When Heroes Die
How are you?” I ask loudly, frustrated by the static weaving itself through the phone.
“I’m okay.” A pause. “She leaves tomorrow, and I guess once she’s gone, I’ll start dating.”
For a while now, Marcus and his wife of twenty-five years have been in dialogue about her desire to be in a polyamorous relationship. At first, he was vehemently opposed, but after three years in which she has insisted that a polyamorous relationship is what she needs, he has become resigned. He’s not willing to divorce her, as he believes, “It will ruin us financially.” So, at age sixty-two, he will remain in Los Angeles while she traipses off to Costa Rica to find herself, and presumably, the joys of polyamory.
I can hardly hear what he is saying, though I’m connected to a dozen cell towers that incessantly blink from distant hills, like alien scarecrows who stand over us menacingly, reminding us, “We are here, and we have the power to render you mute.”
“Hey, Joe Cocker died,” he tells me, abruptly changing the subject.
“Yea, I saw that.”
“It’s hard to see your heroes die.”
My mind makes the necessary leaps to understand why Joe Cocker would be a likely hero to Marcus. Yes, yes, musicians, both of them, although Marcus’ music is nothing at all like Joe Cocker’s.
And then Marcus says just the kind of thing that explains why I love him, and why we have stayed friends for more than thirty years.
“I guess it’s time to get new heroes.”
*** *** ***
It’s tough to face the fact that we’re growing older, especially for the generation whose mantra was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” and who inspired the phrase, “sixty is the new forty.” My friends and I, spanning in age from the late fifties to the early seventies, have a hard time believing that we will not be “forever young.” Many of us still have dreams to fulfill, a long list of adventures to undertake, a world to change. So we are brought up short by the reality of one of our peers, or worse, one of our heroes, passing over to the other side.
One of my own heroes, though still alive, has recently begun to suffer from a health issue which has become debilitating to the point where it affects her ability to think clearly, to read and to write. It was a devastating diagnosis for a writer and poet―words having been her raison d’être, her salvation, her vehicle for transmitting the truth of her life, and gifting all of us with the brilliance of her insight.
If my generation is delusional about anything, it is the limits of our bodies. In my early forties, a troubling mammogram sent my doctor into alert mode, and he prescribed a biopsy of my right breast. Trying to comprehend his words of alarm, I felt the fist of God strike the middle of my solar plexus. Cancer, I might have cancer, my mind repeated over and over again.
The future−a place we often find ourselves visiting so as to escape the very real and unalterable present−was suddenly off limits; each breath became at once supremely important and excruciatingly precious. The result of the biopsy was, ultimately, “benign.” I was off the hook. But I vowed to never forget that moment, and what it felt like to confront death, to meet my mortality face to face.
Years later, in one of our phone conversations, I shared that story with Marcus. He laughed in disbelief. “I’ve never considered my own death. I plan to live to be a hundred.”
And I am convinced he was telling the truth. It had never occurred to him that his body could−in fact, would−take him down. I felt as if I had just disclosed to a four-year-old that there really was no Santa.
The email from my writer friend, in which she described her health crisis, relayed a similar sense of disbelief. It seemed unthinkable to her that her brilliant mind could be stopped―that the thousands of firings of nerves which bring thought into form and communicate information to one’s arm, hand, fingers so that a pen can be raised, a computer keyboard tapped, could somehow be eclipsed.
*** *** ***
It is unclear to me if these understandings―that our lives are finite, that disease, old age, and death are inevitable, that something ultimately will cause our breath to cease―are so difficult to accept for our generation, because of its uniqueness in coming of age in the sixties. This is the generation that stopped a war, and participated in the liberation of blacks, women and gays. We rushed the stages of the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Hendrix and Joplin; made love in the park, and dropped LSD to transform our consciousness and that of the world. Do we hold some wildly ineluctable belief that we will be the generation that beats even death?
Or are we not so different from all the generations before us? Did my mother not cry when her beloved first crush, Frank Sinatra, died, her tears falling for her own lost youth? Did my eighty-five-year-old grandfather curse the heavens as his heart spasmed and stopped, his body crumpling to the floor, his hands reaching up to his breast pocket where two tickets to Ireland lay in an envelope?
Does each generation “rage against the dying of the light?” Is it part of our humanness to fervently seek life, even as, increasingly, the inevitability of death manifests itself around us? So, Marcus, an aging hippie, looks to date once more; his wife gets on a plane to Costa Rica in search of a rejuvenated love life. I tilt at windmills in the form of cell towers and iPhones, for who knows what reason. Is it because they’re too close to the sci-fi fantasies of my youth, and I fear they will ultimately be our collective demise? Or is it something far simpler? Perhaps I am not fully able to accept that after I die, life will go on, new technologies will bloom, new heroes will be born, and my one short life will be but a whisper in the trees, a cosmic flash that will exist only as starlight.
We live, we die, as every generation must, no matter how wonderfully wild, wooly and strange a trip it’s been. What I wish for myself, and for all of us facing that ultimate end: that we live countless more moments filled with what is most significant−and may it be easy, at the last.