with the greys in my mother’s hair getting more and more each day, and my grandfather struggling to get up the stairs more with each day that passes, the sudden realisation of them getting old hit me. looking at old pictures is a startling moment of grasping how life really slips through your fingers without you even noticing. I never notice how much my hair has grown since my last haircut or how slimmer I was last year, not unless I take a tour in my photo gallery or snapchat decides it’s a good idea to remind me of those times. it’s nice to reminisce from time to time, but it’s also a painful reminder of how little we’re actually in control of our lives. life acts almost as if we’re on a boat, going from one side to another, not realising the distance or how close we got until we get on the boat again.

getting old is both a privilege and a curse. it’s a privilege to be able to create memories, feel all sorts of feelings, not just happiness. getting to grow old in a world where untimely deaths are this common is the gentlest way of life telling us “you’ve made it.” it doesn’t matter if you’ve accomplished a lot, it doesn’t matter if you were famous or not, it doesn’t matter if being successful was your ultimate goal and whether you’ve achieved that or not. to me, having at least one person that cared about you, loved you, or you’ve shared a smile with is success enough to count for a live well-lived. maybe an advice you gave them has led to a butterfly effect of endless possibilities, maybe a compliment has made their day, maybe you being there for them when they’re at their lowest made them hold onto life once more. you never know. oh, and how great it is to have so many chances to do these in a life so long! what’s the purpose of life if not to live to the fullest? and I don’t mean being happy all the time, or having the best day every day. that’s not realistic. being sad, having rough days, feeling like it’s never gonna get better are all things that come with life itself. it’s necessary to cherish these moments as much as the happy ones because how lucky we are that we are able to live a life that’s full of these moments of diversity. getting old gives you a chance in life again and again, a chance to do what you didn’t dare to do one year ago, a chance to make things right, a chance to rewrite your destiny. a chance to create, maybe new memories, maybe art, maybe literature, maybe a family, the possibilities are truly endless. I want to be many things all at once, maybe I can’t be everything today, but it’s nice to hope that someday I might have an opportunity to be something else I always wanted to be.

on the other hand,

the curse of getting old is a sad one rather than an enraging one. it hits you all of sudden, it catches you in the most unexpected moment. maybe in the sunniest summer day when you’re out with your friends, maybe when you visit your grandparents, maybe when you drive past a cemetery. it’s that sudden feeling of shock and agony that overcomes all of my other emotions, leaves me with that unsettling feeling of running out of time. it’s a painful and agonising moment of realising how even the current moment will be a fragment of history one second later, it’s the moment of realising yesterdays and yesterdays, more than we will ever be able to remember, are what creates the person we are today and will be tomorrow. it is so hard to live with the knowledge of not even an hour later is guaranteed and every memory we have is momentary, something that will either be forgotten or reminisced about but also something we will never be able to recreate again.

it’s hard to draw the line between growing up and growing old. I’ve always thought about this, when do we stop growing up and start growing old? is there even a line to begin with or is it also one of humanity’s artificial concepts to help compartmentalise the human life and existence? isn’t growing up essentially growing old too? and don’t we grow old and get “wiser” every day while simultaneously growing up, with it not mattering whether we are 10 or 60? this concept really messes with my head from time to time, how do we even draw the line? is it after 30? or 40? how do we decide that we’re too old to grow up so we start calling it growing old?

and of course, I couldn’t write about the curse of getting old without mentioning death. I will try my best not to get too religious with it, and honestly I’m not very religious either but sometimes it’s kind of comforting to think that death is not the end. of course, there’s not a definite way of knowing, it’s rather a case of what you choose to believe and what feels the best for you. to me, as someone who is not very spiritual or religious, my feelings about death change every day. one day, I’m surprisingly okay with it, I realise that we are all born to die someday and that’s just the way life is, but another day it’s hard to come to terms with the idea of people I know and love dying. ever since I was a kid and I learned what death is, it scared me so much. I used to sleep in the same room as my mother when I was little, so almost every single night I would check if she was still breathing and cry myself to sleep. for me personally, I’ve never experienced death firsthand, that’s why I’m having a hard time understanding why I’m so obsessed with the idea. it’s probably because its unknowable nature, and as humanity we are scared of the unknown as much as we want to learn about it. our brains think of it as dangerous, the other, the monster. as jeffrey jerome cohen states in his article monster culture (seven theses):

“The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster's body.”

there are certain rules that are set by science and as a scientific and logical society, concepts like death become hard to comprehend and come to terms with. the monster’s body, death in this case, is the perfect rebellion against science’s ground-set rules. scientifically we don’t know anything about it, and that’s scary to us. what we don’t know is scary because of humanity’s power around the globe now. we can learn about what’s happening in literally the other side of the world from where we sit, so of course the unknown gets conceptualised as a monster in our brains. the need to know everything has caused this fear, both around the unknown and death.

and it’s sad. it’s painful. knowing it could happen any minute but having to live with that feeling until it actually does happen. it never went away for me, that feeling of doom and pain in my chest ever since I was a little kid. it’s still here, I can still feel it but I think I’ve more or less learned to live with it. co-exist with it maybe. because I realised that I can’t go 24/7 having panic attacks about my mom or grandma dying. it’s a sad and scary thing to think about but there’s no way around it other than getting used to it unfortunately. also, yes getting old means getting closer to death maybe, but isn’t it nice to have lived a life so long that your hands got wrinkly, your face has lines, maybe you have a hard time walking around but you have grandchildren to help you with it? isn’t it nice to have a long life that’s full of memories and loved ones, and in that case, isn’t a peaceful death the kindest way to say goodbye?

I don’t believe death has to be categorised as cruel, yes it’s hard and sad and very hard to endure maybe, but I believe rather than it being a good or a bad thing, I think it’s indifferent. it doesn’t hold a personal grudge over a really really bad person, or it doesn’t let some really good people live forever. no. it comes one day, whether we’re old or young, and we have to live with it. at the end of the day, we come into this world knowing what’s eventually going to happen to us, so rather than making my days hell by thinking and crying about it, I’d rather cherish the todays I have with my loved ones until I have no tomorrow.

p.s: I know I wrote about death being indifferent, and there are a lot of wars and injustice in the world and it would be hard to portray those as indifferent as well, I would like to say that the death I’m talking about doesn’t include those deaths of innocent people dying in wars and such, and that’s cruel and never acceptable. the indifferent death mentioned in this essay doesn’t include and will never include anyone dying unjustly whether from war or violence or literally anything else. those are portrayals of humanity’s sick mind and cruelty and I will not stand for those. and that’s about it, I don’t want to offend anyone or be misunderstood about such a sensitive topic. that’s all. if you made it this far, thank you! and I’d love to hear your opinions about this essay in the comments.

xoxo thea