The Human Condition

The other day, the missus and I went for a walk and wound up having a coffee and pastry at a funky grocery store/deli/restaurant in Brookline’s Coolidge Corner (not far, incidentally, from JFK’s birthplace). Seated at a table near us was a very old woman with a middle-aged female companion whom I guessed was the old woman’s daughter. For some reason or another they drew my attention. The elderly woman had to be in her nineties. Her sallow skin was entirely covered by a tracery of wrinkles and her face was fined down to an austere bony sharpness. Her nose was beaked and her eyes deep set; she looked like a grizzled old bird, perhaps a kind of vulture, severely hunched over from osteoporosis.

There was nothing sudden or alarming about their movements, but you could tell the old woman was in some distress. She kept touching her face and hair with tremulous fingers and her daughter inclined her head constantly toward her in a solicitous way. They spoke in whispers; you could see the younger woman was asking questions and the elderly woman was answering them, although perhaps not always very clearly. Finally, the daughter stood up and walked to another part of the store to get something for her mother, leaving the old woman alone at the table. Now my attention was completely arrested. The woman’s back was more or less toward me, so I had no fear of being caught openly observing her. Her shaking fingers continued to work her face and touch her hair and I wondered if she might cry. Her head was hung low. I saw her hair was quite thick and luxuriant, and, just as I asked myself if it could be a wig, she abruptly answered the question by snatching it off her head, as if that had been the thing weighing her down. The effect was startling. You don’t see very many people doffing their wigs in public. Her actual hair was pure white, thin and tousled; delicate pink skin showed through the white strands. After she placed the wig into her large handbag, she massaged her scalp and rubbed her face for a minute or two until the daughter returned with a cup of water.

As thoughts frequently do, sparked by trivial occurrences and then flitting this way and that, I found myself provoked into asking the question: how often do we confront the idea of our own mortality? The notion that eventually we’ll cede our vitality to old age and finally die? That is a profoundly sobering thought, one that we all, of course, recognize as a certainty, just as we’ve been taught to know that one plus one equals two, but how often does it truly hit home?

My first full realization of this universal condition occurred to me when I was 17. I was working a summer job in between my junior and senior years of high school at a steel punch factory, one that threw me in with a whole bunch of different people — all sorts of backgrounds and ages. Perhaps you could say I lead a sheltered life, but I had never mingled with true blue collar types before, men and women who may have never graduated high school, many of them immigrants. I saw people in their 40s and 50s doing work that any kid my age could pick up and do as well with only a half a day’s practice. They were all loud and good-naturedly gruff and friendly. One man, I remember, looked as if he could have been an aristocrat if you dressed him up in the right clothes. I enjoyed their conversation during breaks and it was quite a thing for a boy to be accepted as a peer among grown-ups. This was in 1973, so many of the older men I hung out with probably came of age during World War II. You half expected to see Betty Grable pin-ups on the break room walls and tattooed anchors on their arms.

One man I befriended was well into his 60s. His name was George. He had a kind of Latino-Native American look, which was reinforced by a characteristically slow, deliberate manner of speaking you tended to associate with the Indians you saw on TV shows. Although he had a vigorous shock of thick, white hair and retained an erect carriage for someone his age, there was no mistaking he was close to the age of retirement. The jobs they gave him were less physically demanding than the others and his movements were measured and slow. George didn’t speak much, but this paucity of speech had the effect making him seem wise rather than dumb. I was a set-up man, the guy who went around with a hand truck, hauling away the full bins of steel toe caps turned out by the machines and supplying empty ones in their place, so I saw George at least several times a day at his workstation.

One slow day I seated myself in the same room as George. For some reason, circumstances were such that the kid could enjoy some leisure time while the older man toiled. Idly, I watched George perform his task. I looked at how slowly and minutely he moved. I observed the set of his face, the lines age had drawn into his forehead, and the veins that stood out on his hands. Suddenly, without warning, the realization struck me that someday I’d be as old as George. I would someday be as close to the end of my life as I was, at that time, near its beginning. I wouldn’t always be young. I would follow the same route as George, the slow-moving, quiet, unimportant old man in front of me. Someday I’d be George!

I was in shock for about a full minute. I had never, until that time, truly grasped the ephemeral nature of my existence. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t think I have been so profoundly struck by the idea since.

How often do you think of this? I’ll admit it’s not very cheerful to do. Is this line of thought something you’d be better off avoiding? Or does it lead to intriguing spiritual or philosophical questions, ones that you feel are enriching and worth examining? I sometimes wonder about the afterlife. Like many people, I can’t conceive of myself simply stopping altogether. I have this crazy theory that our soul or consciousness or essence is like matter, in that it can neither be created nor destroyed. I think reincarnation makes more sense than the concept of heaven and hell. I feel that our time on earth is merely a stage of our existence, just a phase, and that eventually we’ll evolve or graduate on to something else.

What do you think?