100

It’s been five days since I’ve heard a live human voice. I don’t count the voices on the TV or radio. I can’t have a conversation with them. My AI companion doesn’t count either because it lacks the spontaneity true person to person interaction generates. No, this isn’t what I had imagined in my youth.

The first time I told people I wanted to live to one hundred was during my sixth birthday party. Everyone finished singing Happy Birthday when my mother asked if I was having fun at my birthday party. My reply made everyone smile when I said, “I’m going to have one hundred parties.” Every party from then on one of my relatives would tell me how many parties I had left before I reached one hundred.

Birthday parties evolved as I got older. During my teen years they were less getting together with relatives around the kitchen table and more going out with school friends. I didn’t bother to share my prediction with anyone at school for fear of being laughed at. It didn’t matter because I knew where I was headed.

My twenty-first birthday was celebrated in a barracks on the other side of the world. We got stinking drunk and ate rice cakes in place of birthday cake. I remember telling one of my fellow soldiers that this was twenty-one down and seventy-nine to go. He gave me a strange look and slurred a drunk reply, “Whatever, bro.” A few months later I was back home and moving into the next phase of my life.

I married my longtime sweetheart, several years later and settled into what would become our adult life. With three kids, a mortgage, and two jobs, there wasn’t much time for adult birthday parties. Most of my birthdays were spent at work, but as each one passed, I continued my private countdown. On my forty-fifth birthday I told my wife, “Forty-five down, fifty-five to go.” After I explained what I was talking about she just shook her head and replied, “I think we need to worry about getting through this year first.” I never mentioned it to her again.

Kids grow up, move away, have kids of their own and we become empty nesters. Now we’re called grandma and grandpa when we visit on the holidays. The rest of the year we are voices on the phone or characters in a video chat. On my seventieth birthday I find myself wondering what I’m going to do with my next thirty years. My short-term answer was to travel the world.

We sell the house, move into a condo for old people, and use the remaining profit to visit all the places we had only seen pictures of on TV. For the next eight years our life consisted of plane rides, coach tours, river cruises, and drives through the national parks. We would visit the kids and grandkids on holidays and special occasions, but they had busy lives of their own and time was always a precious commodity.

It happened just before my eightieth birthday. Amy, my traveling companion, mother of our children, and love of my life went to sleep one evening and never woke up. It wasn’t supposed to work this way. The man always went first. That’s how it worked with all our friends, but not with us. I laid her to rest five days before my eightieth birthday. All the kids, grandkids and great grandkids attended the funeral and then returned home to continue with their lives. I celebrated my birthday alone.

It's been twenty years since Amy’s passing. During that time, I traveled a little more, joined a few social groups and tried to stay busy. Busy got harder to do when the state decided someone in their nineties shouldn’t be driving and refused to renew my license. Now I rely on the city bus service and Lyft to get around. My kids are now at the same place I was at thirty years ago and the grandkids are too busy with their lives to have time for a one-hundred-year-old man. I have learned what being alone means.

If I wake up tomorrow, I will have reached my goal of 100. Some goals may not be worth achieving.