My business partner of 38 years, Angelo Valenti, is one of a kind in his mix of Brooklyn street smarts with keen social and philosophical intelligence. He introduced me to a phrase he calls “a conspiracy of ineffectiveness” by which he means a widely shared yet unexamined viewpoint or behavior regarding some matter of real importance to all of us. When we behave in an unconscious and unexamined way……be it with love or war or children or politics or our work or our communities or our self-expression or or or…. we can find ourselves reacting over and over again in the same way. We are, to quote the writer, Rita Mae Brown, crazy, in that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting or demanding a different outcome is, in fact, nuts. We can be on “automatic pilot’ without truing up, truing up as in listening for feedback and correcting course.

Recently, as I turned 75 in May, ’22, I began to observe the very real realizations that the runway in front of me falls far short of the roadway behind me. I began to confront that the end of life, my life, was not merely an idea, a gripping tv show or film, or a someday one day event…………. but rather it was in up close and personal, a happening that could come at any moment. Here. Gone. Poof. In a moment.

I began to realize that I had always assumed in an automatic and very unexamined way, that there would always be a next moment coming. Of course there would; after all there always had been. I realized that I had no real plan as to how I might age and die……………the who the what the how the when the where of my aging and dying were out there somewhere in the skies above ………….and it dawned on me that I had better wake up fast and get to work ….on what ? Updating my mind set of attitudes/emotions, relationships, the logistics, the finances … for starters……….. that are very, very real challenges for us over 70, often at a time when we are less able to confront big and changing circumstances. And, I realized that I shared this unexamined, semi-conscious way of being regarding aging and dying with millions of other people, likely most of the billions of us……….I then got it: WE ARE UNCONSCIOUS regarding our leaving the planet……passing on/dying/leaving this material world. What happens, when does it happen, where does it happen, with whom does it happen, and how do we actually get complete with life ……ours or anyone’s for that matter………is now and next, really for all of us, of whatever age. If we are to become conscious of, responsible for and effective with our own aging and dying, it begins in each and every moment.

Why? So that we can (and do) empower ourselves and our loved ones, with competence and compassion, to prepare effectively, even happily, even gladly, joyfully, for death. Yes, routinely, we do the predictable all-of-a-sudden let’s engage dying and talk about its ‘must-have’ operating details when it happens. And yet for the most part, we do not address, in any conscious, clear and complete way, aging and dying long before it happens. Our shared and public conversations regarding our aging and dying, specifically our own aging and dying, are relegated to the back seat if not the trunk of our lives. Working through the real down and dirty specifics… the places, the people, the times,….. about our aging and dying are minimal, late arrivals to the scene we call life.

As a kid, this struck me again and again as strange to seemingly ignore or merely dramatize something so fundamental to life. And then I would learn to remind myself that we do not as a human species talk openly and readily about what we may have most in common and what arguably matters most: money, or work or love or sex, or childrearing, or God, or leaving the planet…..etc. Why ?

Perhaps we have shame that we are different, outliers, ” wrong” , separate, apart, strange in some way to speak openly regarding such “personal” and presumably “private” matters. And perhaps fear……….. of being wrong, different, outside what is the norm, or simply fear that death is too big, too momentous, too all-consuming, too “final,” too grievous to even effectively confront at all, let alone capture in our words and in our hearts. Yet perhaps the very words that I might struggle to speak regarding death and the expression I call my life……..my own death, that of my loved ones, and the death of the ways and means of the life I treasure………….That very endeavor, that struggle, to communicate fully our end of life, let’s me complete my journey with power and grace and peace.

Being authentically empowered regarding aging and dying is much more than just some resolute coming to grips with it, facing up to it, soldiering on in the face of it, let alone ignoring it or avoiding it. Being empowered with aging and dying means to be engaged actively and authentically in it, to be and willing to be inspired by life and death, and one’s own life and death, and to be equipped for all of the down and dirty specifics of each death that comes to be.

It occurs to me that perhaps the words I choose to describe and express my life and its death, to express what matters in my life, allows me, enables me, to get complete and fulfilled and fully at peace with my life and my death, including long before I actually, physically leave this Planet Earth. My words, the words I choose, give me what I call my life and my death. If I consider my words to mean all forms of languaging…… so not only words but numbers, pictures, certain sounds and movements…… I begin to see that my life is indeed constructed, actually created, in the conversations that I generate and live inside of. And at bottom, these conversations that are my life are with the 2 audiences that make up my world.: the conversations I have with myself (this can include my internal states of feelings and thoughts) and the conversations I have with the larger world that I know as THE world, “out there.”

I realize now that I can, in a dance with the changing circumstances and challenges of each day of life, get to where I entirely construct my relationship to the inevitable facts of aging and dying. In the conversations, that I give to it………….aging and dying is mine to own if I choose to. I choose to. I want you, my reader, to have this choice also. How ? By first becoming aware that you and I can create and design our relationship to aging and dying. by how we relate to it, in the language we give to it.

If I choose to complete my past by recalling it in a way that honors it, learns from it, even or especially the tough parts, I can do so with my mouth, or my keyboard. I can re-visit my past…………..and own it as my life, fully lived.

This might include my remembrance of our old favorite 200-year-old, 80 ft maple tree, that has stood itself proudly and strong in our Vermont front yard since George Washington was President….when this 1790 farmhouse was built, replete with a beehive oven, wooden pegs to tie the rafters, and the marks of the adzes and drawknives that cut the joists before there were sawmills. There the maple stood, unfurling its thick trunk limbs, generously bending every which way and that. Its power leaves an unforgettable imprint … and in the act of recalling it, I make it real again. In the words I use to give it birth. I quite literally bring it to life.

And this languaging of my life and of its end, includes memories of my childhood and its ‘’skip-to-my-Lou” innocence , fueled by my cocky sense of its limitless abundance…like…. “C’mon world….whaddya got ?!”

Or the hot hunting of sex and love, and the pleasures, surprises and hurts of romance as I tumbled in and out of love.

Or wrestling with becoming and being a man………..and wanting oh-so-hard to get it just right for all the ages.

Perhaps our struggles and efforts to put these proud bearers of our lives into words is the genesis of owning all of life and thereby, death….. my death and your death…… and is the beginning of our each getting related to death in a way that is honest, authentic, real and perhaps in that way, unique and
timeless as each life is, was and always will be.

Maybe there is or can be a timeless wordless beauty and sacred power to death, a deep letting go into it and wherever it may lead, once one has given life to one’s words, and words to one’s life. The silence born of the life fully said.

Maybe some peoples…..some indigenous peoples, some peoples who listen to life at its source, some upspoken wisdom of women, and of mothers, perhaps, some newborns agog at this new world, this very planet, perhaps some man simply honoring his word ……….allow death to arrive right on time and with the fanfare ‘ just so. ‘

And maybe death can have, can bring, a kindness, a generosity, that gives us a heads up that has us be its partner…………

Maybe we can speak usefully and expressively of death, as with life, and let it speak through us, for us, to us, with us……………

https://www.consumerreports.org/family/what-to-do-when-a-loved-one-dies-a3615919379/