You forget, after awhile. We would smoke flavored cigarettes and drink ferocious porters that sat like a meal in our bellies, we would get red-cheeked on a Tuesday. When you burn at both ends you don't give a thought to the candle. It's when you burn slowly that every tendril of melting wax becomes a disaster, a pestilence.
Life can certainly be scary and there's a form of dealing with it that involves alienating yourself from everyone else so that you never have to make those dreadful comparisons, or, so that you can stand haughtily above the rest, stroking the sense of moral height that you feel you've achieved. You look down all of your life, and you end up unhappy and alone. We apples do not fall too far from the tree.
As for me, I'll be in steerage getting drunk on beer and singing Irish sea chanties.
And my sisters will be there, and the rest of my kinfolk who are so good at remembering that knowing you're loved is more valuable than any portfolio and what good is money if you can't make someone happy with it? I will remember the dreaming and the scheming, and the sitting around together and drinking wine and the prank phone calls, and all the days of work will blend and meld and become indistinguishable. The bounced checks a distant memory. The returns on CDs and retirement dividends a trace of a thought. Was I happy? Yes, I was very happy. What else is our duty, as human beings?
At some point you realize that you were wrong about everything. And, if you're incapable of such humility, you will need the help of us all and will be utterly unable to ask any of us for it.
She is decades past you. Catch up or bow out. The misery will stop, or we will stop it for you.
