mortality | Kingsview & Co

Photo of barn for blog posts by Michael A. King

There is nothing new under the sun, says the prophet in Ecclesiastes; this post is evidence of that. Who knows how many millions or billions of people over the millennia have said the same things?

The complexity is that it feels new to those of us experiencing it. A zillion words don’t get some things into us until the realities themselves get into us.

So the old new thing I’m pondering is living with expiration dates. Both key loved ones and I now have some statistical prognostications of how long we might live. Oh, it’s not precise and could vary by years. But you can look up X condition and be told that if you’re 70 your average life expectancy might be Y years. Or if you’re 65 with condition B, your average longevity might be Z more years.

Talk to the doctor, and she may nuance: unless this criterion is met or that complication is involved–then maybe it’s this much longer or down to this many months. But typically, many doctors seem to add, each person is unique and we’re giving you state-of-the-art care and we have lots of Plans B, C, or D if we need more than Plan A so we’re a long way from needing to treat you as a statistic.

And from a technical, medical standpoint, until or unless something recurs or introduces itself, that may be that. Now what? Here let me try to redeem an inclination which has caused at least some mild tensions with some cherished persons: my interest in seeing sell-by dates as almost always about how long this or that product is in its ideal or at least usable condition rather than when it must be trashed.

For example, I will here disclose to my dear spouse Joan for the very first time (in case she happens to read this–she recently told me to get her a copy of my dissertation which is a quarter-century old because now she wants to see what I was up to back then) what happened with the cherry tomatoes. We were gone a lot when they started to get a little wrinkled. But I didn’t throw them out because I knew as soon as we had a chance to be home a while I’d make pasta and they would go great in that.

The first I realized someone else had a different vision was when I found the tomatoes in the trash! Not even the compost, which is where they’d usually go, but in the trash. I knew what this meant: These tomatoes are utterly beyond redemption. So I sighed, patiently and compassionately, having navigated many decades of thought patterns not always as convincing to me as my own, and delicately pulled the least wrinkled ones out of the trash, put them back into the container, then put the container in the mudroom up above my head where I doubted she would be looking for tomatoes to throw out.

The next night we had pasta. While her back was turned I washed and cut up the tomatoes nicely with a sharp paring knife. I threw a few that might be even-post-wrinkled into the compost, then had a delicious delicious meal while dear Joan experienced a sadly under-tomatoed version. (When I let her preview this she said, “I should have done what I usually do, put it way under the other trash so you don’t find it.”)

What else is there to add? I’m not sure. Certainly I resonate with the gazillions who have testified to what happens when you’re convincingly exposed to the reality that your life will some day end.

I say convincingly, because it takes a lot to move us from pity for those who somehow didn’t outwit death to really really believe that we’re not exempt. This barely days-long horizon is why despite the data underscoring that spring is coming earlier and earlier as most of the planet keeps warming and warming, I sure had trouble still believing that when those polar winds blasted so fiercely I could literally feel them blowing in around my head on the pillow.

Still, sometimes what happens is sobering enough, inescapable enough, that against your own lifetime of believing otherwise you do become convinced that even you yourself have an expiration date. Then each remaining day does seem to be somehow fuller of fizz.

This might be something for the billionaires who are convinced they’ll live to 150 to think about before someday they learn that the biblical three-score-years-and-10 lifespan could affect even them. Now what about the lives they could have lived with such different gifts of grace than the mere conviction of never having to give up their lives to find them?

I also do want to take seriously that the cherry tomatoes that had mold did require a dignified and loving good-bye. But also that the tomatoes that were just wrinkled really did still have a lot of zest and sheer joy to offer.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

The going was slow, but I was meditating on how fit I felt compared to when I started biking again the week before.

Some sort of whooshing commotion blew by on my left. Before I knew what it was I heard “Good job!” On she sped. When I crested the hill, she was already far ahead, bike light flashing in the distance like a rocket’s red glare.

How to feel? Affirmed? Ashamed?

Just a week before I had had an appointment to make sure I understood Medicare. Just the day before I had checked our online phone account to see why our landline had been ringing almost, it seemed, every minute. I found some 40 calls. Most were marked “Spam?” and followed by variations on the word Medicare. Many want to benefit from my aging body even as I need to make sure to handle insurance carefully, since my heart may need a new valve.

Good job. I pondered again how to feel. I was certainly tempted to pedal harder and prove how wonderfully I was retaining my youth no matter my body’s age and condition.

I thought about a generation earlier encountering Carl Jung’s idea that an aspect of the first half of life is developing ego, skills, mastery. Key to the second half is falling into soul and spirituality, with ego taking a servant role.

I thought about Jesus and his teachings that to gain our lives we have to give them up, that except a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it can give no fruit, that the first shall be last and the last first, that rather than amass power for its own ego-driven sake, a true leader kneels before those served and washes feet with a towel.

When I was younger I did seek to live out such insights of Jung and Jesus. But the paradox of pursuing this while developing a career and presence in the world posed complexities and confusions about how to integrate ego with soul. So many of the tasks of life’s first half run more with the grain of ego—its inclinations simultaneously bolstered by a culture idolizing the pursuits of wealth, status, privilege, and power which are ego’s delights. Now Christians court presidents and even Anabaptist-Mennonites long committed to basin and towel are often concluding the time has come to claim our places at the tables of influence and preeminence.

I thought about the final years of my parents, who though passionate Christians and believers in the teachings of Jesus found it hard (as do I) to embrace the reality that at the end there is no reprieve from the body’s failings.

Good job! I decided to smile. I decided to embrace the encouragement. Oh, I’ll still bike and walk and hope doctors and medicines keep me young-ish and vigorous for years yet. But maybe my cyclist encourager generously intuited that in fact at this stage being a failure in contrast to her cycling prowess is nevertheless a success.

You’re getting old, I hear her say. You’re falling behind the younger pack as it becames ever clearer that, as Psalm 103 reminds, we bloom like flowers of the field then vanish with the wind. Still you’re climbing on. Good job, Michael!

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.