Baby Boomers Consider the End of Life

Robert Kopecky writes in How to Survive Life and Death:

Every generation must have more or less the same experience of life—updated to current times, that is. The basic life cycle couldn’t have changed all that much, except that we generally live a lot longer now. We obviously all get born—a shared experience that I don’t think anybody can remember. As little children, our brains aren’t developed enough to receive all the complicated transmissions, navigate “reality,” or fill up with lots of (mostly useless) “important” stuff for a while yet. I think that’s why so many little kids appear to be so endearingly insane. For a little while at least, they’re free of the complicated world of “who you are supposed to be.” They haven’t yet reached that threshold of sanity that we call being “grown-up” (which some of us never truly reach) and which always tragically tends to interrupt our ability to perceive the simplest magic of Life. That can be our critical loss of innocence, I suppose.

It isn’t until you get a little older that a slightly more adult perception starts to form and you also first begin to notice the seriousness of death, perhaps with the loss of a beloved pet—a loss that never gets any easier because of the shared innocence of our animal partners. Then maybe a grandparent passes away. Sometimes there’s an illness or an accident involving a young friend or acquaintance, and occasionally the loss of another person now and then throughout your life. Then your second generational wave of deaths arrives: an uncle, a friend’s parent, and on into your own parents’ generation. It’s a far more involving wave, that one, because it sets you firmly into a middle age when you begin to lose your parents and mentors, and when you first begin to sense that “ultimate” wave that’s drawing ever nearer to your own generation—and, most important, to you.