I have been living in the same New York City apartment since 1978. After my nearly 50 years here, I refer to it as my bat cave, because over the years taller buildings have grown up around me so all windows look out onto brick walls. I do have enough innovative lighting so the natural darkness does not permeate too depressingly.
This unique cave has become an interior world of make-believe, my own personal laboratory. Helpers come and go and friends visit, but this is where I have done and will do whatever work there is going forward. I miss encounters with nature, but New York City streets have become increasingly impossible to navigate, especially in the cold, and I have long since given up any idea of wider travel. So my home is pretty much my world, a cave world. And it often resembles Plato's Cave as the shadows dance on the walls reminding me of a life well lived.
Recently I have been refurbishing the space to make it more amenable to growing old. This unavoidable fact of life eventually hits us all. The body becomes less and less able to do even small tasks that once could be done easily even amidst hazards of disorganization. Opening packages or food containers, like jars, bottles and cans becomes an effortful task and dropping things is a regular event. Reaching for things out of place becomes impossible and could risk a fall. Most older adults begin a slow demise after a bad fall. In my case it was getting hit by a cab in 2011. Life has been a matter of compromise and adaptation ever since, as this cave of mine has also served as a recovery unit for the last 14 years when one surgery after another has been necessary. Just moving upright poses a constant challenge and getting out into the world for anything other than doctor appointments rarely happens anymore.
Because this cave is filled with things I love, it has also become my pyramid, representing life in preparation for "shuffling off this mortal coil."
Here my archives are carefully organized for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts who generously agreed to house the artifacts of my career many years ago. I am gratefully represented there in both dance and music. And as for whatever else is here, I hope some use may be made of it by those who will take care of these things for me.
The Stoics speak of our Memento mori - an acceptance of death as part of living fully. Seneca writes - Death is not something that happens to us once, that we are moving towards, each at our own pace. Instead, he says, death is happening right now. Not just to other people, to people we love, to people who themselves thought they were healthy and invincible, but to us. We are dying every day, he says. The time that passes belongs to death. Once a second is spent, it is gone forever. As we kill time, time kills us, slowly, inevitably, irrevocably.
Yes, we all have a death coming - it's part of our bargain with life. Each worrisome symptom begs the question “is this what will eventually get me?” Longevity becomes a puzzling phase, as one gets closer to the certainty of an end but finds little clarity of just what that will be, living through our aging moments in a kind of wonderment, riding the wave of time.
Being death-conscious in my 80's does not mean I'm morose or sad. On the contrary I celebrate life in all ways possible and cherish contact with friends, my family being long gone. I remember my sister as she approached her own chosen assisted suicide. She was alive and thrilled to experience that last phase of her life, open to whatever was to come.
Curiosity for what we do not yet know persists, but only when we can admit how little we truly have comprehended all along. Humility and acceptance, patience and wit, validation and gratitude win the day.
May 2025 bring some revelations – a growing ability, as if we always knew the way, to deal with what seems impossible, jogging along through time, moving into open spaces to avoid crashing into those jogging along beside.
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