On Turning 40 During a Pandemic

I'm the kind of person who mulls over milestones. Some people party (although not so much right now hopefully), other people think and read. Twice on my birthday I recited Milton's "When I consider how my light is spent" for no one in particular. My kids were puzzled but tolerant. Maybe it's just as well that I couldn't have a big birthday bash . . . I wasn't in the mood to party.

I was more in the mood to brood over my increasing age. I ran across this work of Schopenhauer where I read: "the first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary; and that without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains and all the subtle application of which it admits." 

Wait, I thought, what did you say, Schopenhauer, you old misanthrope? With this birthday, I'm finished living the story of my life and next comes the analysis and interpretation of that story? Everything that came before is cause and the rest is effect? I'm done with action and now am living in consequences? Surely not. 

However, I do see a grain of truth here: after a certain age a person has a chance to look back, reflect, gain perspective and all that. Maybe 40 is about the time in life where people start to do this. I'll start my old-age commentary by looking back on the last day of my thirties.

The day before my birthday, I was feeling restless, so my husband and I went for a hike. We walked on the shoreline of a lake fed by streams and creeks that start in the mountains east of us. The lake empties into a river, which continues to the ocean. We live in Southern California where water has been important as long as people have lived here, so long ago inhabitants of this area also gathered near this water. And on our hike we saw rocks painted hundreds of years ago by the Kumeyaay people. The meanings of those paintings are long lost, but on the rocks there are also deep hollows where women once ground food as they went about their daily work. And here we were, one of many small groups of hikers, striding along a trail right past sites that were--in some ways--of vital importance to people long vanished from memory.

 

It may not have been the best hike for a woman already feeling a little sad about the passage of time.

 

The passage of time isn't just some abstract concept right now. The big number 40 is a looming reminder of my own mortality. The pandemic and discouraging news about how serious it is right now have already been weighing on me. And then my birthday hammers on that same theme.

A few years ago, I taught a Literature in History class in which we focused on the two World Wars and literature written by people involved in those wars. We read some brutally honest war poetry and some sobering fiction. We ended on a note of hope, though. We finished with C.S. Lewis' address called "Learning in War Time" delivered in 1939 as Lewis, a World War I veteran, saw that his country (and its young people) were heading into a second world conflagration. In this address, Lewis encourages his young audience to resist the fear of death that war (or, in our case, a pandemic) creates: 

"War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it would be good for us always to be aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centred in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows it. We can see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. . . if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon . . ." 

Lewis concludes by reminding his listeners that the circumstances of war do not take away "the life of learning" as one of the small, humble ways a soul can approach "Divine reality" and beauty. At the time, I was glad to be able to join my voice with Lewis' and encourage my students to continue learning whether the life ahead is long or short.

Now that I have turned 40 during a pandemic, I keep remembering this Lewis essay and how I once enjoyed reading it with my students. Lewis is right that Christians of the past were more concerned with always remembering their mortality. Ever heard of momenti mori? Remembrance of one's inevitable end is not a theme we focus on much these days--unless you're a literature teacher, and then you have to talk to students about it. Poets seem to like to dwell on the inevitability of death. Once, on a student course evaluation (not the World War class surprisingly), one of my students commented that the class was great, except the focus on death "got old." This kid may have had a point because great literature and other forms of art can be unrelenting in their focus upon human mortality. We don't much like constant reminders that this life is temporary, we are all hurtling towards death, and time is fleeting.

Our culture today has turned away from facing death as a part of each person's life, and we tend to see mortality as a less personal, more abstract concept. In fact, if you were to Google "mortality," you would get all kinds of stats and data on death and mortality rates, showing that the word and concepts connected to it have generally become a matter of scientific study rather than religious or philosophic inquiry. As a result, death is what happens to other people or to the population in general--not to me.

But now a pandemic is robbing us of that complacent view of mortality. I am writing this as our country has passed the 400,000 mark of deaths due to COVID-19. And just this last month there has been some hand wringing over the ways that COVID-19 has affected life expectancy across multiple populations in our country. Even if one is somewhat comforted by what life expectancy really means, the fact remains this pandemic is bringing before us what was always already an uncomfortable truth: death awaits us all. 

What a time to turn 40.

But Lewis' words  in his lecture to young people facing a second world war encourage all of us to remember mortality for the purpose of reminding ourselves that--not just metaphorically--this life is a pilgrimage rather than a creation of a permanent home. What I do in this life really does matter, but not because I am building or achieving something permanent for myself to enjoy.

 

I went on a hike on my last day of my thirties, and could not have done anything more symbolically apt on that day. I set off on a journey. Along the way, I saw signs of many people who came before me. I remembered their end and thought of my own. Then I went home and ate soup and did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen and argued and laughed and read and played and worked. The next day I got up early with my four-year-old, drank some good coffee, and read some melancholy stuff to match my 40-year-old mood. And then in the evening I celebrated my birthday with my twin brother whose family has chosen to ride out this pandemic alongside of mine. My twin and I smiled for pictures in front of our cakes and laughed about once having been "womb mates," and then we listened while our bunch of noisy kids sang for us. 

In this tiny circle of family, I looked at the faces around mine and was so entirely thankful for my fellow life travelers, whose lives have drawn very close to mine on this journey through a pandemic.

So it is that as I turn 40, I hope to understand the true sense and coherence of my life not by looking back at anything I have already done, like Schopenhauer suggests, and picking out the significance of my own actions or achievements. Instead, on this birthday, I've chosen to remember I'm still a soul in passage, mercifully given fellow passengers to love and with whom I can enjoy each ordinary, meaningful day. What's more, every day I get to choose to live like a person looking forward to the day--whether it is near or far--when I am gathered up to those who have gone before me and when--somehow--my soul will rest satisfied in the Lord.