This Old Box: You and I Are Too Old and Too Full of Life to Fit Inside

Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Jason Pofahl on Unsplash

Life lived outside the lines

There wasn’t much room left in the metal box. Manila envelopes, once marked with my father’s neat block letters, were worn, torn and often opened. Old wills dating to my grandparents, ancient powers of attorney, dad’s graduation papers and other documents dating to the early 20th Century spilled out into the private booth.

I’d written over Dad’s script after they had passed. Their deposit box contents ended up stuffed into my own.

I have a hard time letting go of what’s left of my family.

In fact, I am what’s left of my family. No kids, uncles, aunts, no brothers or sisters. I’m it, at this point. I guess what’s stuffed in the box reminds me that there is still so much more life to be lived.

Everyone else is gone. It’s all on my shoulders if there’s to be any kind of story told about my twig of the family tree.

My maternal grandparents, Mom, Dad were all crammed in there, evidence of lives lived. But nothing remains of the vast arcs of those lives, the loves, the people touched, the chances taken, the visions seen and lived, the risks, rewards, devastation, losses and immense expanse of feelings over so many decades.

Those stories cross two centuries of human experience, little more than a minuscule blip in the vast ocean of geological time.

I was standing in the safety deposit vault at my local Key Bank, updating my own box with a few new pieces of paperwork and getting copies of essential documents for the potential move overseas.

Again, it’s not for sure. But getting all the necessary documents (marriage, divorce, social security, birth certificate, etc.) is part of being mission-ready.

If Trump drops the axe on my income, I have to sell my house. If that happens, I have a few choices, one of them to move overseas. I’m hanging fire right now but I have a go-plan, just like I have a go-bag in case of fire or earthquake.

Such a tiny box to hold the sum of three lives. Mom, Dad, my own. There is nothing of my brother’s, whose life was lived outside paperwork. Deeds to houses I bought and sold. A single certificate marking the start of a marriage, thick wads of paperwork marking the end of that marriage.

I’m now older than both my parents when they first wrote their wills, moved themselves into their final living facility and began to slowly sit out the last of their days.

Their battered RV lilted slightly to one side as it hunkered, weighed down with years, miles and a million stories, just outside their tiny 500-square-foot box of an apartment at Sunny Acres Villa in Denver.

Ultimately, that tiny box wasn’t enough to contain my mother.

Dad died of cancer in a tiny box of a room in the final care area of their facility.

After Dad died, she fell in love, broke briefly out of tiny box jail and flew to California to be bedded a few more times before her bright light finally dimmed out at 91.

She couldn’t be contained even though her eyesight failed at the end. She was still living large in her own way.

Her ashes were presented to me in a cardboard can, another box, which then lived in the back of my van, another box, for several years.

Every turn I took I could hear Mom rolling across the floor, banging into the sides of the van, my mother’s laughter echoing as I drove. My van was another box.

She’d have been delighted. But she wanted out of the ashes box that was now inside the van box.

Years later, I drove Mt. Evans, the highest highway in America, to spread her ashes on the high mountain waters. A duck came over to inspect, thinking I had food.

It wasn’t. Disgusted, the duck shat on my mother’s sinking ashes as I watched, laughing, hearing my mother guffaw as she spread herself far and wide, her irrepressible stardust returning to its source. After a short stint with duck shit, that is.

My mother: fertilized. Free, finally.

Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash

So many of us live desperate lives within the confines of a box based on fear. The terrifying “what ifs” drive stakes into the beating hearts of our souls, those souls whose wings so often never spread, never feel the rising warmth of a thermal off a cliff in Mendoza.

I’ve ridden those thermals. Free of the bounds of earth, soaring, tears windswept over my face, arms outstretched. Free. Boundless.

I miss that feeling right now, as I get ready for two more foot surgeries this year which will, I hope, put me back hiking mountains, riding my bike, and feeling the wind from the back of a fast horse.

Sometimes I think that one reason I so love adventure travel is because I’m outside the box. In a tent, subject to the whims and vagaries of Nature. Like

Erik Hogan

, who shares such gorgeous photos of his world.

Are you living inside the box? Done that. Huddled inside, gripped by shame and eating disorders for decades. Once I broke out there was no going back.

So little of that life is reflected in the sterile paper reports sitting in my Key Bank safety deposit box.

Our lives are told in small part by the paperwork which marks the major milestones. Flat, staid reports about lives lived, some in full, some in fear.

Constantly we’re told to think outside the box.

Bullshit. That’s thinking way too small.

Let’s LIVE outside the box. That means to let go of the attachment to perceived safety- hell, most of our so-called safety is being ripped away anyway.

The way I see it, we’re being kicked out over the cliff. We can hide in fear or we can fly. As Americans, anyway, we still have choices for how to feel about how we live our lives.

Will you risk rising with life’s thermals? Create a story that can’t be contained?

Will you live outside the box? What will you do with the precious time you are given, time that will never be recorded in your tiny safety deposit box?

If you want inspiration, please see this story about the extraordinary Annie Wilkins.

If you want inspiration, please see this story about the extraordinary Barbara Hillary.

What makes the bird in your chest sing, the one who wants out of the cage, the box in which we contain our lives?

Will you live as stardust before you return to stardust?

I’m sure going to try.

Let’s play.

Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash

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