Preview: Confronting the Inevitable
An honest conversation with my son, Glenn II
As I’ve mentioned, I tend to get a little depressed around the holidays. The calendar turns over from one year to another, and it’s impossible not to wonder how many more years I have left. Perhaps it’s inevitable that we feel the passage of time more acutely as we age. I certainly do.
This year, I found myself seeking solace. But I didn’t want platitudes, so I turned to someone who reviles platitudes as much as I do: my son, Glenn II. I know that if I ask him a question, I’m going to get an honest answer, even if it makes both of us uncomfortable. We sat down for one of our semi-regular recording sessions, and we talked about the hard things: life, death, and the struggle to change. This conversation is platitude-free, and it is honest—sometimes brutally so.
This is a preview of that conversation. I’ll post the whole thing on Sunday for full subscribers. So if you, like me, are seeking some solace, some honesty, or you just want the full, bracing, multigenerational Glenn Experience, click below to become a full subscriber. You’ll get access to the bonus conversation when we post it, plus early access to weekly episodes, more bonus content, access to the comments section and the archives, and other goodies.
Glenn, if you aren’t looking for platitudes on aging and death, Seneca’s letters to his friend Lucilius on the subject of death are worth reading (there is a short book which contains those letters). He urges people to rehearse for death — so as it actually arrives, the experience is not wholly unfamiliar — and he makes several observations about why death is nothing to fear.
Thanks for doing this. I'm not a morbid person, and yet, I have always considered my life bracketed by death. It's the silent gorilla in the room. It always has been, and it gets bigger every year. More pointedly, my remaining days are finite if not numbered, and as I lay my head down each night, I understand that number to be decremented by one.
Insofar as I find meaning in my life, see value in it, feel love of people, this is a slowly unfolding tragedy of the greatest of proportions. I am not prone to sadness and yet find deep sadness in this tragedy. I am one who easily celebrates the moment, the day, each day, and yet I have begun to mourn my passing. But really, I mourn the loss of all that I so dearly love. It's a very, very sad thing.
I am thankful for having so much to lose. How's that for some lipstick on the pig?
Laugh. Laughter. That's about the most powerful and pointless counterpoint to it all. It's an absurd piece of the puzzle, a tool in the human toolbox, a winning one, amid the great unfolding tragedy. This is a very, very bad joke unfolding. And the joke is on you, Glenn. (It's on me.)
God bless. We're still kicking.