I Have Outlived Most Of Them

There is a particular arithmetic that starts somewhere in your seventies, and nobody warns you about it.

You count. Not on purpose. It happens while you are doing something else, and what you are counting is how many of the people who knew the whole story are still reachable by telephone.

The number keeps getting smaller and it does not go back up.

And what it does to a room is strange. You are at a family gathering, surrounded by people who love you, and part of you is somewhere else entirely, in a kitchen in 1961 with people who would have understood a particular joke without it needing to be explained.

So you have started to feel like a visitor at the very table you built.

What the counting is really doing

Let me be careful here, because there is a version of this that would be an insult.

Nobody is going to tell you to look on the bright side. Nobody is going to suggest the ones being counted were replaceable, or that the room around you now is the same room. It is not the same room and everybody who says otherwise is talking about something they have not lived.

What I want to name is narrower. The counting has quietly become the way you locate yourself in a family, and it can only ever return a shrinking answer.

You have been finding your place in a family by subtraction, and no honest sum has ever once told a person where they actually stand. Psalm 71:18 has a man in old age asking God for one specific thing, which is written into the passage, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can turn a person around in a room without asking them to forget anything.

Because there is a second family in that house and you have been looking straight past it. The grandchildren. The one who married in. The great nephew who is twenty three and has no idea what to say to you and turns up anyway, every time, and stands about.

They are not a replacement. They are also not spectators. They are the family, present tense, and every one of them has their own reasons for the way they are with you, and at least one of them is right about something you have never conceded.

You are surrounded by people who are actually here, and being outlived by a household has never once meant being left outside of it. The Spirit of God is what makes a room in the present bearable rather than second best, and it is written in Psalm 71 that a man asks not to be forsaken when he is old and grayheaded.

Until I have shewed thy strength

Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. (Psalm 71:18, King James Version)

Read what the man is actually asking for, because it is not comfort.

He is not asking for company. He is not asking for the old days back, and he is not asking to be spared anything. He asks God not to leave him yet, and he gives a reason, and the reason is a job.

Until I have showed Your strength to this generation.

You have been left here on purpose and with a reason attached, and God has never once kept somebody in a room only because He had nowhere else to put them. It is written in Psalm 71:18 that the request is until I have showed thy strength unto this generation, which is the written word naming an assignment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old assignment current.

Note the phrase this generation. Not my generation. The one in the room, the one that does not remember any of it, the one that would need the joke explained.

That is the audience he is asking to be kept alive for.

You are the only person left who can hand this generation something, and no one else in that house has ever once carried what you carry. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a memory into an inheritance rather than a private ache, and Psalm 71 puts the whole request in terms of what is still to be shown to the ones coming after.

The thing only you can do

Here is the practical shape of it, and it is smaller than it sounds.

The people in that room do not know the stories. Not really. They know the outline, the way anybody knows an outline, and they have never once heard the specific detail that makes a person real: what your mother said in a particular hallway, what the house smelled like, what it cost to make a decision everybody now takes for granted.

You are the last person alive who has that. When you stop saying it, it stops existing.

You have something in you that no one can get anywhere else, and a story nobody has heard has never once been the same as a story nobody wants. The Holy Spirit is the one who prompts a person to speak at the right moment, and it is written that a man asked to be kept until he had showed God's strength to this generation.

And I want to take one fear off you, because it is why most of these stories never get told. You are worried about being the old person who repeats themselves. You have watched somebody else do that and you decided a long time ago that you would not.

So you keep it in. And the family reads the silence as you having nothing much to say.

You are permitted to tell it, and one true story told once has never once been the same thing as a man repeating himself. The Spirit of God is what gives a person the nerve for an ordinary sentence, and Psalm 71:18 makes the showing of God's strength the actual reason for the years.