The Rhythm Of Melancholy

I have begun to realize there is a kind of generational rhythm to melancholy. It has a predictable pattern.

To explain: a close friend of mine, a man almost exactly my own age, just lost his father…this after his mother passed on only a short time ago. As you know, my mother too recently passed away. In fact, virtually everyone I know who is also of my generation is in a similar situation. We all of us watch as our parents age, become frail, die…

Which is why I suspect that every generation has a certain cadence to its emotional life. We share with the majority of our peers common stages of our lives. We know together the extreme emotions of childhood, the extraordinary unease of adolescence, the confusion of the twenties, the triumphs and defeats that come after that.

When you are my age, and I'm 57, you share with your peers that moment in your life when you suddenly realize that they…your parents …won't be there forever. Or, are not there now.

And, no matter how good or bad your relationship was with them (and in my case it was very good), there is something unimaginably disturbing in that.  For you know that what seemed a fixed point in the universe, its pivot, does not exist any longer. It is wholly gone, forever.

You realize that now you have no choice but to attempt to be a pivot yourself.

Though, in some ways, that is the more dreadful, for you know that…in time…your children will discover in their turn just how unsteady a center you really are.