Richard Koenig: A New Year’s Resolution — Taking a count of the days left to me

A friend of mine has urged me to think hard on the country song “Don’t Let The Old Man In.” He himself is bent on living out a full 100 years, and my bet is he’ll make it. Last year, in the space of eight months, he went big-game hunting in New Zealand, got a hip replacement upon return home to South Carolina, then set out on another expedition, this time to Colorado. If he’s to reach 100, he has 24 years to go. 

So do I. But I know this about me: The old man is already in, and he insists on telling me I might not have a lot of New Years ahead.

Nontrivial calcium deposits have shown up in x-rays of the vessels that feed my heart. The medical terms for the cracks, slips, and ugly curve along my spine would, if run together, come to 30 syllables. When I take out my hearing aids, cicadas swarm into my head and screech. That’s tinnitus.

Nor must you look inside to see the old man. He’s on display. I never realized how bulging, how ropey, are the hardening blue-gray veins along my forearms until the moment a young grandson ran a finger along them in wonder. There are other little surprises for someone who doesn’t often care to look in the mirror. That wrinkle running down my forehead, that wrinkle deep as a dent — how long has that been there?

I’m not complaining. I manage to swim a lot. It’s just that I don’t know that I can swim all the way to “triple digits,” to use a phrase you hear these days among my generation. What matters more is that I have yet to check off all the items on my to-do list, current and prospective, including a few big ones.

So my resolution for the New Year is to give myself a little prod — actually, to firm up a practice I’ve let slip. Each week as I turn to the Monday page in my weekly planner, I’ll write there the number of days I have left to me should I die at a certain age short of 100. That number is arbitrary, fixed, and my secret. (My father died at 80, my mother at 97.) 

The items on my list?

Commit poems to memory. It beats cross-word puzzles. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” should get Dylan Thomas (dead at 39) honorary membership in the triple-digit club.

But already you’re thinking: “That’s all? This guy might as well just check into one of those places for old folks and commit to winning at bocce.”

Okay. But let’s move on to a few other to-do’s.

See things. I miss a lot of what’s out there. My wife, whose paintings hang in our house, will ask: ”What color is that shadow?” Me, glancing up from my laptop: “Black, of course. Dark gray?” Her: “No, purple. And lavender.” 

I’m dumb lucky to be old in the 21st century. There was a time when itinerant oculists removed cataracts by “couching”—crudely poking the eye with a needle to dislodge a clouded lens from the path of light. Bach was blinded when he risked couching in the last year of his life. 

I have been treated by an ophthalmologist who fragmented both natural lenses, vacuumed out the pieces, and then inserted through tiny slits the plastic discs that are the replacement lenses. Result: nearly 20/20. 

It’s time to start looking at things as if I don’t have many looks left.

Heed the grandkids. I’ve got five of them: two girls, three boys, ages six to eleven.

And here is my admission. I didn’t know as well as I should have known, didn’t understand, my own children at these ages. Where was my head? Yea, yea, busy, busy. Praise be to my wife. So much of what my children have become owes to her early attention and discernment.

With this next generation I must do better. Hardly anything I do with them at this stage will they remember. Yet long into their futures something from our time together will live in them without their awareness. I myself am still awakening to what my forbears put into me, good and bad.

This to-do, as you might imagine, is in progress, sheer joy, and exhausting. I play ball with these kids, once bruising a rib. I write down what they say so I’ll never forget it. Of sparkling water: “It feels like stars on my tongue.” 

There is no doubt they are prolonging my life.

Get religion? I lost mine. Why, I asked, should anyone think the three pounds of flesh that make up the human brain are capable of divining first causes and final things? People smarter and wiser than I divided on the God question. What could I know? Call that a dodge, but I was comfortable with it.

With age, however, have come flashes of astonishment that anything exists, anything at all. These moments are not intellectual, not even intentional. I can’t explain them. They just dawn on me. Why now, at my age? 

There is no telling where this confusion is headed, but to-do’s will come of it.

That friend of mine, I kid him. I say we’ll end up in the same nursing home. We’ll demand a gym and do bench presses, though with the bar only, leaving off the other weights. What do you expect at 100? 

I don’t kid myself, though. The triple-digit club is exclusive in the extreme, and I expect to be blackballed by one sort of demise or another. 

The first Monday in the New Year will be January 5. I’ll mark on my planner the diminishing number of days ahead. It will be one way to concentrate on what matters from here on out.

Richard Koenig is the author of the Kindle Single No Place to Go, an account of efforts to provide toilets during a cholera epidemic in Ghana.