(from the Why Aging Sucks Dept.)
Tell the truth. At one time or another, you’ve been stuck
behind some old person shuffling along at glacial slowness, blocking your
passage through a doorway or down an aisle and thought, “Jesus shit, get out of
the way!” Followed by “Why the hell can’t they walk any faster?! Just because they have all day… I have
THINGS TO DO!”
We might deny it if asked outright, but we all know this
goes through our minds when we are twenty- or thirty-, even forty-somethings.
Because we are, by then, adults and at last in total charge of our lives. Our
health, wealth, place of residence, kind of car—everything is what we have
chosen, or the result of choices WE made. That sense of power colors all our
thoughts and feelings.
Because we don’t know yet that it’s only temporary.
As adults in our prime, we secretly carry the idea that how
we age is our choice, too. That whether we get dementia or lose our hearing is
a decision we make, at some future point in our lives. I think there’s a
half-formed idea that, just as you get a notice that your library books will be
due in three days, you must get a notice that you are about to become old. Young
and middle-aged adults seem to think the incipient old receive a list of
symptoms and characteristics of Being Old and instructions on picking the ones
they will have. Like ordering from a drive-through.
“Yes, I’ll take gray hair, hearing loss and
not-keeping-up-with-music-and-movies.”
“I’d like dry wrinkled skin, a saggy butt and boobs and a
hunched back.”
“Give me the painful arthritis and a heart condition that messes
with my circulation so much my memory turns to soup.”
Oh PUH-LEEZE!
Nobody. Chooses. How. They. Age.
Uh-huh, uh-huh, I can hear the yeah-buts now. Yeah, but if
you don’t exercise regularly—or eat healthy, or give up caffeine or smoking
& drinking, or learn to reduce your stress, etc., etc., blah, blah,
blah—you gotta expect bad results.
Really? We all know of the young man in his prime who went
out for a jog and fell over dead at 28. We also know about the centenarian who
started smoking at age 12 and drinks whiskey every day.
These are extremes, yes, but they underscore the truth that,
while we may influence our individual outcomes to varying degrees, we do not
actually choose our aging process.
Living righteously and following all the expert advice in
the world about maintaining your health, active lifestyle, whatever, is only so
helpful.
Because, though it matters how we play the hand we get, we
don’t deal the cards.
To continue with that metaphor, taking care of our health
might be like holding three of a kind. Maybe even a jack-high straight. But
mortality is the Royal Flush; it always wins. The lucky go to bed and never
wake up, or they start to say, “my head—” and before they get to “hurts,” they
are gone. Or they’re thinking
about having a cold beer after this shift is over when BAM! An IED blows them
to pieces before they recognize what is hap—
The problem for young and old alike is that few of us get
that gift of grace known as sudden death. Note that I am not talking about the
survivors’ experience in grace-full terms, only about the person whose process
of aging comes to a sudden, unannounced end.
The rest of us, the unlucky majority, go through a drawn-out
process of aging—and dealing with it—until we become those slow, tottering
assholes, blanketed by deteriorating senses and tripped up by physical
incapacities, unable to get the hell out of your way or even know you’re behind
us, muttering impatiently. That’s not the worst, of course, that awaits the
old. They get to look forward to being denied even the luxury of shuffling
through a grocery store; their future consists of sitting alone in a warehouse
for dying. If they are lucky.
Like adolescents who revel in their hormonal rushes, rush to
act upon their every risk-taking impulse, indulge their ricocheting emotions and
trust the underdeveloped executive decision-making region of their brains, plenty
of old people embrace their infirmities and expect the rest of the world to
make room and time for them.
So I’m not as steady on my feet as I used to be (thanks to
changes in my inner ear due to medication I take because I worked at a plastics
plant or as an exterminator to buy all my kids cars for graduation), I’ll just quit
trying to merge with the “traffic” in the grocery store and trudge slower and
slower and slower, now that I have fewer places I need to go. Other people should treat me with
respect and courtesy just because I’ve survived this long.
Other oldsters apply the reverse logic with which they
survived marriage to an alcoholic, a lobotomizingly-dull job and/or their
disappointing children. As in— I am not walking slower. YOU are in too much of
a rush. MY brain has not slowed so much I can’t grasp new technology, laws or
social realities. THE WORLD is changing too fast. In other words, it’s not the aged who have changed for the
worse, it is everything around them.
News flash: no matter how we address or present our
deterioration, we do not like it any more than you do. In fact, I bet we
dislike it a hell of a lot more than you do. Because we have to put up with it all day,
every day.
Who looks forward to clearly-spoken, separate words to which
you can respond wittily, devolving into fuzz and mumble, like a conversation in
another room where a loud TV masks half the words? Do you seriously want to
drive while joint pains weaken your grip on the steering wheel and strengthen
your fear that you won’t be able to wrench the wheel fast or hard enough to
avoid an accident if that idiot backs out of his parking space without looking
because he’s 20 and has lightning fast reflexes and, therefore, thinks everyone
else must too?
Do you want dangerously high cholesterol, even though
you haven’t even looked at red meat in years? Or diverticulitis that for no
reason decides to break open your intestinal wall—and a blood vessel or two—while
you’re driving alone down a country road? Can’t wait for your pants to fill
with blood as you search in vain for a cell signal until you pass out, still
bleeding? Did a couple of grandparents who suffered from “hardening of the
arteries” actually pass along Alzheimer’s genes? Or one for brain tumors? Or
weak lungs that working in a hair salon during the weekly shellacked hairdos
era only exacerbated? Did you know your lungs were “weak” when you chose
cosmetology at age 18?
I didn’t think so.
See? That’s the rawest deal about aging, about getting old
and enfeebled. We don’t choose how we age. But we have to live with what we
get, until we die.
So. You’re pissed at getting stuck behind me as I totter
down the aisle? How the F**K do you think I feel?!?!
