Depressions of Age

!!!This blog comes with a warning: Do Not Read If You're Depressed!!!

Mid-summer approaches, and the rising sun is now well to my left, not yet dazzling my eyes. Midsummer's day is the saddest day. Not for nothing is it called the longest day, for it is hard to get through. After midsummer, the nights draw in and cold winter looms ahead. As my steps slow, and even going up stairs grows more painful, I am growing maudlin in mind as in pace. It is good to be surrounded by young people, for the old grow old like me. But there is a dark side to seeing youth: the clear skin and bright eye, the energy and hope and optimism that one loses with age, yet yearns for yet. I remember an SF story, where a rich old man grants a poor boy all his riches, to exchange minds with him. Bernard Shaw too, for all he had achieved, looked back with nostalgia in Back to Methuselah.  I read it when young, and thought it a poor play, but now it resonates, and I look on youth with envy, not with joy, and yearn to run and play again as once we did.  How we took our youth for granted, like a spoilt child brought up in riches, never thinking that his fortune might be spent. The only consolation is platitudes: "You can't turn back the clock", or "You had a good life" or "It could be worse". But you can keep your platitudes and stick them where you will; they do not console.

If Death Should be The End

If death is the end, it is better to die
in the cradle without pain or strife;
yet on we live.
Through thought and writing,
by poetry and art,
in children and friends
we live on.
All we are and all we have been
is poured out through them.

When friends die and children die,
do we then die with them?
It is said that when someone dies,
whole worlds die with them.
We each contain a world of thoughts,
of habits learnt and feelings won,
of loves known and memories earned,
worlds awaiting death.

How little passes on;
some trick of speech,
some memory of a distant day's event,
some happy moment.
How little is the recollection now
of once dear grandparents;
yet all that exists of them may be
that tiny and fragmented memory.
Somehow you try to ingrain it
in children of your own.
But you forget, or they forget,
and though their insidious influence
creeps through your every act,
everything that was and made
that individual fades gradually away
into insignificance,
as surely as their name fades
on an old tomb stone until
one can barely read the scratched out lines.

JHM