Once I realized that I had danced with death, my understanding of my life started to come together. It was like watching the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. However, the process sometimes wasn’t as fast as I wished, and I am impatient. I want to see the complete picture of the puzzle now and no later than tomorrow. What hasn’t fallen into place haunts me until I understand my reason for being.

For those that haven’t done the dance, trust me; it changed me. My Weltanschauung (worldview) was radically different once I understood the psychological impact that both dances provided me. I did my two dances exactly ten years ago but didn’t grasp either until several years later.

A friend of mine emailed me the video of Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. I spent over a dozen years attending lectures in college, graduate school, and post-graduate school. I also taught a long list of college humanities classes over the past twenty years. Can you imagine the number of lectures that I have attended or lectures that I have given?

Nevertheless, Pausch’s Last Lecture was 1:16:26 long and was the best that I have ever heard or given. That single lecture began the pieces of my life’s puzzle coming together so that I understood essentially my reason for being. My two dances changed me forever. I am more into life than I ever was.

Enter Rod Stewart and his song, Forever Young.

Rod Stewart’s Forever Young was released in 1988, three decades ago. I loved that song then. I merely added it to my long list of songs that I like by Rod Stewart. However, that was 30-years ago when I was 45. At that age, my death wasn’t a present reality. It was something that would happen to me someday. However, the emphasis was on some-day.

Intellectually, I knew that my clock was ticking. Both of my parents had died. My mother died in her early 50s due to lupus, and my father suffered with heart problems for many years after her death. When I was growing up, death lurked just around my home, but I didn’t fathom the reality that I would someday grasp me at a most personal level.

Several weeks ago, I happened to be driving and listening to a cd, which contained some of Rod Stewart’s songs. I don’t recall where I was or where I was going, but I was absorbed in singing along with him. It was my attempt at karaoke.

As the miles sped by, I was musically mesmerized until I realized that I was singing Forever Young. As I drove, I stopped singing. While listening to Rod Stewart sing, I revisited lost loves. This is the third of recent essays wrestling with failed relationships: Ginger and Camelot.

After getting to wherever I was going, I returned home to write another essay about what could have been but wasn’t. I googled Forever Young and clicked on the video as I cut and pasted the lyrics to my rough draft of this essay.

There I sat watching Rod Stewart singing Forever Young. “I was shocked,” like Louie Renault said to Rick in Casablanca.

What shocked me was that Forever Young had another spin on it. It was about Rod Stewart and a young child to whom he was singing the song. Who was the one that decided to use the paternal concern format of a parent/child for this song? I checked the ages of the writers of the song. All the writers were relatively young, and I doubted that they had done the dance. If you were middle-aged and had not done the dance, you would have featured two lovers expressing his or her love for the other person as they went separate ways.

I have three adult children and an adult granddaughter. They are doing well and have faced obstacles in their lives successfully. Nevertheless, I have five much younger grandchildren. Jack and Owen live in Indianapolis and Ti Ti, Snow, and Fatty live in Taunggyi, Myanmar. Those young grandchildren are beginning their journey down the yellow brick road of their lives. While they have faced childlike obstacles, they haven’t faced the onslaught of adult problems, which lie before them.

As I wrote this essay, I watched and listened to the video over and over again. Talk about something haunting me. I worry about my younger grandchildren facing health issues without having the benefit of decades of experience addressing many medical concerns.

Each of my younger grandchildren have to deal with school and their education. Dealing with grades and teachers is a challenge. However, none of them have decades of learning in schools or in the school called life.

Then there are political problems facing them in their countries of origin. Their awareness of those problems is limited, but, as they grow older, those problems will be more clearly understood.

My list of cares is a long inventory of concerns, which have to do with money, jobs, relationships, etc.

And yet, there is that excitement about their journey. Each of them wants to explore what lies ahead. They get up each day to face the day…a day with excitement mixed with anxiety. As I watched the way Rod Stewart cared for the little boy, I remembered holding each of my young grandchildren. I want them to know that “I'm right behind you win or lose….” However, I want to be “right behind” each of them to protect, support, encourage, and comfort them. It haunts me that as their grandfather, I can’t be right behind them all the time. That reality really haunts me.

While they are facing their looming problems, what can I do for them when I am not present? I need to hold them in my arms and tell them that I love them. I need to remind them of my confidence in each of them. I believe in each of them even though they wonder whether he or she will be able to endure their journey down their yellow brick road of life. Amid all of the unimaginable troubles, obstacles, and pain, I must remind each of them that they will be able to address whatever befalls them in their lives.

Dancing with Death

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The Last Lecture

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"My Hauntings"

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On Seeing the Light

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"We Are Family"

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"Music I Love and Why"

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Burmese independence flag

Visit the Burma Independence page to read more about this topic.

09/07/18