a terminal disease.  We joke about who will be the last cousin standing.  Anyone care to bet?

Well, I’ve given up trying to predict when I’ll die.  At a prophet, I have an unblemished record of failure when it comes to my own death.  But I’m convinced that if I pray long and hard enough, God will finally grant me release, so I still have hope, it not faith, I will get there in the end.  Wish me luck!