King Lear's Lament - Umberto Tosi

Lear and daughters

Choices narrow as I approach 90. I see across denial. I find that I must adjust, while struggling to preserve as much as possible of what I find most essential. I see why we ultra-oldsters disturb our juniors. It's not just individual disposition. We rattle their operative mythology.

Yet I have no choice but to accept death's proximity - no choice when I consider the alternative. 

At the same time, I find that everyone needs some degree of denial. The feeling of immortality comes with consciousness. 

As an outspoken critic of an 80-year-old President who mocks the aged and fakes youth, and for whom denial is a way of life, I don't like admitting to any degree of it. 

But I try my best tot to admit my shortcomings. I'm not a felonious poser and sexual predator. I don't dye my hair, wear makeup and demand flattery from those around me.

I continue to write, edit, and publish drafts of my latest novels, essays and short stories with more urgency, but proceed nonetheless. I see doctors and follow their recommendations. 

I monitor myself, use common sense, and ask a lot of questions. I exercise moderately. 

I've benefited from healthy eating and decades of running 10K a day, but ageing has dissolved the wellness culture's more heady illusions.

Welcome to my slo-mo world. Everything takes me longer now. One must be patient or be constantly agitated.

I cope with labyrinths of doctors and therapists, of Medicare parts A, B, and C, and health insurance plans and pharmacies, and suffer the slings and arrows of missing teeth and not-always-reliable bladder and bowels.

When I was a boy, my father told me I'd live to be 100. That was back in the late 1940s. Two of my grandparents made it into their late 90s. At 89, I'm thankful for every day. 

I'm most thankful for my four precious daughters. I'm proud of their accomplishments, resourcefulness, and how they live, love and cope with adversities.  I'm deeply grateful that they care for me. 

My eldest, a high school English teacher, helps me edit my novels. 

She flew two thousand miles from San Francisco to Chicago to visit me in the hospital where I landed after a fall and complications.

My two youngest amaze me in myriad ways and pull together as a family.

I now live with my second eldest, in Montana, a thousand miles west of my long-time home in Chicago. But it is vastly preferable to care facilities.

She, her husband and I share a rich relationship, full of love and memories. She is in her early 60s. The other day, we had a joyful visit with her daughter, whom I had not seen in 20 years, and two of my great-grandsons, whom I had never met. 

At the same time, I'm sad that this has meant uprooting myself and separating from my inamorata, Eleanor, with whom I lived for 15 years. She is in her mid-eighties, with multiple health challenges herself. We remain friends, chatting frequently, sharing experiences and continuing to support each other's creative work. 

I ponder philosophy and religion a lot nowadays. I delve into the Roman Catholic mysteries and rituals I learned in parochial school, and the existentialist riddles that I danced with as an adult. 

I conclude that it's best to behave as a good Samaritan - with or without belief. It's not always easy, but simply the best kind of life. 

Sanity demands that we trust life even though existence makes no sense. Certain native American tribes see God as a trickster coyote. Christians disagree brutally on matters of faith and scripture, as do Muslims and Jews, Hindus, and even Buddhists.

Shakespeare knew this. King Lear's fatal flaw was his inability to trust. It made him easy to fool and distrustful of the daughter who truly cared for him. 

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Umberto Tosi is the author of Sometimes Ridiculous, Ophelia Rising, Frank Ritz Hollywood Noir mysteries: The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead, the Christmas novel: Milagro on 34th Street and Our Own Kind. His stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. He was a staff writer for Forbes magazine, covering the Silicon Valley from 1995 to 2004. 

Before that, he was a section editor and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and its award-winning Sunday magazine, West. 

He was editor of San Francisco Magazine and Diablo Magazine and a contributing editor for Chicago Quarterly Review. 

He has written more than 500 articles and stories for newspapers and magazines, online and in print. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to several of its anthologies, including Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. 

He has four adult children. He resides in Havre, Montana, USA. 

(Umberto3000@gmail.com)