Sixteen Years Left to Live. How Many Bowls of Froot Loops Is That?

I forget her name but I haven’t forgotten her words. She was telling me something I didn’t want to hear, so I worked hard at shutting her message out, which is maybe why it’s stuck with me all these years.

I have her name somewhere. I could look it up, but I won’t. I’ll just call her Louise for now and take a guess at what she said.

Louise was old, or so I thought back then, and I was young. She was 70-something. I was in my 50s, still but a stone’s throw from my youth.

Louise was sitting upright in her favorite chair, in her living room probably. I sat facing her, my cassette recorder running.

I had come to Louise’s house to interview her for my book, “Wrestling with God,” and my plan was to ask her the big questions: Who is God? What is God? Is God?

She Wasn’t Interested in God

But Louise wasn’t all that interested in God on that day, which is why her interview never made it into my book. She wanted to talk about getting older — about being older — about the numbering of her days.

“Getting older is about subtraction,” she said, shooting me a look sharp enough to pierce any resistance on my part to her news.

“Time grows short,” she said. “There’s not that much of it left to me now. There isn’t room for all the undertakings that used to seem so necessary, so consequential — career, travel, volunteer work.”

It’s All About Subtraction

“You can’t do it all,” she said. “You have to let some things drop away. It’s all about subtraction.”

Not me, I thought. I’m going to keep on keeping on. I had no intention of turning 70, and if ever I did, I wouldn’t be doing this subtraction thing Louise was talking about.

Well, I did turn 70, then 80. And up till now I’ve done a pretty good job of not subtracting much of anything. I’ve kept it all — friends, house, garden, career, family.

Of course, my family no longer includes a husband. Mine subtracted himself five years ago — out of the blue and decisively — with a pulmonary embolism. The doctors tried to resuscitate him. They couldn’t get him back. And now there is a big zero where Jon used to be.

Grandchildren Bursting With Intention

But I have grandchildren. They come to visit, and their visits are all about addition — noisy, busy children bursting with intention. Feet, knees and elbows all over the house.

My grandchildren would like to eat Fruit Loops when they come to visit. It’s a treat they are allowed when they are on vacation. But I am against Froot Loops — fake food! fake colors! So the last time they were here I refused to lay in a supply of the stuff. A great grumbling ensued at breakfast time.

This was not subtraction.

Doing the Math

What Louise saw then and what I am finally seeing now is — the subtraction of years, the relentless subtraction of the years left to us.

(Which is why I’m not getting up from my desk right now to expend one of my precious hours looking for Louise’s real name and exact words.)

For most of my life up till now I’ve told myself that I would live to 100 like my grandmother — born in 1876 and gone to her reward in 1976. My death deadline was always years — decades — away. Sixty years. Forty years. And most recently twenty years

Except it isn’t twenty years anymore. If I’m 84, I’ve got a mere sixteen years to go before death or senescence sets in: 100 – 84 = 16.

That’s subtraction.

Sixteen Years Left to Live. How Many Bowls of Froot Loops Is That?

In the sixteen years I’ve got left, how many of the items on my gotta-do list will get done?

Will I find a publisher for the thriller Jon finished just weeks before he died? Will I finish my own next book? How about the one after that?

Will the grimy carpeting in the den ever get replaced? The balky microwave?

Will there be time to run to the store for Fruit Loops?

More on getting older at “The Shame of Aging: The Big Seven-Five”  and “A Child Is Born — And so Is a Grandpa.”