The older I get, the younger seventy-five years old seems. So it was sobering this past week to note the deaths of two seventy-five years olds, NPR commentator Cokie Roberts and The Cars lead singer, Ric Ocasek, both of whom I consider to be cultural icons, albeit in very different ways.
Yesterday while listening to the replay of a 2017 NPR interview with Ric Ocasek I was struck by his need to create, how what he wrote seemed hard-wired into his very being, and how the judgment of the world-at-large mattered less to him, but not so little that he didn’t want affirmation that his words and ultimately his music, resonated with others. The way he expressed himself reminded me of the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson when he said “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Finding balance between independent creativity, and a co-dependent life (be that in work, in marriage or in both) can be a great and persistent challenge.
Cokie Roberts seemed at relative ease in the integration she found between her work and family life. She seemed to thrive on her unique ability to translate and make digestible complex global politics, and she was very much immersed in the intricacies of the world. Yet she also took time to write books (some in collaboration with her husband), thereby embracing time for her partnership and for her solitude. But even with that said, when in 2013 she was asked what was the best part of her career, she answered saying that her family has been “by far the best part” of her life. While living on the world’s stage, she clearly valued most the intimacy of her family life, and they in turn valued her saying today “We will miss Cokie beyond measure, both for her contributions and for her love and kindness.”
Ric and Cokie’s deaths give me pause and cause me to consider the profound daily impact we have on one another. Their deaths also bring to mind Mary Oliver, whom the world also lost this past year, and her poem The Summer Day, which I see as a challenge to all of us:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
