On Turning 80: First, You Cry

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash 

--- By Tom Phillips 

First, you cry. 

Lying in bed, doing nothing, thinking about nothing, I would suddenly start to cry.  Nothing dramatic, just a few deep, soft waves of sadness that came and went, with few or no tears shed.   Still, it felt like a good cry. 

My mind went back to senior year in high school.  I'd been determined to goof off and take a minimal academic load, so I could concentrate on basketball and girls.  But my guidance counselor told me that wouldn't look good on college applications. So I  reluctantly signed up for a fourth year of Latin.  And along with a handful of fellow scholars and goof-offs, we read the Aeneid of Vergil, an ancient epic that mixes Gods and humans, history and mythology to tell the story of the founding of Roman civilization, by wandering refugees from the Trojan War.      

With the very first phrase, you know you are in the presence of a great writer: Arma virumque cano, writes Vergil -- "Arms and the man I sing."  A hero, a war, a song -- all promised in three words.  And delivered, in thousands of lines of dactylic hexameter without a false note or a misplaced syllable. 

And somewhere in the middle, I came upon a phrase that stayed with me forever:  

Lacrimae rerum.  "The tears of things" is the literal translation -- but rerum means more than things.  It means what all things have in common, the common ground of existence.  

At the ground of existence, we cry.  

At 80, I hit the ground and cried.  I cried for everything I loved, everything I had lost, for life from beginning to end.  I saw my life and all lives flashing into emptiness and uncertainty.  I began to prepare for my own epic journey.  

First, you cry.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips