The Worst Part of Getting Older Is All the Dying
I suspect this is not going to slow down.
On Sunday afternoon, word came that Wes Freed, a longtime Southern underground artist perhaps best known for his album covers for the Drive-By Truckers, had died of colon cancer. Freed was the sort of artist that meant a ton to the people who knew him — Jason Isbell dedicated his set to him last night — but wasn’t quite popular enough to get an obituary in, say, The New York Times … which is probably exactly how an underground artist would like it. Freed will be sorely missed … which is a phrase I feel like I’m saying all the time anymore.
I have a friend who is an entertainment writer who has begun to darkly joke that every time he finds a second to take a break or a few days off, a beloved actor or musician will die and he’ll be called upon to write an obit for them. The joke isn’t that he doesn’t like writing about performance he cares for, but instead that there are constant obits to be written. The older you get, the more people whose work you value start dying. And it will never, ever stop.
In his brilliant essay “This Old Man,” the writer Roger Angell — who just died this summer, sparking his own set of obits — described the worst part of getting older: Continuing to live while all the people you care about don’t get to anymore.
“Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing — that pale-yellow Saks scarf — reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation. Our dead are almost beyond counting and we want to herd them along, pen them up somewhere in order to keep them straight.
When I was in my 20s, I never thought about death, or at least not as anything but a shocking aberration — Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Princess Diana’s car accident, sudden cruel thunderbolts but hardly anything settling into any sort of pattern. But as you get into your 40s, death starts to creep in around the edges. People you went to high school with, if they kept partying like they did in their youth, start to have their bodies give out on them by this point. When you’re in your 40s, people your age can legitimately have heart attacks; my grandfather had had two by my age. Former co-workers, old friends, exes, that baseball player who played for your team but you hadn’t thought about in a while … they just sort of pop up, and drop dead, every time you turn your head for a second.
This accelerated during the pandemic — when there were so many deaths, and, really, there are still so many deaths — that it became impossible to chronicle, or even process, them all. And as I get older, it will accelerate even more. Death no longer feels like a shocking aberration; it feels much more like a part of regular life. Soon it will become a staple of regular life. Then it will feel like a pleasant rarity when it doesn’t happen. And then it will happen. I hadn’t thought about Wes Freed other than a vague sense of admiration of his work, until he died, which struck me as sad and terrible but not immediately tragic. Death feels less tragic than it used to, because of how much of it you are confronted with, as you get older. Even though it’s just as final now as it used to be. There’s a lot you have to figure out, a lot you have to go through, when you get older. This strikes me as the worst of it.
Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.