Both of my grandfathers are dead. Both died abruptly. 

My father’s father passed away from a stroke when I was just 13. My father and I watched it happen. Or, rather, I watched my father watch it happen. The grave spoke in heavy whispers through my Daddy’s eyes as Grandpa slurred his final words. It was, in many ways, an ugly death. And my childhood was over. 

PawPaw passed away this summer. His was a very different death. He never even told us he was sick. He did tell a close family friend that he felt a few lumps in his neck two weeks before he passed while building a cabin on Weiss Lake. He told him it was serious. He told him he had a bad feeling. He told him not to tell my Momma. He also told him he had amended his wrongs, settled his debts, and had no regrets. He said he was ready to die. And he did, softly on what was by every other measure a lovely morning. I woke up to the news — the first with breath I’d heard in years. 

Both of my grandfathers were also younger than the star of The Golden Bachelor. 

I first saw the advertisements for the show a month or two ago. I laughed. I thought no one would watch it. The show simply adopts all the concepts of the original Bachelor series and tweaks one thing: No contestant is younger than 65. I thought people would be a little uneasy about promiscuous grandparents. But, as it turns out, people are watching it. I have multiple friends who love the show, and from what I can tell its ratings are actually pretty good. 

So, I figured I’d watch the first episode; I reckon I just wanted to hear their voices. After all, I had an inkling of what the show would be: raunchy old ladies who never grew up embarrassingly trying to convince us they are hip and spry. I was aware that it would be a piece of propaganda for young adults convincing them to “rethink old age.” One can figure these things out merely through reading the title. What I did not expect to find, however, was a faint nihilism peeking around every corner of the show. 

The Golden Bachelor Fears Death

I distinctly remember one woman whose name I fail to recall saying something to the effect that she came on the show because she was still looking for hope in the world. I believe she was telling this to the Golden Bachelor himself, but I could be mistaken. 

If I heard my Nana say that, I think I would burst into tears. “Am I not your hope?” I’d ask. “Is everything you’ve built not a sign of your hope?” 

I think I’d be on the verge of departing from this life, too, if in her search for hope she returned to all the fickleness of youthful pleasures. I’d intuit that there is no hope in life at all. That my desires and passions lead me to nothing. That it’s all some pagan circle, all some cave. All myths built upon more myths like Nietzsche thought. 

As a southerner, I have been reared in a tradition utterly at odds with this; one that understands a life matured as that which reflects man’s quest to Heaven; one that gives us hope for rest in the midst of a life where we are dragged around by oscillations between extreme passions and strange desires — perhaps through finding some along the way here on Earth. It is far from foreign for a southerner to aspire to have established roots, built a home, gleaned from life, and met some rest into his final years. After all, life is at its cusp. Death has at least found its way to the driveway, if not the door. This is simply how we’re educated. It’s wisdom. It’s how we prepare for death. As Addie Bundren says in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, “[M]y father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

It struck me that everyone on The Golden Bachelor is scared stiff of dying, which is despairing. My PawPaw was not afraid of death. 

But the despair of The Golden Bachelor is comical. I found myself often reacting to scenes with a sad laugh. A jerk of sorts, as if the laugh snuck up on me. As if I accidentally spit out water. 

And so, as the show came to a close, I was reminded of a woodcut from Holbein’s The Dance of Death. Death himself is hot on the trail of some noble woman. A queen, from the looks of it. He dons a jester’s cap, and an hourglass rests in his left palm. He’s grinning ear to ear like a little boy who just caught a 5-pound bass. The noble lady is fleeing, awfully spooked. 

Then I prayed. I prayed that when I slip through the doors of death, he does not greet me laughing. Because his cackles pealed off the walls of the Golden Bachelor Mansion.