Saturday, June 14, 2025 at 11:10 PM

I was watching the late Honorable Ralph Fonseca’s funeral on YouTube on Thursday last, and was struck by the number of grey-haired older people who were in attendance, not realizing that they were my contemporaries. Some I hadn’t seen in over half a century, since I left Belize; but there they were, looking like their grandparents I knew when I was still a young man. The last time I saw Ralph was in Prague in the Czech Republic in 2000. He was there with a delegation from Belize attending the WTO. And that is the way I will always remember him, in his prime. We tend to remember people as they were when we last saw them. We weren’t friends; we were acquaintances, but there’s still a sadness there inside me.

Stephen King, one of my favorite authors, describes death as the clearing at the end of the path, in his Dark Tower series. It is both depressing and scary that many of my friends have gone into that clearing, without warning. The depressing part is that they are gone, and that I will never see them again. The scary part is that we are growing old, and rapidly succumbing to that inevitable clearing. Wat a ting!

I do not believe that I am scared of dying; maybe when I was younger, but even then, I didn’t dwell on the macabre—too full of life and living and loving back then. The thing about life is that it surprises you. You either live a good or a bad life, then one day, BOOM, you are old and miserable and incontinent and struggling to remember what you had for dinner last night, and remembering some lost love and hoping it’s all a bad dream! Then you wake up and feel the aches in your body as you stagger to the bathroom for the 15th time in the middle of that long night of disquieting dreams and dribbling, and farting, and fighting with the ghosts of your past! Again, wat a ting!

I have always believed that one should embrace life, roll with the punches and hope for the best. Hope, especially for the down and out, and for the poor, or the sick, or for the captives of old age, is the only currency one can afford, to keep one alive; the only survival mechanism left. Without that hope, we just give in and give up.

I never believed that I would live past 50, and after turning 50 I believed I was living on borrowed time. I now know that at 50 one is just beginning to really live. You have learned from all the mistakes and terrible choices made by your younger self, and after 50 you should just relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But no, your body starts arguing with you, rebelling against its master, your mind. It does what it wants, and you start living a different life where your doctors are your consolation and guardians against the inevitable journey to the clearing!

We are now that greatest generation, not in terms of accomplishments, but in terms of being the ones who are now disappearing at an alarming rate. We aren’t heroes; we didn’t have to make the sacrifices that they did. We just lived our lives with abandon, sucking the marrow out of every single minute we were allowed to exist in this world. We are selfish and greedy, and we hunger for more time, as the clearing hovers about us, patiently waiting to welcome us into its embrace.

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

And all the beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

“Elegy written in a country graveyard”, byThomas Grey

Glen