SO GRATEFUL TO BE HERE, IT COULD HAVE BEEN OTHERWISE

I will turn sixty-five later this month. On the 1st of August I began Medicare, which I'm still trying to wrap my head around. Sometimes, in bed at night, the ache in my lower back and right hip throbs like toothache, and I feel my age. Mostly, I don’t. I am shocked at my image in the mirror. The crepey skin on my underarms. The bags under the eyes.

Now, I get to practice what it is to love my aging body.

My father was about the age I am today the last time he was physically able to visit me and my brother in the States. We took a family trip (also our last) to Mexico and spent a day in the rain forest. My father sat in a shallow stream on a rock, lush vegetation all around him, the hum of insects, glints on water. With a smile that can only be called beatific, he told me, “I could have come to love all this.”

This New York City-born, London-living, city-loving man, glimpsed another life in that moment. It was the one I was lucky enough to latch onto when I got sober at the age of twenty-seven and nature helped me to recover and heal.

Though he quit drinking in his late forties, my father continued to smoke heavily until his first heart attack, age sixty. His cough was a consistent soundtrack in our lives. His body emaciated. I can recall his frail form as he soaked in that forest spring almost forty years ago. He died of emphysema just after his seventieth birthday.

I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am that I “came to love all this.” The wild paths that took me to mountains tops and remote places, backpacking under the stars. My body’s wear and tear is a price I’ll happily pay for all the adventures I have had, and the happiness that has—and continues to be––mine.

I think we all have those moments in our lives, where as Robert Frost says, “two paths diverged in the woods.” Mine came when I quit drinking and started walking, further and farther into the wild. And I think, too, of the poem “Otherwise” by Sharon Olds that begins:

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise.

There was a moment when my life hung in the balance—to go back to drinking or to reach for this wildly beautiful world and come home to myself through nature.

And I wonder what path you have chosen. And I wonder if you know in your heart if it is one that you would chose again.