As I contemplate the end of my life, which has to come sooner or later, I try to share with my friends the smartest, most useful thoughts that have come my way in the past 81 years.
One of the best is this simple thought: don’t fight over small things with those you love. And in that category would be lovers, close friends, parents, children, and, in particular, those to whom you are married, or those whose children you are raising.
It’s easy to hatch grievances and anger hurricanes against those you live in intense closeness with. You can get extremely angry at people whom you run into, trip over, have to smell horrid bodily smells from, have to clean up from, have to move their cars from blocking your cars.
I would say it’s almost impossible to fail to get angry at such people. The fundamental truth that those people are your relatives or lovers just makes your feelings of being trapped more intense. You can and must keep those feelings of being imprisoned from taking over your brain to the point that you want to commit murder rather than face life in prison where the chief jailor is your mother or your lover.
But you can and must do it. And if you look to escape by watching a TV show or glomming onto a TV show, it’s really simple to do it.
You don’t want to spend life in prison. Anything would be better.
Wednesday
I have finally found a way to live in the shelter of the Lord:
I awakened today because of a frantic phone call from Jackie, the woman at the bank I have been dealing with for many years. I had an overdraft: not a rare event at all, but her call at such an early hour was unusual.
Through the day, I was in panic about mortality and money.
Then, after lunch, at a cafe by a huge swimming pool, I went to see my psychoanalyst, Dr. Paul, who has been my shrink since 1980, when a cruel Hollywood girl got me tied up in knots. That’s 46 years. I have been with him all of that time, while he lost two wives the loss of whom tied him in knots.
He has always been a doctor and a psychiatrist and a business-like guy — also a polo player and a yachtsman.
Now he’s old and fragile. Today while I was talking to him, I dropped two small bottles of anti-allergy pills on the office floor. We old people are not supposed to bend over, and Paul is extremely tall. But he bent over and picked up my pills. I was touched.
Then, as our session ended, I told him that due to health and money issues, I probably would not be able to see him much longer.
He did something that doctors never do these days: He looked at me with the warm brown eyes of a Jewish doctor. “I want us to keep seeing each other,” he said. “The money is not important. The relationship and its lasting are what counts.”
I started to cry and I am crying right now. I have finally found something good about old age: Plumbing the depths of a love that lasts for generations.
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