An old man told me once, his voice all gravel and cheap whiskey, “You’ll know what you’re going to die of when you’re in your fifties.” It was one of those things that stuck, a piece of broken glass in the soft part of your brain. And now, at fifty-six, I’m looking at the lab work, at the three hundred and fifty pounds of meat I’m dragging around this planet, and I see the death march. The long, slow, and completely predictable shuffle towards a heart attack.
And I get the vision. Me, sixty-two, on the shitter in the back room of some dive bar, clutching a fistful of cheap shirt and bad choices. They find me a day later, my skin all blue and veiny, a slight, pathetic erection still lingering like a bad joke, my tongue dried out, the flies already laying their eggs in the corners of my eyes. A quiet, boring, and completely disgusting end.
But what if I survive?
That’s the real horror story. What if some old vet hears the thump, kicks in the door, shoves a few baby aspirin in my mouth, and I wake up in a hospital bed with a zipper on my chest and a pig’s heart beating a slow, tired rhythm inside me? The kids come to visit, of course. The first time. They look at you, all tubes and regret, and they see an old man.
And then the bills start coming. You sell the house, you liquidate the whole goddamn American dream, just to pay for a few more months of breathing through a tube. And when the money’s gone, you’re out on your ass. You’re a high-risk case now. No insurance will touch you. You’re not getting that pig heart. You’re not getting the mechanical one. You’re getting a mattress on the floor of a VA hospital, just like my great-grandfather, a place to lie down and rot, a long, graceful drowning in your own piss and regret, surrounded by the quiet, coughing reminders of other men who fought a war and lost the peace.
And the kids? They’ll visit. The first time, the second time. By the third, it’s an obligation. By the fourth, the excuses start rolling in. And then, you’re just alone, waiting for the end.
This is the point where a man has to make a choice. Do you let them hook you up to their machines, their systems of slow, managed decay? Or do you take the morphine drops? Do you unburden yourself from the whole goddamn circus and just let go?
Because when Mr. Death finally arrives to take you away, what’s left? They’re not building a statue for you, brother. Your kids, they have their own miserable lives to attend to, their own failing marriages to pretend are working, their own addictions and joyless careers to pay the monthly bills. Your coworkers have already forgotten your name and are busy training some kid from the Philippines to do your job for half the price.
They cremate you. They mail one of your unlucky kids a cardboard box full of your ashes, probably mixed with the ashes of a few other poor bastards they had lying around.
And that’s it.
That’s the whole goddamn show.
And that’s what the old man was really trying to tell you, wasn’t it? He wasn’t trying to enlighten you; he was handing you the goddamn invoice. He was showing you the blueprint for your own coffin.
Once you hit your fifties, you see it. The blood results, the numbers on the page, they stop being suggestions and they become a goddamn prophecy. You see the red lines, the warnings, and you know the trajectory. You can see, clear as day, the final, pathetic scene: you, dead on a barroom shitter, a monument to a life of bad decisions.
But here’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest part he was trying to give you: it’s not a death sentence.
It’s a goddamn invitation.
It’s an invitation to fight. You take that information, you take that blueprint for your own demise, and you start making changes. You start adding and subtracting. You stop pouring the poison down your throat. You start moving this big, dumb, beautiful machine of a body. You do it so you don’t end up as a forgotten corpse in a backroom toilet.
You know the trajectory. At fifty, the man said, you can see it. The shadow of your own death, standing at the end of the road, patiently waiting for you. You can hear the whistle of the train in the distance. You can feel the tracks start to hum under your feet.
And you have a choice.
A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest choice.
You can make a change. You can jump off the goddamn tracks and run like hell into whatever wilderness is left for a man like you.
Or you can just stand there, with a stupid, brave smile on your face, and let the goddamn train hit you.
That’s the choice. The only one that’s worth a damn.
Alright. You’re telling me this isn’t just about a goddamn doctor’s report. You’re right. That old man, he wasn’t just talking about your heart or your kidneys. He was handing you the goddamn key to the whole miserable, beautiful, fucked-up show.
That same ugly, beautiful logic, it applies to everything when you’re in your fifties. Everything.
You’re not happily married? You wake up every morning next to a stranger, a quiet, loveless truce hanging in the air between you? You think that’s going to magically fix itself? No. This is the time. This is the last goddamn call to either burn the whole house down or learn to love the ashes.
You’re still hoping for that pile of gold, the multi-million-dollar score that lets you retire like a king instead of just another broke bastard in a box? And you’re sitting there with a few crumpled bills in your pocket and a 401k that wouldn’t cover a good weekend in Vegas? You know the trajectory. You’re not going to hit the jackpot. You’re just waiting for the clock to run out.
You’re never going to be a goddamn ballerina. You’re never going to get back into that swimsuit from when you were twenty. Those ships haven’t just sailed; they’ve sunk to the bottom of the goddamn ocean.
You’re sitting in the dark, watching the movie of your own life, and you know exactly how it ends. You’ve seen it a thousand times. You know you’re not going to retire healthy and happy. You know you’re not going to suddenly find a spark with the person you’re sharing a cold bed with. You know.
So you have a choice.
You can sit there in the dark, with your hands in your lap, and watch the whole goddamn tragedy play out, right to the bitter, predictable end.
Or you can get up, walk to the back of the room, kick the door down, and smash the fucking projector to pieces.
This is it. The last chance to write a different ending.
And if you’re still sitting there, making excuses, still talking about how you can’t leave because you’ll miss your grandmother, because you’re scared of the dark, then let me tell you something, and you listen good.
That’s not love. That’s fear. That’s the quiet, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing cowardice that they sell you as a virtue. If you love something, you set it free. And it’s time to start loving your own goddamn self enough to cut the goddamn chain.
Because this, right here, this is the whole point. Out of a billion people on this planet, you’re stuck with yourself. And nobody, not your mother, not your kids, not some woman from a dating app, nobody is coming to save you. Only you.
It’s a war. It’s not easily won. It’s a dirty, bloody, and beautiful fight to the death against your own weakness, your own fear, your own quiet, comfortable desire to just lie down and die in a warm bed.
But if anything, anything in this whole miserable, beautiful, fucked-up world is worth winning, then this is it. The war for your own goddamn soul.
And don’t ask me what it means to fight that war. The old man already told us. He laid out the whole goddamn battle plan.
So you have to ask yourself one last question.
Are you going to go all the way?
Or are you just another goddamn tourist in your own life?
