PLANT A tree. Sire a child. Write a book.
Was it a Chinese sage that made those the prescription for immortality?
Unimportant really as the adage has long been appropriated by the Rotary.
So I’ve done all three – in excess too: hundreds of trees planted from Mount Arayat to the edges of the shoulders of MacArthur Highway, since the 1970s yet, to my own front- and backyard; six bright kids and three beautiful grandchildren to boot; and seven books, so far. So am I now immortal?
Reflections, nay, apprehensions over one’s mortality – most pronounced on one’s birthday – are endemic to the Age of Aches when the knee joints creak, the fingers start stiffening, and it takes longer and more difficult to get out of bed. And that makes only the easy part.
Yes, the physiological changes become more painfully pronounced. The second or third chin and the mid-section bulge become great sources of jokes for the kids.
The specs get either thicker or duo-fold – doble vista, that is. Lethargy comes easy. Sleep, even at mid-morning, even easier.
Most uneasy comes on the emotional plane. It simply is very difficult to let go. To grow gracefully and act graciously old.
Holding on to the last vestiges of youth, you still treat your college son like a preppy, your twenty-something daughter as a baby. To their utter consternation both.
You start growing your thinning hair long. Vainly trying to recapture your flower-power psychedelic rage. At one point, you even consider reviving your horticultural talent with the beloved herb of your youth, the five-fingered cannabis sativa.
Finding no solace there, you turn into a curmudgeon. Fixed one-track mind. Fast in judgment. Faster in forgetting. Slow to forgiveness. Easy to resentment.
Hard and obstinate in opinion of others. The wife grimacing every time you shout “Stupid monkey!” at just about every driver on the road.
Lest it be forgotten, this too is the Age of Don’ts when the spice, the salt and the sweetness of life are deemed a forbidden lot. Unkindest, most insufferable of all though is the quenching of the once ever-raging conflagration in one’s loins.
Comes to mind now a departed elder’s toilet lamentation over his lifeless member:
“We were born together, why, in heaven’s name, did you die ahead of me?”
And that notice posted atop a urinal at a retirement home in Big Sur, California:
“Your hose is short. Your pump is weak. Come a little closer or you’d pee on your feet.”
Machismo knows neither retreat nor surrender though, else it ain’t…well, machismo. From the myth of the Spanish fly and the legend of the Korean bug, the search for the ultimate stiffening tonic stopped at Pfizer’s sterile lab.
So with the blue V the inevitable was defied. So manhood rejoiced at the resurrection. So comes now a novel entry in the coroner’s report: stiff staff in advanced state of rigor mortis. Dropped dead ignominiously.
In the not so distant past, a politically incorrect chauvinistic take on the aging distaff side made the rounds:
“When a woman finds herself unattractive to men, she turns to God.” Ah, how the churches filled with veiled manangs lighting votives to just about every saint to intercede their case with God in Her heaven.
Ah, how times have changed! O tempora, o mores! as Cicero ejaculated.
These days, at the first sign of the dreaded wrinkle or the initial lump of the distressing cellulite, women now haste, not to the nearest church but to the spa, the centre, the clinic. Their hallowed velos traded for the doctored Belo.
Vanity of vanities, all the world is vanity. Can’t we just age gracefully? And meet our Creator as we are, most honestly, naturally, the least artificially?
Intimations of mortality generally spur too a frenzied accumulation, if not an accounting, of one’s worldly possessions for a lasting life of ease and some guaranteed provisions to the loved ones that one would inevitably leave behind.
It is not bad to prepare for the future of one’s progeny. It is supremely better to prepare for one’s future spiritually.
I remember the sudden death of one who amassed much material wealth in so short a period and immersed himself in the pleasures of the world.
As I sat down to say a little prayer for the repose of his soul, I got the shudders when I opened the gospel for that day he died, Luke 12:13-21, The Parable of the Rich Man: “…
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, ‘Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!’
But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong? Thus it shall be for the one who stores treasures for himself but not rich in matters to God.”
We give much account for worldly wealth. What shall we present for the divine audit?
In the divine scheme of things – and people, yes – heritage, legacy, what we leave behind, no matter how great, is not as important as what we take along. The purity of our soul. Then God have mercy on us all.
(A birthday reflection updated from a Commentary by the author in Sun-Star Pampanga in 2006).
