Tom Volhein

I spend a lot of time worrying about being 61, what it means to me and what it means for my future – more to the point, the lack of future.  Too often, the more excited I get about the things that I am doing and the things that I want to do, the more scared I get over my age and getting old, frail, and finally dead.

At one level, I don’t experience being old in my psyche, never have.  The youngest of my siblings and the only male,  I was the young man of the family.  That is how I feel and how experience my relationship to the world.  I am ambitious and adventurous.  Maybe that is why old age is making me panic.  I have never been able to resolve the difference between my age and my ambitions.

My friends don’t want to talk about this.  I don’t blame them.  This subject is a thin-worn, tried and true topic of the aged.  I want to whine, piss and moan about being old.  And no one wants to hear that, particularly those my age who are having the same fears.

There are days when, at every turn, I get panicky feelings about something or other, sometimes everything – a body ache, a desire, a thought about money or the lack of it.  In the mix of each of these thoughts is the fear of dying – that moment when it is all lost, over for good.

When I feel a body ache, I think that it will never get better and that it means that I am aged.  When I get excited about what I am doing and have thoughts about my future, I counter that with a thought of how little time I have left.  When I think about money, I worry that I am too old to earn enough money to take care of myself and that I will die in poverty.  Fear of dying causes me to be mad, sad or at least melancholy, and depressed about everything that is happening in and around me.  It it ruining my life at a time when there is less life to sacrifice.

I am unreconciled to death.   I don’t believe that this is uncommon, or is reconciliation at my age even reasonable.  When I have been with those I love as they die, I find that it wasn’t until pretty late in the process that they reconciled.  Some never did.  So, I am not expecting to find relief by accepting my own death, not now.  But I would like to come up with some mechanism or framework that gives me some relief from the too-often thoughts of dying.

I think that some of the issue for me is the current, sour economic news.  This is adding a constant pressure that has me worried regardless of my age.  And the bad economic news, added to my fear of being old, causes me to feel compressed and under pressure to do everything right away.  I have no sense of priority, everything I do is critical; from the important commitments that I have made to myself and others, to the simplest and most insignificant tasks.  Nothing escapes the pressure cooker, a.k.a. my head.  I am so tired.

I wish that I could end this post on a positive note.  But I don’t know what positive things to say that I mean in my heart.  What is in my heart right now is what I just wrote.  My hope is that this is phase, be it winter or a stage in my life, and that I will reconcile, not to death itself, but to my age.  It will certainly be a hard road if I worry about death and let it ruin my life for the next 30 or so years that I have left.  I can’t help but believe that others my age are struggling with the same issues.  That, I suppose, is some comfort.

peace

t

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