Tag Archives: nothing lasts forever

I Want to Live

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York photoshops her old heating system as she puts in new heat pumps and hopes to live to be 100.At some point it becomes apparent that no one is going to be able to fix you, fix what’s wrong with you. Nothing lasts forever, my father used to say. Including health and youth. And life.

I always said I wanted to live to be a hundred. Why wouldn’t anyone want to last a whole century, I used to wonder? That was before I started noticing friends and family coping with chronic pain. It was before losing a daughter to cancer. Before I knew about Alzheimer’s and dementia. Before a friend was reported to have howled in the emergency room, “Kill me now.” This was before my own body began deteriorating with age.

I love living. When it comes right down to it, I would sooner give up my independence, my house, my limbs, my eyesight, wine and magnificent food, … before giving up my life. Even though my daughter died. Even though I often feel unnecessary and unneeded. Even though I feel depressed just thinking of the day I’m told I am beyond fixing, I want to live.

This line of thought consumed me weeks ago as the twenty-year-old heating system in my house started to die. Nothing’s wrong with the boiler, my plumber had said. But meanwhile, the loud grinding noises and stinking were keeping me awake at night. And it was expensive to run. That couldn’t be fixed. So I shut it off and began the process of gutting the closet that contained the mess of old pipes and outdated parts. It made me think of outliving my own parts and becoming a useless, non-functioning nuisance. It brought up some of my greatest fears around dying: disappearing, losing myself, not mattering, and then being erased completely like I never existed. I killed the plumbing system anyway.

I could look at strawberry shortcake or anything and relate it to dying. But I stood mesmerized, elated, watching the shiny state-of-the-art heat-pump units being installed up and down the house, and forgot the old familiar plumbing system that was being removed. And now I’m calculating the lifespan of this new equipment, considering how long it will keep me warm, how many more decades I can keep this house, how many years I can keep living — until the time when I, too, can no longer be fixed.

 

Would you want to live to be one hundred? What do you fear about aging out and dying?

REPLY TO ROBIN

What Lasts Forever?

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photographs a daylily on top of a boulder in her rock garden that could be two million years old.“Another boulder,” I hooted, as Excavator #5 dislodged a large mud-covered rock. That made four. Four boulders now sat in my yard. Solid. Substantial. They would outlast me by eons, hanging out on this land forever. Always.

If a stone in Central New York could tell its story, it would reveal that millions of years ago it was detached from its parent rock by weathering and erosion. It was then pushed and dragged by glacial ice, scraping over soil and stone. Sometimes stuck in stream beds, the rock’s rough edges were rounded, worn smooth. Once settled, it sat for ages, being built around or buried, or left alone as forests grew up around it. A rock in New York could be two million years old. This is why each boulder I find, I love.

My biggest boulder had been pulled from the bottom of the pond years ago. By Excavator #4, shortly after my daughter died. The pond was deteriorating. Muskrats. Weeds. Algae. I was trying to save it. Marika and the muskrats were the only ones to swim regularly in the pond. When she died, I had told people, “I feel like frozen mud, like a heavy lifeless rock.” And then the excavator found the Pond Boulder.

The Pond Boulder must have first been unearthed back in 1998 when Excavator #3 dug the pond and then left the heavy nuisance he found at the bottom. My third pond. Built with my second husband, by the third excavator. It was my third home on the same land. Nothing lasts forever.

For many summers the Pond Boulder sat as children swam above, kicking and splashing on pink Styrofoam noodles. Years later the huge rock, fished out by Excavator #4, was rolled to the base of a nearby tree. And last week Excavator #5 bunched all the boulders together into a kind of giant rock garden. My boulders. Like I could ever own them. Or hold on to anything in this world.

“Come see my boulders,” I said to the friend who planted daylilies in my yard in June. “And will you look at the lilies? They’re not doing so well in this drought.”
“They only bloom for a day,” she said, watching me pick off shrivels of spent blossoms. “That’s why they’re called day-lilies.”

 

What lasts? What can you count on to be there when the world as you know and love it is washed away?

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN