My Friend Stan

My friend Stan had a heart attack this weekend. He’s lucky — got a stent that will keep him around for a long time.

Stan is my age and we’ve known each other for 52 years or so (since we were 5). Stan and I were inseparable as kids, growing apart through middle and high school as our lives took separate paths. We’ve kept in touch and lost touch repeatedly over the years, reconnecting most recently a month or so ago when I was planning my high school reunion trip. Probably a story that is repeated hundreds, no, millions of times a day in this world.

This is starting to sound like a eulogy, but it isn’t. Stan is alive and well, stent in place. Diet and exercise will keep him here, too, and there is no real concern about his imminent demise. Still, this was probably the greatest signpost of aging that I have had to face in a long time, and it did get me thinking.

I’m 57 and entering the stage of my life where people will start passing around me from natural causes other than cancer (I exclude cancer here because cancer is the one killer that doesn’t seem to correlate with age in a fairly linear manner). It is an adjustment period, as now, when I loose a childhood friend, it looks less like a shocking tragedy and more like the ordinary progress of life and aging.

Also, it is never far from my thoughts that I could be one of the early ones.

I guess what is most telling is that I wasn’t shocked by the news of Stan’s heart attack as I would have been even two years ago. Instead, I felt bad and scared for Stan and his family, and acknowledged that this happened at a relatively young age — but the truth is that age had a role. And it is the beginning of a process that will happen again and again, friend after friend (or me, for that matter) until there is one, and then none of our generation left.

This is what life is supposed to be, I know. A journey through an existence that is by its nature, temporary, with no real understanding why we’re here or what we’re here for (I expect people of dogma to disagree with this assertion). It seems as if our bodies — if we’re lucky in a lot of ways — can get to around 110. But that does seem to be the outside number.

I know, you’re thinking that average lifespans have increased. That is true — and it is also true that the number of people in their 90’s and 100’s have increased as well. But an average is just that, and is affected by major shifts on the other end of the scale – lower childhood mortality, increased survivability from wars and epidemics, plentiful food, relative peace, etc. All of these play into the numbers.

This year marks the 40th high school reunion for Stan and I. 40 years since high school. 40 years of being an “adult.” That is a long time and a lot of changes. I’m dreading the fact that I’ll be in a room of my contemporaries, many of which look much, much older than I perceive myself to be. But like everyone else, my mirror lies to me, my close-cropped hair doesn’t really show grey (but my beard does, so I’m clean-shaven), and my attitude about life lacks the general gravitas of many of my peers.

I will be there, dents and cracks, along with people I haven’t spoken to in 40 years. We’ll all share the memory of place as it was in 1972-1975, the faded memories of people gone by, of teachers now old, retired or dead, of relationships lasting or fading, of exploits that would frighten us now. Like old photos that have their colors washed out, yellowed pages of paper, and wrinkled faces and hands. And we’ll all wake up the next morning with a hangover that only 40 years can bring.

This is how it should be. This is how it must be.