Eighty Summers Isn’t a Lot When You Do the Math… Choose Wisely

TL;DR: If you live to eighty, you get roughly eighty summers, full stop, no bonus round. Most of us are already past the halfway mark without ever doing the math. This is the math, plus what I’ve decided to do about it.

I wasn’t grieving anyone when I did it. Nobody was sick. I was just unloading a dishwasher, doing the kind of aimless mental calculation you do when a task doesn’t require your whole brain, and I landed on a number that has not left me alone since. Eighty summers. That’s the allotment, if you’re lucky, if nothing interrupts it early. Eighty. Not eighty years, which sounds generous and vague and far away. Eighty summers, the specific, countable, sunburned weeks you actually notice you’re alive, the ones with a popsicle stain on the car seat to prove it happened.

I am not a woman who scares easily with numbers. I’ve read the retirement projections. I’ve done the client invoicing math at eleven at night more times than I’d like to admit. But this particular number sat down at my table uninvited and has been there ever since, and it did not help that I turn forty next year, which by this accounting is not a milestone, it’s a halftime whistle, and it’s annoying A.F.

The Math Nobody Asked Me to Do

Here’s how it works, in case your dishwasher hasn’t done this to you yet. Count your age. Subtract it from eighty. That’s what’s left, assuming average and assuming the odds are even remotely on your side, which they may not be, and that’s a separate essay for a separate day.

Now do the harder version. Take the people you love most and are lucky enough to still have. My mom will be sixty-three this year. Eighty minus sixty-three is seventeen, which isn’t a metaphor, it’s just what’s left on the clock. Seventeen summers with her physical presence in the patio chair by the fire pit, the one with the sweater draped over the back because she’s always prepared for any temperature, not her voice on the phone, not the idea of her. Seventeen sounded like plenty until I said it out loud once, in the car, alone, and heard how it landed.

Nobody prepares you for the version of this that turns your own mother into a countdown clock you didn’t ask to be handed. And yet here we all are, doing it anyway, somewhere between the school pickup line and the group chat about whose turn it is to bring the fruit tray.

We Spend the First Half Like the Bank Never Closes

For the first forty summers, give or take, we behave like the account is bottomless. We skip the family barbecue for a work deadline nobody remembers by October. We say next year to the trip, the visit, the long weekend at the lake, because next year always seemed like a reasonable place to keep things. I have personally rescheduled visits with my own parents to accommodate content calendars, and I’ve done it while telling myself it was temporary, this season, next month for sure.

It isn’t recklessness exactly. It’s just that summer forty-one feels indistinguishable from summer eleven when you’re standing inside it, laundry list in one hand, phone buzzing in the other. They come with the same heat, the same long light, the same false promise that there will obviously be more. The account doesn’t send a statement or ping you at fifty percent. It just quietly spends itself down while you’re busy assuming abundance, or answering emails from a lawn chair you paid good money to sit in.

The Second Half Is Where the Math Gets Personal

Forty is where the whistle blows, apparently, and I did not choose the timing. Past that mark, the equation stops being abstract and starts having names attached to it. It’s not eighty summers anymore in a nice framed quote kind of way. It’s my mom’s summers, the ones I keep almost calling ordinary before catching myself, because ordinary is exactly what I won’t get an unlimited supply of. It’s the “charcuterie” breakfast she still puts out every visit, watermelon and bacon and too many kinds of bread spread across the table like a buffet for two people and one very determined nine-year-old, because Jack and I have never once wanted a plate assembled for us when we could build it ourselves. I hope that breakfast never gets old, in both directions. It’s the ones my son still wants me at the table for, before the day comes when my presence is a formality instead of a request. It’s the friend I’ve known for over thirty years, who I keep meaning to call, and might, if I’m not careful, only sit across a real table from five or six more times in this life.

I used to think grief arrived after a loss. What I’ve learned doing this is that a certain kind arrives before it, while everyone involved is still very much alive and passing the potato salad, simply because the subtraction came back smaller than your denial account could absorb. That grief doesn’t ruin the summer. It just makes you show up differently, with your phone face down for once.

What I’ve Actually Changed, Since I’m Not Going to Pretend I Fixed My Whole Personality

I have not become a serene woman who lives entirely in the present moment. I still answer emails on vacation, though I’ve gotten meaner about how many. What’s changed is smaller and more honest. I no longer say next year about a visit if this year is available. I stopped treating my mom’s invitations as things I could reasonably decline for a deadline, because her summers and mine overlap in a window that isn’t infinite. I’ve started ending phone calls with my dad differently, saying the real thing instead of the efficient thing, because he is not an invoice, and one day the call will end and I won’t get to redo it.

None of this is dramatic. Nobody’s quitting their job to live on a beach, and if they did, I’d want to know how they’re paying for it. It’s smaller than that. It’s choosing the barbecue over the deadline as often as I actually can, and being honest about the difference between can’t and won’t.

It’s also, apparently, moving my kid back to my hometown for the summer, the single most literal thing I’ve done with this so far. I wanted him to have the version of childhood I had, not a curated one, not one that requires a group chat and a waiver. Streets he can walk without me watching from a window. A backyard pool that was ready for him and his buddies at all times, towels never quite dry, chlorine smell in the car for weeks. Kids whose last names he didn’t know and may never learn, because nine-year-olds exchange popsicles and loyalty, not surnames. City living has plenty going for it, and I still like a good iced matcha latte delivered to my door. But there’s a stretch of childhood that only exists at this scale, and I wasn’t going to let that stretch of his eighty summers slide by on the theory we’d get to it eventually, right after I answered one more email.

Choose Wisely Isn’t a Suggestion, It’s Just Math

Here’s the part that finally sat still long enough for me to write it down. You don’t get to choose how many summers are in the stack. Eighty is the estimate, and plenty of people don’t get that. But you get to choose what you do with the ones left, and who gets to be in them.

I keep thinking about my son, who still wants me at everything, holds my hand crossing the parking lot without being asked, and how that window is closing faster than I’m ready for. I keep thinking about my mom’s patio chair, and how many more times I’ll actually sit in the one next to it, watching the fire instead of my phone. I keep thinking about the friends I let go quiet, not from any falling out, just the same lazy assumption there’d be more time.

So I did the tally, and now I’m doing something with it. Fewer next years. Fewer summers spent proving something to people who won’t remember the proof, and more spent sitting across from the ones who are running out of chances to say the real thing to me too.

Eighty summers isn’t a lot. But it’s not nothing either, and it’s still mine to spend.

Choose wisely. I’m trying to.

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Click here to read other articles for the women in the middle of it all:
• Hockey Moms Unite: Why the Women in the Stands Are the Real MVPs
• The Sideline Is Not a Small Thing: A Sports Mom’s World
• When Did Life Get So Heavy?
• When Did We Stop Being Beginners?
• Nobody Warned Me My Body Would Start Filing Complaints

Click here to read some incredible articles about Grief:
• Have You Met Grief? by Sydney Starko
• The Grief No One Talks About by Pam Monjar