MY EXPIRATION DATE
As I approach old age, at its extremity—beyond 80—an expiration date emerges like an overlooked stamp, a smudged date not yet quite readable but definitely imprinted and waiting to be seen, ready to deactivate or to render not useable at the end of a long extended life. Does knowing that expiration date will soon be visible and thereby tending to accelerate the fewer and fewer days or months or even years remaining? It seems as if I am being rushed by an overworked executioner trying to meet his deadline.
Everyone knows that the sense of time passing begins early on, incrementally, hardly noticeable until it becomes inevitably apparent that time will betray us. And we remark, increasingly, how time flies. It flies ever faster with each year until the expiration date approaches, if we even get that far. But on finally sighting that date we begin to hold onto each rapidly passing day, but to little avail. Time, we realize, has always been stacked against us. Time is an instrument of everyday chaos. Time deceives us by its interruptions, its occasional longueurs, its seconds stretched into minutes, even hours, as when we endure crippling pain or submit to a prolonged medical procedure or wait for the train to arrive. An expiration date exhibits its mortal shadow, dropping itself on us like a new trait, another wrinkle, a more gross turkey neck. That expiration date reveals to us our yellow brick road, one we must follow, eventually taking us to our real or imagined or invented or darkest magical kingdom.
Yet doom, the idea of passing out of my life, as well as the life of everyone in the world, never quite seems truly, really possible. Yes death awaits, but as a cloudy, mist covered, shadowy destination, supposedly inevitable yet always refuted and denied, like a favored object that always disappears when we try to find it. Will death really take us, will we really relent, will we actually go, will it happen on our day-in, day-out watch, no matter what? Denial of our death lies couched in some slippery brain fog, like our vestigial intestinal appendix, able to kill us when unanticipated, virulent conditions arise. This implacable vestige of our lower animal origins, the creature that lives its life unaware that it shall die, fearful of predators, wary of danger, able to mourn the loss of others, but blind to the expiration date that sits stamped out of its vision.
Is this our greatest humankind woe? Our sense of time and lifetime? Or is it fixed there to drive us toward some good? To remind us that we can’t take anything or anyone with us, that we go naked and alone, and that all we ever have is appreciable, ever acknowledged, usable time. Time to use or misuse, abuse, whittle away, or attempt to achieve something, try to care for the little things, be aware of timely limits, and look to generating welfare for ourselves and for others, and possibly adhere to the timeless ideal that by saving one life we save the world. Put time to use. It’s all we ever have.
And then it leaves us.
