It was a few weeks ago I watched the sunset, not a particularly dazzling one, but poignant all the same. I watch most sunsets, drawn to them by something unnamed and unspoken in me. Each day, those few moments freeze me in place, all the monkey chatter in my mind and mouth temporarily silenced. The sunset plucks a deep animal chord in me, one of the edges left unfinished by evolution or whatever.
This one I have in mind was a standard glaring yellow, conventional but handsome. It was unremarkable, really, except for it being June 25. That afternoon had roiled with news of death.
I was staring at the sunset that Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson would not see. Hm. I watched for a minute or two more.
While I sat there, averting my eyes to the brilliant gold seam outlining the few bands of high purple clouds that evening, I thought I’ll be doing this again in another few days. One of my cousins had learned his cancer had reappeared and spread to his liver. Hospice was called. He was going fast. They moved his bed to the living room window, where he might be watching this same sunset with me.
I thought in a few days that I would be staring at another sunset, even another mediocre one, because that one would be my cousin’s.
A few hours later I got a call. My cousin and Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett all shared the same sunset. The one I had watched too long that day, that left yellow and blue spots in my gaze.
My cousin was 50, just like Michael Jackson. I suppose his death wasn’t as shockingly unexpected as Michael Jackson’s, because he had been battling cancer for the better part of a year. He had at least seen his two children grow to young adults.
But what is it about that number, 50?
You see, this is the second cousin I’ve lost this year. The other cousin, from the other side of the family, died in February. He dropped dead in a store on Monday morning, out on the far loop of his sales route, somewhere in snowy Iowa. It was a massive brain aneurysm. Wholly unexpected, like being hit by lightning during a snowstorm.
He too was 50.
His daughter is almost adult, a freshman at Ball State, there on a scholarship. They were estranged, but he was working to patch things up, always working to patch things up.
He and I had been estranged too, not from temperament but from circumstance. He was in sales, he traveled a lot of lonesome miles and years on the Plains. But recently he moved to my area and we got in touch again. He had lost weight and looked tall and lean like in his baseball days. The first night of the Beijing Olympics, he and my brother brought a pizza and we ribbed each other all evening. It was so corny, and great. I think I might have had him convinced to skydive with me this year.
50, 50 and 50.
Anyway you slice it, 50 is not young. Dying at 50 is not a tragedy, not when 5-year-olds and 12-year-olds and brand-new parents die every single day. But 50 is not old, either. At 50 in the US you still expect another 20 years of life at least, which is time enough to watch another generation appear and grow.
Is there a lesson in events like this? In the number 50? Nah, not really, except for the one we all ought to bear in mind anyway: that nothing going forward is a given. Not your health, not the person next to you, not even tomorrow.
For instance, a month after my cousin died, I learned about the death of somebody else I know. A decade shy of 50, he killed himself. No note, no apparent reason, no idea among his circle of friends. It was shocking, especially to my brother: this was one of my brother’s lifelong friends from school — and my cousin who suffered the aneurysm was my brother’s roommate.
So, you can see why lately I’ve been going about in a cloud of unreality, with a tentativeness and distrust of what seems to be definite before me. Spooked by 50, am I? Will I be tormented by nightmares, visited by talking ravens, develop physical tics and desperate craven eyes as I myself approach that haunted number, the mid-century mark, what the Romans chiseled on their mausoleums as “L”?
I doubt it. I suppose all this foreboding simply translates into what’s currently called “living with gratitude.” That’s not such a bad thing, is it?
But on the other hand, this evening I was scrolling through Google headlines, and happened to see a profile of the late TV pitchman Billy Mays, he of perpetually youthful beard and unflaggingly megaphonic voice. Mays too passed away a few weeks ago … and at the age of 50.
I don’t recall the sunset that day, but here’s wishing it was the same blinding orange as the Oxy Clean cleanser he used to hawk.
