Common Ground: Busy Dying

December 2005

Busy Dying

A Baby Boomer Looks at Aging — His Own

by Wes ‘Scoop’ Nisker

I can see it all around me. People of my generation are growing old, and, while it should come as no surprise, the fact of aging may be especially hard for boomers to accept. Did we actually believe we could stay “forever young?” We did manage to have a decade or so of extended adolescence, so maybe we also expected an extra decade of middle age. (In fact, some of my friends have been going through a “mid-life” crisis for nearly 20 years.)

But alas, here I am, just in my early 60’s, and I’m already starting to feel my age. I realized that I hadn’t really understood aging — until I started doing it more often. Perhaps like most people, I didn’t understand aging until my body began to explain it to me.

First my eyes spoke up. “Mr. Nisker! We’ve just about seen enough. We’re getting tired of gazing at beautiful sunsets, staring at women, and looking for lost socks in dark closets. And we’re especially tired of all that reading you do, looking at those damn little squiggly black marks on the white background for hours at a time! At this age, you aren’t going to learn anything new anyway, so we’ve decided to kick back here in your head, relax the old receptors and focusing muscles, and go into semi-retirement.”

Around the same time, my bowels spoke up. They’ve been talking to me my whole life, but suddenly they started singing a different tune: “Mr. Nisker, we’re tired of your crap! Tired of pushing it around down here — a couple of shit-loads a day! So we’re going on a work slowdown. You used to take a newspaper into the toilet with you, but you’d better start taking a novel.”

My bowels had obviously not consulted with my eyes.

Next my testicles started on a rant. “Okay, man! We’ve done a lot of hard work down here over the years. Probably produced enough sperm to populate an entire galaxy with your offspring. And we know you’ve wasted a lot of it, too — all those times when there wasn’t an egg anywhere in the vicinity, but you just had to have another one of your sacrificial spasms. Well, maybe it’s time to take those vows of celibacy, or else start seriously practicing tantra, because we’re just about out of juice.”

Moving on down, my knees gained courage from the other up-risings and began asking, “How many more steps, brother? How many more times do we have to fight gravity to move your rear end from one place to another, just so you can find enough food to fuel up for still more moving around? We’ve been on a treadmill down here, and we’re giving notice now — unless you slow down, we’ll put you behind a walker before your time.”

Then my bladder spoke to me. It was nice, and tried to explain: “Hey Scoop, you know how when you go over to the sink and turn on the faucet, and there’s a washer broken? So the water comes out in a spray, or sideways. And you can’t turn it all the way off. Well, we’ve got a broken washer down here, and we can’t seem to find a replacement. So don’t plan to get a full night’s sleep again, at least not until your next life.”

Of course, my memory speaks to me a lot lately. It usually has only two words to say: “Forget it!”

So, it is now becoming real to me: I am aging. And aging is nothing less than the process of dying. I don’t think my death will be coming anytime soon, but I know that my body is getting tired, losing interest. I could get stronger eye glasses, drink prune juice, rub ointments on my joints and muscles, take tons of antioxidants plus all the herbs and vitamins that could possibly help revitalize my organs and lengthen the life of my cells, but there is no longer hope for substantial improvements of the house I live in.

And that’s one good thing to be said for aging: it gets you ready for death. In fact, death was kind of an abstraction to me until I felt my joints getting stiffer and my neurons slowing down. The truth began to sink in along with my body.

Of course, we all have been aging and dying since the day we were born. So why bring it up? Some of us are doing okay for now; quite alive, thank you. Why think about the finale?

One good reason, according to the sages, is that contemplating death will teach us how to live. Gautama Buddha says, “Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.” If you can conquer the most primal of fears, the rest is easy. In Zen they say, “Die before you die.” Then, presumably, when death comes around you can say to it: “Been there, done that.” And, as one African proverb puts it: “When death comes, may it find you alive.”

So we bow to death, the great teacher. The great equalizer. The one who wipes the slate clean. Even while alive, we are bowing to death: to the death of another year, and to the death of this moment — there it went — and to the death of friends, ideas, projects, and even occasionally to the death of nation-states and civilizations as they come and go on the stage of human history. May they all rest in peace.

And when our turn comes, hopefully, whatever wisdom we have gathered from living will bring us a kind of ease with the dissolution of name, rank and serial number, along with the body that carried them around. Hopefully, we will have gained a deep humility about who we are and what it all means. Hopefully, we will go out with a deep bow, full of gratitude for the ride.

Until then, keep your joints moving and your priorities straight. And, if you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own

Wes “Scoop” Nisker is an author, radio commentator, Buddhist meditation teacher, and performer. His books include the national bestseller Essential Crazy Wisdom (Ten Speed Press). His CDs, books and classes are available at scoopnisker.com

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