An old friend took me out for a lovely lunch yesterday. He is a long-time friend, but the adjective “old” suits him well. Roy is ninety-eight. I asked him if he is looking forward to being a hundred, and he said, “Not at all!” Then he said, “I’m ready to go.”
This is a fine line to walk, and I find that I and a number of my friends are now balancing on it with as much care as we can muster. It is obviously a great privilege to live to be old, to be elderly. For one thing, it brings a sort of inner support that some might call wisdom.
Roy says that every night when he closes his eyes for sleep, a voice inside asks him, “What did you offer today?” And then he hears, “What did you receive?”
Being able to give and receive is, it seems to me, the heart of being human.
Roy’s voice also asks him, “Are you ready to go?”
This, too, is the essence of being human. We are here on borrowed time. As my guru once said, “This is not your life to live as you wish. It’s what you are choosing to do with God’s time.”
Of course, one of the greatest challenges of getting older is the loss of our powers. Abilities that we once took for granted—hearing, seeing, walking, balancing, standing erect, having energy—begin to diminish and even to disappear.
And, too, we lose the company of our loved ones. The first time I went to see my mother after my father’s funeral, she had a huge bowl of M&M’s set out on the coffee table—a little crutch to help her through her days.
Roy lost his beloved wife of sixty-eight years just a couple of months ago. “Joanne was everything to me,” he said yesterday. “She was my companion, my social life…”
“It’s like losing a limb,” I told him—though I have to admit that the heart losses I’ve sustained have never been as deep into my vitals as Joanne was into Roy’s.
Before Roy and I went to lunch, I had a few minutes to look around his apartment. I was thrilled to find that two of my own creative offerings were on display there—a soul collage I’d made for Roy’s ninety-seventh birthday was stuck to his refrigerator door with a magnet, and a pair of shells I had created into an image of Joanne and Roy some twenty years earlier was sitting on a prominent shelf in his living room.
Seeing these creations of mine being held with care in a friend’s life made me feel loved. I had given them as expressions of my love, and they had been received in that same spirit. Discovering this was, I found, unutterably satisfying.
I can say that I feel these are the most important actions we take in life—giving and receiving love.
What did you offer today?
What did you receive?
There really isn’t much else that matters.
