So long, and thanks for all the fish

Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.

Oddly enough, Canadian Sister and I were just talking about this last night – well, last morning in Alberta. Just after explaining that she was intending taking her car to Canadian Tyre or more likely Tire to get an oil change because that scary little light keeps coming up on her dashboard, she was telling me about this almost 100 year old woman she is friends with, from The Seniors.

This almost 100 year old woman is still working, helping people with their tax returns. Also, being a diabetic, she is still very conscientious with her diet. My sister wondered what it is that makes a human being so careful about her physical health when she is – realistically – so close to it being irrelevant.

There’s nowt so queer as folk, as they say. We are a mass of contradictions. Our mother, for example, stopped going to the dentist when she got old because a) she loathed going to the dentist and b) she wasn’t going to need her teeth for much longer.

On the other hand, when Dad was approaching his end, unable to stay awake for more than five minutes at a time and confined to his armchair in the living room, she was still very concerned about him “not getting fat”.  He had never been fat and now he was skeletal but she was still bringing him those little saucers of orange segments, and limiting him to one chocolate a day when there were chocolates. Like me, he had a sweet tooth and I used to think, for God’s sake he’s falling to bits in that armchair! Let him have a little saucer of chocolates why don’t you, and ditch the interminable oranges.

My only thought (concerning the almost 100 year old woman) was that this is maybe one way we cope with having to know that we are going to die. We know, but we don’t allow ourselves to really believe it. We switch off our imaginations and focus in on the day to day. And what a gift it is to be able to do that.

I don’t really expect to be a hundred, or even almost a hundred what with the illness and all, and I can’t say I really want to be, either. And what on earth could you write to your hundred year old self?

Good grief, are you still here?

Well you made a bit of a mess of that, didn’t you?

Or, as the dolphins apparently said in departing a doomed Planet Earth:

So long, and thanks for all the fish. *

* Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, book 4.