Reflections on the Middle of Life
In late summer, on the playground, our daughter noticed a child with two mothers. Some of her first and closest friends have two dads, but in her short living memory the idea of two moms was new and intriguing. Her dad explained that families contain all kinds of combinations of parents and caregivers. She thought about this and decided on her ideal: “I want two mommies and two daddies.” That way, she explained, when we died she’d have a back-up of each of us. It took the wind clear out of me, like a penny drop from the monkey bars.
Despite the tears that pricked my eyes when I heard this, I have to applaud my daughter’s creative thinking skills, deductive reasoning, and wide-eyed instinct to solve a vexing problem. Because it is vexing: the unbearable realization that we will lose the people we love, some of whom are part of our very constitution.
Something about turning 5 this year crystallized the concept of death in my daughter’s mind and, in turn, forced me to think and talk about it more. This was not my idea.
The reality is I am aging. And I will die. We adults know there’s no hack, workaround, or resolution to be found to these truths. And yet, we try; with yoga and green juice, vitamins and heirlooms. We wear devices snug around our wrists that attempt to quantify life — steps, sleep, and not-sleep — as if we will someday crack the code on an algorithm for eternal youth. As though I need a device to tell me when I’m not sleeping.
I currently reside in middle age, though the term seems presumptuous. How can I identify the middle without knowing the end? I like to joke that I’ve skipped middle age — I was 40 when the pandemic began, and now I’m 100. I don’t mean to be flip; it’s just that for me, right now, aging has happened the way Hemingway famously talked about going broke, gradually at first and then suddenly. With my eyesight, for instance, this has been the case. I started wearing reading glasses in my mid-30s. I barely needed them; I found them stylish. Now I need progressives nearly all the time. You may recall that progressive lenses used to be called bifocals. It’s humbling — the squinting and smudging and sliding down the bridge of my nose. My body, which once ran marathons and stood on its head for ten minutes at a time, can no longer do such things. I can no longer swipe a new expensive beauty product across my face or get a single good night’s sleep and disappear time. Believe me, I’ve tried.
I began writing this essay in the fall at 4 o’clock in the morning. I was sick with a cold, and whether aging or the wonkiness of a post-pandemic immune system, illness hits me harder now. My medicine wore off, and I woke up. My mind started churning. I thought of deadlines, a word that contributes to a writer’s predilection toward melodrama. I thought of an essay I’d read by Douglas Penick on “The Magic and Mystery of Aging” for Tricycle Magazine, a Buddhist publication I’ve admired and read for years. In it, a monastic student tells the author, “Old age. It’s a secret, a kind of hidden magic. It’s right there, this practice, and no one sees it. We’re being shown, given. It is how our lives actually work.”
I thought of old people with vibrant, young minds and young people with worldly, wizened understanding. I reconsidered how vulnerable we all are, walking around as we do, exposed to everything, and all that is wrong with the world flashed in rapid-fire clips on the screens behind my eyelids. I marveled at the depth of my intergenerational friendships, and calculated how much deeper the creases in my brow were becoming with all my worrying. I got out of bed.
In his essay Nothing Personal, James Baldwin calls 4 AM the hour of devastation because it walks us right up to the dark edge of life — the understanding that it ends — that hour when the previous day is definitely gone, and we’re faced with what to do with the next. He writes: Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it — life — one more time?
My daughter woke up and found me on the couch. She climbed into my lap where she remained curled as she had as a baby for hours (months) at a time. It was Halloween morning, so we donned crocheted blankets over our heads and howled like ghosts. This woke my husband who gamely pretended to be terrified.
“Do we know anyone who’s been dead?” my daughter asked.
I was expecting a request to watch Peppa Pig or turn the couch cushions into a fortress. For these questions, I am prepared. I possess ready, cheerful answers. Wading into new parenting territory is always tricky, but the stakes seemed much higher navigating existential matters of, well, life and death.
I told her about my grandmother, her bis avo (Portuguese for great-grandmother) of whom she’s seen photos. How she lived a long life and then her body “stopped working.” I cribbed this language from an NPR segment about children grieving for parents and loved ones lost to Covid. When my daughter’s questions about death first began, I was ill-prepared. She asked who would die first: You or dad? And I panicked. I dodged. I blinked several times and lunged in the direction of a time-tested means of distraction. Who wants pancakes!
I made breakfast and, because it was still absurdly early, planned dinner, which was how my grandmother greeted most of her days. I thought of her as I filled a pot of white beans to soak. The running family joke was that you could show up unannounced with an entire futbol team and she’d be prepared with more than enough food. A devout Catholic, one of her favorite expressions was, “God don’t sleep.” I believe the same of Buddha-nature, too. It abides, all hours and seasons of our lives. Any Buddhist will tell you about impermanence. And yet, when it comes to losing those we love most, people are hardly gone, are they?
I’ve tried to explain this to my girl, how permanent my love is. How I think bis avo visits me as a butterfly or in the aroma of a holiday meal that warms the whole house. I see her in one specific expression of zany delight in my own daughter’s face. I’m not sure what shape this will take in her young mind, but I know we’re both less spooked talking about it. With any luck I have a few decades to go before I “drop my body,” as a wise fellow writer friend of mine refers to death. But I like to think I’ll turn up sometimes, like a misplaced pen or a favorite book, forgotten and remembered. I know she’s around here somewhere, my loved ones could say.
Rebecca Pacheco is the author of Still Life: The Myths and Magic of Mindful Living (HarperWave 2021) and Do Your Om Thing: Bending Yoga Tradition to Fit Your Modern Life (HarperWave 2015), which was named one of the “Top 10 Yoga and Meditation Books Every Yogi Needs” by Yoga Journal. She has appeared on NPR and the Canadian Broadcast Company and has been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Hindu, Reuters, and more. Previously a teacher of yoga and meditation for more than 20 years, she also founded and wrote an award-winning blog and has worked on the business and editorial sides of publishing. She’s a frequent contributor to the Boston Globe covering a range of mind-body topics and creator of Good Art Friends, a mindful writing group that supports the creative process of writers and artists.