Getting older:

The first surprise: I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not:

I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.

Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same blackness
which for me is silent.

Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say

as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration.
~ Elaine Feinstein, “Getting Older” from The Clinic, Memory

It is a privilege and a gift to turn 70 years old today. I’m pleased to make it this far relatively unscathed.

When I was an early grade school kid, I worried about everything: whatever could happen would happen – in my imagination. My parents would perish in an accident while I was at school. My dog would get lost and never come home. I would get sick with a dread disease that only afflicts one in a million children, but I would be that one.

The worries went on and on, often keeping me awake in the night and certainly ensuring that I had stomachaches every morning so my mother would keep me home from school where life felt safer. Our pediatrician, who saw me much more regularly than was actually necessary, would look at me over his glasses with a gentle perceptive gaze, put his hands on my shoulders as I squirmed about on the noisy paper on his exam table, and tell me for the umpteenth time I was 110% healthy. He affirmed there was nothing I needed to worry about.

Decades later, I tried to emulate this reassurance and instill this confidence in my own patients, thanks to the wisdom of that good man.

But I knew I needed to worry; somehow the worry was a talisman that kept the awful darkness of bad stuff away, things like nuclear missiles and polio outbreaks and earthquakes. That is a heavy load for a little kid to carry, making sure everything stays right with the universe.

None of it ever happened in my sheltered little life so I must have been doing something right!

Thankfully, by the time I turned nine, I finally learned to coexist with the inherent risks of daily life, as I realized I, in fact, wasn’t in control of the universe. We survived a rumbling 6.3 earthquake. We lived through a 114 mph windstorm that took out the power for a week. We coped with my grandpa dying. Later on I made it through some hard stuff that is too painful to even recall so I’d rather not.

Growing older means realizing that bad stuff will happen, and it is usually survivable yet the reality is: life on earth itself isn’t survivable. I’ve seen and experienced a few traumatic things over my 70 years, and have seen how some people, maybe even me, can be amazingly heroic in the worst possible situations

But I’ve learned my confidence can’t be in myself or anyone else. It rests solely in Someone who really is in charge of everything that moves and breathes in the universe and Who knows all that was, is and will be.

I really am not responsible for the universe — thank goodness.

Oh, I still worry. It is hard to stop when it is deeply engrained in my DNA, having been descended from a long line of worriers. My children are not grateful for that genetic gift to them. It is already evident my grandchildren won’t thank me either.

Yet, every day I snatch back from that darkness is reason for celebration, and today is no different.

Over 25,500 days under my belt of celebrating being here.
Hoping for more gentle occasions like this one is.

It’s a great day to be alive. Soli Deo Gloria.