Notes on Facing My Generation:

So much of what matters to me now is a celebration of the past; I see the faces of people my age, and their eyes are benign with the inevitability of death and the shared realization that life—our life—is finite.

One faces the infinite terror of inevitable death by personal choice; either philosophically, with humor and aplomb or with avoidance of the coming end of the organism that has carried one through all these years from birth and youth, to maturity and advancing age.

Either way, death is a fact for all life. Whether or not there exists some form of eternal life, well, no one believable has yet returned to allay our fears and the egotism of any particular life surviving the physical end of a particular organism becomes, whether admitted to or not, less and less a matter of importance as one marches towards the end of ones lifespan.

Harry Houdini promised to return. To date, he has not. Jesus is said to have returned from death to walk the earth, but misinformation and the politics of the ages have diluted His message to the point where doubt of the Gospels is inevitable, whether admitted or not. Confucius said that we return as different life forms until our multiple journeys are completed, and while plants and animals also have a life force, returning as a plant or a mollusk or other form of life is not all that attractive. Dung beetles come to mind, and other, vaguely undesirable forms of life.

Who knows? Even the neo-preachers with the power to run television stations and affect national politics say they have the ‘answer’, but the ‘answer’ is more than likely only available to the limited few with the ovine gene firmly implanted in their genetic make-up and functions, more often than not, as a foil for even greater reaches towards power and wealth by the same neo-preachers who rip off poverty stricken old folks and other fools with enough money to buy a stamp to send a few dollars to perpetuate that particular myth of ‘eternal life’.

Over the years of my life one of the most important facts I have learned is that our girl children carry the ova in their bodies from birth to eventual delivery of children. What has struck me as my girl children have matured and delivered children of their own is that those children—my grandchildren—were there with us when my children were doing things that families do: weeding tomatoes and tending animals and cleaning house. That to me, is the most fantastic of human accomplishments—that science has been able to provide us with this knowledge that enables us to know and to care for our grandchildren before they are conceived and birthed, and thus, all our future genetic progeny stretching out in a long line to the future.

This makes the future palpable—these are not strangers for which we are husbanding the earth, but beings who hear our voices and are tempered directly by our actions.

Nobody has yet determined when life enters the ovum. And I don’t care what anyone else says about this—as a mother and a grandmother and potentially a great-grandmother and matriarch to my line (as my grandmother and great-grandmother and mother were matriarchs to our line) I know that life is encompassing us from beyond time to beyond time.

This is not a political statement and I am not advocating behavior for any other person in terms of whether or not abortion is an option or not an option. What I am saying is that this is what I know in my heart to be true—our ancestors are here with us and our progeny are here with us. We are one long line of human life and to break that chain is death.