Life, Writing, Weirdness

I’m 55 now, which I have stated here recently is the beginning of the senior years for men where I live. The math is simple: average lifespan divided by three to give youth, middle age, and senior brackets. (This is the logic a lot of companies seem to use to want me to shop there, offering token discounts often only on certain days of the week, to get people my age and older to come in and spend money. Which is beside the point.) Average lifespan for men in Canada is currently tracked at 81 which makes the senior bracket 55 to 81. Ergo, I’m a senior now. So be it.

But I’ve gotten a lot more introspective and reflective in recent years. A discussion with two of my cousins at their father’s celebration of life a couple of years ago brought us the realization that we were becoming the older generation of the family. I might be one of the younger members of that older generation, but it’s still relevant. Looking only at my father’s side of the family, of the 22 of us, there are only 5 younger than me. I only have one cousin on Mom’s side and because my uncle was a decade younger than my mother, his child was born about a decade after me. Taking a similar view of the parents of my cousins, I have Dad and two Aunts who remain with us on that side of the family, though my uncle and his first wife remain with us on Mom’s side.

We’re not quite the older generation yet, but it’s closer than I think any of us want to think about.

Which doesn’t stop me from thinking about it.

I’m trying to get better about reflecting on good memories of the people I’ve lost and so I’m going to try this year to mark, at least for myself, birthdays and anniversaries. I won’t be sharing all of them here, but I will share the starting point of the year.

My maternal grandfather was born on 02 January 1916. It’s unreasonable for me to think about him still possibly being with us if he’d survived the heart attack in 1978, but I would like to have more memories of him than I do. Since he died the summer I was seven and we never lived so close we could visit regularly while he was alive, there aren’t that many. We usually visited for several weeks in the summer no matter where we lived before moving back to Ontario (Dad was in the air force), and my grandparents came to see us while we were living in Sudbury as it was “only” a six hour or so drive. So I remember things like fragments of shopping trips, saying goodnight to each person in the room while everyone was watching TV, looking for the ice cream man, and grandpa working in his shop (he was a jeweler by trade, part time at least, and had been for most of the years since coming home from Europe at the end of World War II). Mostly, what I have are photos and a few family stories, and not nearly enough of either.

The age I’m at now, I’m only two generations removed from family births, direct family, more than a century in the past. I want to say I miss my grandfather, but what I probably miss is the idea of him, and that doesn’t feel like enough.

Not such a positive start to remembrances, is it?

Be well, everyone.