A Reflection at Seventy-Three
By: Kenneth Carnesi, Sr.
I wake earlier than I used to, though I sleep no less. The body keeps its own clock now, indifferent to the hour I’d choose for it. There is a stiffness in my hands most mornings that wasn’t there a decade ago, an ache in the knee that climbs the stairs before I do. I sit in my chair and watch the light come up, and I find myself doing the thing men my age apparently cannot help doing: taking stock. Of years. Of what they amounted to, and what they did not.
I listen for my wife stirring upstairs. Forty-eight years now. I look at her sometimes and see all the women she has been — the girl who married me too young, the mother exhausted at two in the morning with a colicky infant, the woman who buried her own parents and sat with me while I grieved mine. The woman, who, with little notice, was called upon to hold our entire family together through a time of unspeakable hardship, a time that no wife or mother should ever be called upon to face. I did not understand, in my thirties, what I was promising when I said I would stay. I know now it was the only education that mattered — the slow, unglamorous curriculum of showing up, of forgiving the small daily failures, of being known completely by another person and choosing, again and again, to remain knowable. Whatever wisdom I have, she taught me, mostly by outlasting both my foolishness and catastrophic failures.
My children are grown now, they call and check in out of love and habit, roughly in equal measure. I was not, I will admit plainly, the father I meant to be. I was present in the way that providing is present — I went to work, I paid for things, I showed up to the important games and missed the unimportant ones, never quite grasping that to a child, there is no unimportant game. I remember an autumn when my son wanted me to come to his Saturday practices, just to watch, and I told him I was too busy at work, that I would come next week. There were a great many next weeks. He is forty-one now and gracious about it, more gracious than I deserve, and that grace is its own quiet rebuke. I cannot get those Saturdays back. My daughter, now thirty-four, fared no better; missed practices, missed games, missed recitals. I have made peace with that quite rebuke, without ever fully accepting it — peace and acceptance, I have learned, are not the same thing, and a man can live a long time in the gap between them. My children lost me for a time away that stole years from all of our lives. They were forced to grow up too fast and to face realities too young, realities no child should have to face.
Friendship has thinned the way a forest thins in winter — not all at once, but tree by tree, until one day the light comes through differently than it used to. I have witnessed the passing of three men I once called my friends. Heart problems, mostly. The phone used to ring more. There is a particular grief in outliving the people who remembered you young, who knew the version of you before you had hardened into whoever you became — when they go, a witness to your own life goes with them, and you are left to vouch for yourself alone.
Here is what I wasted, since I promised myself I would be honest in this, and not merely wistful. I wasted twenty years of low-grade anger in family disputes that can never be fully reconstructed now. I wasted entire seasons of my life rehearsing arguments I never had the courage to finish, and other seasons replaying ones I should have walked away from. I wasted health I did not know was finite, the way the young always do, on hours of work that no one remembers and grudges that outlived their causes. I chased a version of success in my forties with an intensity I now find almost embarrassing, certain it would settle something in me that, it turned out, only sitting quietly with my own discontent could ever settle. None of this is unusual. I do not say it for sympathy. I say it because someone younger than me ought to hear it from someone who actually lived it, rather than read it as a warning in a book and set it down.
There are things truly gone, and I want to say that plainly rather than dress it in comfort. My mother died before I had asked her the questions I now think mattered most — what she was actually afraid of, what she would have done differently, and whether she thought, after everything that took place, that I had turned out all right. Those questions died with her, and no amount of honest reflection retrieves them. My own youth is gone in the ordinary, irreversible way — the body that could run three miles without consequence, the years when my children were small and wanted nothing more than my attention, which I gave in fractions when they were asking for the whole. Faith has not made these losses smaller. It would be a lie to say otherwise, and I have grown impatient with comforting lies. What faith has done is something else entirely. It has kept the losses from being the only true thing about my life.
I was not raised devout, and I did not become devout through any single dramatic turn. It crept up on me through ordinary catastrophe — a diagnosis that turned out in the end to be treatable, a winter after my father’s death when I could not have told you why I kept getting up except that something underneath reasoning told me to. A catastrophic failure in my fifties, that took our home, our possessions, my career, my freedom. I have come to think faith is less a set of answers than a posture: a willingness to keep facing forward when the evidence for doing so is thin. Hope, I have decided, is not optimism. Optimism is a guess about outcomes, and mine have been wrong more often than right. Hope is a decision to keep my hands open toward a future I cannot see the shape of, made not because I am confident it will be good but because closing my hands has never once helped anything. And resilience, despite the self-help-aisle gloss the word has acquired, is not a personality trait I was lucky enough to inherit. It is closer to a callus, formed slowly, by repetition, in exactly the places life rubbed me rawest. I am resilient now, mostly in the places I once broke.
What I want to insist on, against the grain of my own catalog of regret, is that seventy-three is not simply an inventory of doors closed. Some are, it is true. I will not run again, not really, and I have stopped pretending I am in training for some imagined return. I have a marriage that, freed of the noise of careers and child-rearing, has become something closer to friendship than it has ever been, and there are years left to deepen that, not merely coast on it. I have, for the first time since I was young, more questions than certainties, and I find I would rather sit with my wife and wonder aloud than lecture anyone with the false confidence I mistook for wisdom at forty. There is, even now, a version of generosity available to me that I was too busy or too proud to practice at forty — the generosity of attention, which costs nothing and which I withheld, mostly, for free.
I think, too, of the friendships still possible, the ones not yet begun. It is a strange comfort to realize that a man can make a new friend at seventy-three, that the capacity for it does not expire on any schedule I was warned about. There is, it turns out, no age past which a man becomes finished. There is only the age past which he stops trying, and I have decided, with whatever years remain to me, not to arrive at it.
Sometimes my wife and I can sit for hours and say almost nothing, and I no longer experience that silence as absence the way I once might have. It is, instead, a kind of fullness — proof that two people can run out of urgent things to say to each other and remain, after everything, glad of the company. I think often these days about what I would tell the man I was at forty, and it is not a warning, exactly, though it contains one. It is closer to an invitation: that the years still ahead of him, however few, are not a postscript to the years already spent. They are not lesser chapters. Faith tells me the story is not yet finished. Hope tells me the unfinished parts might still be good. And whatever resilience I have earned tells me I am, even now, capable of the small, repeated acts of love I once mistook for too little to matter. I wasted more than I would like to admit. I cannot get a single hour of it back. But I am, this morning, still here, still loved, still capable of becoming someone slightly better than I was yesterday — and that, more than any accounting of what is lost, is the thing I find I actually believe.
Kenneth Carnesi, Sr. 