There are times when something makes you think of your own mortality. One of these times was when I read the other day that Steve Jobs died at age 56 but he lived life to the fullest. This isn’t the first time that I’ve been reminded that something makes you stop and think about your own mortality.
For me it happened one ordinary February when I slipped on ice in my own driveway and landed flat on my back. A few weeks later — just recovered — the flu arrived, naturally on Valentine’s Day. And then a fellow Exchange Club member, Joy Duprey, energetic and vital, died at fifty-seven. At twenty-five, fifty-seven had seemed ancient. I knew better by then.
Those events led me to ask myself a question I wasn’t expecting: why are you still running a business at sixty-three? Shouldn’t you be taking it easy, traveling, enjoying the grandchildren?
It didn’t take long to answer myself with more questions. How old is old? How long is life? What do you want to do with the rest of it?
The answers came easily. I had already stuffed more living into sixty-three years than many people manage in a lifetime. Traveled. Had dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt. Stood on the lawn in Washington and watched President Kennedy take the oath of office. Flown gliders. Served on the City Council, Planning Commission, and School Board. Been married for forty-four years and raised two daughters who were, each in her own way, a success.
What did I want to do with the rest of my life? Live it to the fullest. And what better way than to keep doing what I found challenging and enjoyable?
As I looked in the mirror that February I no longer saw the young girl who had boldly stepped out of a sheltered Southern childhood into the world. The girl staring back at me had a grandmother face. The face had changed. But the girl was still there — the awe and wonder replaced by something steadier: maturity, experience, and a clear sense of what mattered.
That girl with the grandmother face was going to take advantage of every minute.
That was written more than twenty years ago. I updated it at seventy, when a student in a small business class asked if my exit strategy was to sell my business. My answer was: “Unless I die first.”
Now I am eighty-four and I’m updating it once again.
Ron is gone — the wonderful husband who stepped in and made all those Valentine’s Day deliveries when I had the flu, who supported everything I ever attempted, who was married to this girl with the grandmother face for sixty-three years. The mirror shows me someone older than the woman who wrote those words. The grandmother face has deepened.
But the girl is still here.
She has written novels she’s proud of. She walks her three-legged dog every morning. She sits on the porch swing with coffee and watches the light move through the ponderosa pines. She still has new ideas and more plans and refuses, absolutely refuses, to stop.
The face changes. The girl remains.
That, I have decided, is the whole story. But who knows? I may just come back a few years from now and update it once again.