A RECKONING
You don’t need to wait until you die to receive a reckoning, whether you are going up to heaven or down below. And the platitudes mentioned at your funeral or memorial service, are not a reckoning. They won’t be accurate. You won’t hear them in any case.
At some point in your old age you have to face a lifetime of experience and accumulation and begin to make your own judgment before someone else makes them for you.
What I am talking about is the realization that after a lifetime of accumulation you have to begin stripping things away as you move into tighter and tighter accommodations: an apartment, then a single room, then a bed and finally the tightest permanent accomodation of all. At this point, old age, you also begin to wonder what will be left when you die, what will mark that you have been here, what fading memories you will leave. You can write your memoir hoping it won’t be too quickly shelved and forgotten. Or if you have enough money, you can plan a large tomb; or a bridge or an avenue named for you; or if you can manage it, a pyramid with a hidden tomb like the pharaohs. Whatever you can manage you know it will eventually settle into oblivion, as will the whole human race and the planet we live on.
But on a much more modest scale you probably have writings and photographs and furniture of your parents that you have to decide what to do with, how to keep their memory alive a little longer. And then there are your own accumulated furniture, photographs and writing which you hope your children will be interested in keeping, passing the burden along to them.
You bought this stuff assuming that you were going to live forever, an illusion you knew wasn’t true, but you couldn’t help yourself. And now as you begin to downsize to smaller and smaller accomodation you have to begin divesting yourself of all this.
Finally you face the reckoning, alone, of the results of your life on earth, before someone makes it for you, and begin not only throwing things out, but facing the now apparent idiocy of your lifetime of accumulation.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 