An old man died last night.
An old man who looked out for me and tried to help me, died in his sleep just last night.
I was one of a few younger waifs and strays, as he called us, who he generously gave his time to in an attempt to help us make solid sensible decisions and set about improving our circumstances.
When he first invited me to meet at his home we would sit down at his kitchen table, with pen and paper and a cup of tea, and go through my finances, earnings and outgoings and figure out whether I was succeeding at life or not.
Often I seemed to be failing, on paper at least. The cold, heartless numbers didn’t add up to much and suggested I should have a good long think about how I was leading my life.
He was a very conventional and conservative man, with a good, solid, respectable career behind him and gold-plated savings and triple-locked pensions ahead of him. He was from another age in this respect.
There was always tension between us because I was determined to lead a more unconventional life, something with a modicum of meaning and substance that leaned more toward the soul rather than giving everything to the success of the bank balance.
By some turn of luck, I survived and even began to thrive as a yoga teacher, with a business that meant something to me beyond the amount of cash it could pull in. I did want cash. I did want it to prosper financially and although I valued Peter’s advice I didn’t always take it. The cost would have been too great.
Over the years our meetings became philosophical, as well as financial, as I grew in confidence and proved that I could earn money and provide for my family whilst doing something that had some depth to it. I wasn’t fulfilling my potential in his eyes and it was all highly unorthodox but he supported me nevertheless.
He was experienced in the conventional and I was becoming more experienced in the unconventional. From those divergent places we began to exchange views in frank and robust discourse.
The most compelling subject for me and the one he vigorously resisted, right up until the very end I now know, was death.
As a younger thirty-something (then forty-something) man, I felt lucky to have access to an octogenarian, who made it to ninety before he died, and I was desperate to learn.
I wanted some insight or wisdom from him about what it was like to be so close to death, how it felt, how to prepare, how to conduct oneself in the final years.
Unfortunately on this subject he had little to offer me. Whilst he was a fount of wisdom and knowledge on how to be careful in the use of one’s money and resources, live life responsibly, and be a good upstanding citizen, he simply dismissed my searching questions about death, what it all meant and what lies beyond.
‘What do you think will happen, when you die?’ I would ask him.
‘Nothing!’ He would bluster back at me. ‘That’s it. Gone. Finished.’
He would then segue quickly into financial affairs and how his family would be well looked after once he was gone.
‘So what’s it all for then?’ I would persist once he had finished filibustering.
‘What?’ He would reply, looking at me nervously because I had that glint in my eye.
‘Life! What’s the point of all this?’ I would gesture around me as we sat together in his overheated but well-appointed self-contained apartment, the walls covered with a lifetime’s collection of art, within a tasteful but soulless assisted-living complex.
‘What’s it all for if you’re just going to pop your clogs and disappear off the face of the earth?’ I demanded to know.
‘Well…’
It was always at this point that he would stumble and fall, unable to give me an answer and then revert back to the financial advice or accuse me of thinking too much.
I would often push further here, sensing a deeper truth, and wanting to discover it, even if it meant heartbreak and disappointment.
But I never got what I yearned for.
He was alone during the last years of his life. He had a loving family and acquaintances but he was frequently in his own company, as old people so often are.
I imagine it is impossible for anyone not to ruminate to some degree in those moments: what meaning, substance and quality emerged during those solitary reflections? Was there also emptiness, to add to his isolation?
I’m willing to bet he was fearful at the end, because he was fighting. People fight against that which they fear.
He was lucky because he went to bed one night and then didn’t wake up. I wonder what those last moments were like. Did his eyes open just before the last exhalation in some final frightened reckoning? Or was he spared this accounting of his soul? Did his consciousness just fade and flicker away like a candle at its wick’s end?
I know our conversations troubled him and I took some satisfaction from seeing his surety and confidence challenged because it meant I was on to something in my own life that he, and many others like him, had not adequately addressed.
It meant that the losses I was incurring, at the hard economic edge of the conventional system because of the soul-sacrifices I was unwilling to make, were worth something.
I was challenged recently by a good friend, a generation older than me, because I appeared to be dismissing and criticising older people for failing to come forward with what is really most needed in the lives of those who are following in their footsteps.
She challenged me because I seemed to be woefully ungrateful for the help and assistance I was receiving from another older man in my life.
There are many ways in which I have benefitted from the advice, practical skills and financial assistance of older men and women in my life. Despite how it may come across, I am grateful and I do appreciate the value of what they offer.
But there are limits to what is offered, it only goes so far and it is found lacking as a result. No blame attributed here, just an honest observation of cause and effect.
Unfortunately the hard truth is that the older generation will fail the younger until they can go ahead of us into death without denial, bluster, avoidance, silence, opium-induced oblivion or by slipping away fortuitously whilst asleep on the job.
Again, no blame. Just hard truths.
Each generation does as much as they can for the next. Is that not the model? We are all limited in what we can give. Every day I let my own children down in small and lamentable ways.
I won’t let it go unspoken though. I can keep asking questions. I can testify to this malaise. I can speak up, even though there are consequences. I can point to the approaching darkness and suggest we turn toward it.
Because it’s coming. Without doubt. As sure as the night. As sure as the cruel winter. In fact it’s already here. We are drowning in it.
You can tell because of all the dissatisfaction, the questions, the confusion, the grasping, the consumption, the distraction, the numbing, the addiction, the despair, the purposelessness, the pointlessness and the meaningless deaths.
Hence the sorrow.
Thank you old man, my friend, for everything you generously gave away, I’m sorry you couldn’t give any more.
Rest now, I’ll take things from here.
