When I turned 70, I wondered what life would look like for me at 95. That was just two years ago but the pandemic and its horrific ramifications unfolding in real time has sped everything up. So soon, the veil of mystery shrouding both the truth and the end of things has largely parted.
Over the past three months, I’ve been grappling with a world where denial has broken open for me and us all on so many levels. For starters, I now know that at 95, I would always have come to acknowledge and accept what I and the world are capable of: the heights to which we can arise, and the depths to which we can sink.
For anyone awake enough now to see the shadows that were always there, the pandemic has made us old beyond our years. I did not know that I could shed so many tears, grieve so many losses, shudder with so much dread about the injustice in the world and the role I unwittingly played in it. But the biggest revelation is that wrestling with shadows is no longer an individual quest; nor is it reserved for those of us who are “age appropriate.” This moment of great peril is also a great awakening for the good, thoughtful people of all generations who are deepening their engagement with questions of ultimate concern: mortality, legacy, compassion, justice, forgiveness and more.
On some days, like today, I have to work a lot harder to wrest hope from the shadows. Taking stock, I confess that it’s become increasingly apparent that I had a lot of expectations, only some of which were realized. I did a lot of good, but not always. In terms of redemption, I regret almost nearly but not exactly as much as I love, which is saying a lot. Perhaps evolution has given those of us who are already older the pandemic as a double-dose of mortality because it takes so much to get us beyond denying, defending and story-telling to address what there is still time to rectify on multiple levels in order to live life in its intended intensity.
So what, then, have I glimpsed behind the veil that has allowed me to get through this day? That it is no easy task to relinquish who one once was–the persona, the role, the identity–into something this humble and small. But, too, to discover that when one lets all that was outgrown go, one’s essential self remains, distilled into something that simultaneously illuminates and burns.
This pandemic isn’t over yet—far from it– and while I sometimes wish things would go back the way they were, we’re not done yet. And so it is, at last, I am grateful to have whatever time God grants me and the world to help us navigate this perilous stretch of the journey in order to have the chance to get it right. We’ve got a long ways to go but here are two things I’ve learned so far. The first is that hope is not a given, it’s a choice. The second is that even on a day such as this, how good it is to be alive.
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