On the Brink of Everything

An early morning meditation on what we can learn from children about growing old...

Photo by Sharon L. Palmer

[In the photo, I’m listening as my granddaughter, who’s now in college, takes me to brink of her world by explaining one of its many mysteries. Her eyes are wide with wonder, her hands alive with speech, and her expression says, “Grandpa, I'm going to keep talking until you get it!” At a time when the gift of life is desecrated nonstop by morally bankrupt adults, the rest of us can resist by living with reverence, wonder and care for one another. NOTE: This post is an edited version of a 2015 essay that grew into a book of the same title.]

I. In the late winter of 2015, when I was 76, my friend and colleague Courtney Martin posted an essay titled “Reuniting with Awe.” It painted an exquisite picture of how her sixteen-month-old, Maya, helped her see life’s wonders through a toddler’s eyes.

As I began reading Courtney’s piece, I was mesmerized by its opening line—“My daughter is on the brink of everything”—because that’s where I’ve found myself on my journey into old age. The image still works for me today at age 86. I’m frequently awestruck as I stand on the edge of the rest of my life, including that part of life called death which I can sometimes see from where I stand.

II. I’d be shading the truth if I claimed to be awed by all that comes with old age. Courtney wrote about her daughter scooping “haphazard little bits of cottage cheese into her mouth” then applauding herself between bites. My mealtime storyline does not include applause. At dinner last night my wife grinned, pointed to her chin and said, “You’ve got food on your face again. And on the back of your hand.” Reaching for a napkin, I explained that I was saving it for a snack. Courtney wrote that when she takes her daughter out for a walk, Maya bounces “with the delight of freedom” and “quickly swivels around” to make sure her mom is following. If I bounced and swiveled while out on a walk, I’d land on my keister and need to be schlepped directly to my doc.

Speaking of my doc, like many older folks, I live with a growing list of maladies that sometimes rattle me but, so far, pose no immediate threat to my life. Still, when you suddenly become interesting to the clinicians after boring them for years, it gives you pause—especially as you watch family members and friends suffer and die. And yet it’s because of the diminishments of age, not in spite of them, that I often find myself in awe as I stand “on the brink of everything.”

III. The morning Courtney’s essay was posted, I woke up, paused on the edge of the bed to whistle my soul back home, then made my way to the bathroom. It was winter in Wisconsin, and the east-facing window was filigreed with ice. The horizon behind the bare trees was aglow with a crimson sunrise that, seen through the tracery of ice, turned the pane into stained glass. For several minutes it was as if the sun were illuminating a rose window in a great cathedral.

I went downstairs, turned up the thermostat, and began heating water for coffee. Twice-warmed by the whisper of the furnace and the hissing burner on the gas stove, I was thrice-warmed as I read a handwritten letter thanking me for a book I had written many years ago. “That book,” the writer said, “changed my life.” As I laid the letter down, I recalled all the early mornings in times past when, driven by the daemon that compels me to write, I failed to pause long enough to look out on the loveliness of an awakening world.

IV. I’ve always been an obsessive writer, and before age slowed me down, my rush to write sometimes kept me from seeing the beauty around me. Part of me regrets that fact. And yet, back then—focused laser-like on surveying and mapping what’s “in here” to the exclusion of what’s “out there”—I was able to write something that helped a stranger find new life. Looking back, I’m awed by the way embracing everything, from what I got right to what I got wrong, invites the grace of wholeness.

When Florida Scott-Maxwell was eighty-five, she wrote, “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done...you are fierce with reality.” That’s how I feel when I’m able to say, “I am that to which I gave short shrift and that to which I attended. I am my descent into darkness and my arising into light, my betrayals and my fidelities, my failures and my successes. I am my ignorance and my insights, my doubts and my convictions, my fears and my hopes.” Wholeness does not mean perfection—it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

V. The teakettle whistled and I filled the French press with boiling water. As I waited for the coffee to brew, I booted up my iPhone, got online and read Courtney’s essay. By the time I finished, I had begun to brew this piece, aware of how much had already awed me as I stood on the brink in this early morning hour.

Every hour I stand closer to death than I did the hour before. All of us draw closer all the time, but rarely with the awareness that comes when the simple fact of old age—or a serious accident or illness—reminds us of where we stand. I have no wise words about dying and death. I’ve watched loved ones die in fearful anguish, others in peaceful acceptance. How I will travel that last mile, I have no idea. As for death and its aftermath, I’m not privy to reports from the other side. But I’ll know I’ve made it to Heaven if I can get early-morning coffee there, and I have reason to believe that’s a possibility. I’m told they can dark-roast coffee beans in The Other Place.

VI. What I know for sure is this: We come from mystery and we return to mystery.I arrived here with no bad memories of wherever I’d come from, so I have no good reason to fear the place to which I’ll return. And I know this, too: Standing closer to the reality of death awakens my awe at the gift of life.

Photo from U.S Catholic website. Photographer unknown.

On a late winter morning in 2015, that gift included seeing the world at sunrise through an ice-laced rose window; reading a stranger’s generous letter alongside a friend’s evocative essay; possessing the physical and mental capacity to make coffee, climb the stairs and start working on this piece; and having a laugh with myself about coffee roasted in Hell and served in Heaven. How could I abide my own gravitas without the leaven of humor?

VII. Courtney wrote that her daughter “approaches the world with only one giant, indiscriminate expectation: delight me.” Like sixteen-month-old Maya, I want to approach the world with only one expectation as I stand on the brink of everything. At age 86, I’m old enough to know that the world can delight me, so my expectation is not of the world but of myself: Delight in the gift of life and pass it forward every day in acts of love, truth, and justice.

P.S. If you’d like to listen to a musical version of what I tried to say here, check out my friend Carrie Newcomer’s gorgeous song, “The Brink of Everything.”

[NOTES: Courtney Martin and Carrie Newcomer have wonderful Substack pages—please check them out. My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post.]