Friday, November 29, 2019

Older than time (and Sun Tzu)


There are some notable people from history who died at the age of 48.

I mean, people in history are supposed to be old, right? If you’re in an oil painting or a black and white photo, that adds a hundred years to your age. It must take decades to accumulate the kind of fame that translates to history books and statues, to odes and tributes.

I’ll give you some context.

Sun Tzu (author, The Art of War) and Khalil Gibran (The Prophet). Dead at 48.
People as disparate as Whitney Houston and Al Capone. Dead, 48.

An entire monarch! Charles l, King of England. Cecil (damned) John Rhodes. Graham Chapman of Monty Python.
Hey, man, you guys all died at the age of 48.

My own longevity benchmarks are people like Elvis, dead at 42, and John Lennon, 40.
Hell, Paul McCartney has been alive for nearly twice as long as Lennon was.

Forget the 27 Club, those kids with lives swallowed by drugs, booze and bad driving (Hendrix, Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones), or even that idiot heroin addict Sid Vicious – dead at 21, there are swathes of people throughout history whose lives ended less glamorously in their thirties or forties.

It’s no longer a tragedy if you make it as far as your forties before dying.

According to a whack of articles and estimates we are given the expectation that we’ll live into our 70s in a first-world environment.

That means middle age, as a concept, should cover about a decade somewhere in our thirties.

The thing is, a decade sounds like a long period. We’ve grown up with reverence for the 60s, 70s and 80s as if they’re a cultural talisman instead of a blur of fashion, music, architecture, art and design. A decade passes like a whim.

I may have a couple of decades left. Maybe. Too few years to leave an iconic stain on history, that’s for sure. It could even just be months that I have left.

But you guys who died at 48 or younger? I beat you suckers.

You’re probably younger than I am – almost everyone is, these days, but take a moment to consider that your age is a rug that gets pulled out from under you before you can say “happy birthday”.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be remembering making forts for my plastic figures out of string and twigs and chewing my teddy bear’s ear. I vividly remember the toothmarks on my sippy cup, so don’t speak to me of legacies.

I’m still a child.
49 tomorrow.