It is instructive to occasionally dig out the box with the old death pictures and ponder the unfathomable passage of time. Many relatives and neighbors who died when you were a child are remembered as ancient people. The death pictures reveal the opposite: a surprising number reported their death at the age of 54, 57 or 62, and only a few reached the age of 70. Moreover, when they left this world, they were bent and bent from hard work. The writer Oskar Maria Graf described a relative who died at the age of 58 as representative of all these fates: “He had long looked like a emaciated, stiff-boned old man. His sparse, long, thin hair was snow white and his sunken, eerie yellow face resembled a skull. “
We have just read that on election day in November, American President Joe Biden will be 81 years old – and his opponent Donald Trump will be 78. Americans seem to have respect for age, although it does not always make one wise. In Bavaria, people prefer to pay attention to vitality when electing leaders. Markus Söder was 51 years old when he took office as the youngest Prime Minister to date, closely followed by Edmund Stoiber (52), Max Streibl and Hanns Seidel (each 56).
A few days ago, a farmer who died at the age of 65 was buried in a village cemetery in the Isental. Many names from the 19th century can still be read on the old gravestones in the churchyard. Hardly anyone lived to be older than the person who had just died. What is time, who is old, who is young? Questions that cannot be avoided when looking at the death pictures or in the small cemetery. A farmer’s wife said at her grave that at 70 she finally knew what she didn’t know as a young woman: namely, how quickly 40 years can fly by.
As with every “corpse”, time seemed to stand still briefly at the grave on this cloudy January day. It gave way to the reminder that life is held together by work and by fate, which in turn distributes its gifts as it sees fit. Here it gives happiness, there it distributes sadness. No one has described this area of tension as vividly as the Munich writer Ernst Hoferichter. When he was born in 1895, the midwife came too late. “She was at the masquerade ball of the Funeral Fund Association Happiness.”