Sometime
in your late teens you usually discover that you are not immortal. Shortly
after that you notice that time is not what is used to be; the endless summers
and interminable school terms are gone. Instead, every time you turn around you’re
buying calendars. You barely have time to notice what one month’s picture is
when it’s replaced by the next month’s. Children (and grandchildren! When did that happen?!) grow up as if they were
being inflated by air compressors.
At
some point in the late 40’s or early 50’s you begin to notice your
formerly-reliable body just does not respond to your wishes as you’d like it
to. The deterioration has been going on pretty much from Day One, but has only
now progressed to a noticeable level. For me, it happened early, although it
was hard to tell with all the work injuries, early-onset arthritis, allergies,
and what might have been diagnosed as ADD if that had existed in the 50’s.
I
haven’t been obsessed with my appearance for a good long time. After all,
heredity blessed me with a high forehead, horsey face, rounded chin, and chunky
body. I long ago faced the fact that there’s only so much that can be done with
this. Yet, I recall clearly one day in my mid-fifties when I was squinting into
the bathroom mirror and noticed distinct lines between my brows and across my
forehead! Horrors! I ran from room to room, examining my face in every mirror
in the house. My anxiety just deepened the creases. Now it’s a matter of course
to see the crinkles around my eyes and those faint lines (less prominent than
when I first noticed them because I’m not scowling at the mirror anymore)
across my brow.
Last
week when the stylist handed me the hand mirror to evaluate my haircut, I told
her the right temple was longer than the left. She gently stretched out both
sides and suggested, “It only looks longer because grey hairs are more wiry.”
When did my light sprinkling of silver become an entire clump? Did the white
hairs migrate from other parts of my head for a solidarity rally?
It
does bother me that my body develops more limitations with each passing year,
but not as much as it does some people my age or older. All my life I’ve been
finding ways to circumvent the arthritis, tight tendons, very poor balance, and
a lack of muscle memory. I’ve never let these stop me from doing what I wanted
to do, from skiing to playing musical instruments. Admittedly, some things I
never did well, but if I persisted
through a learning curve vastly longer than normal, I became quite good at
activities I truly love. Mechanical aids, such as stools to reach high shelves,
wheelbarrows or hand-trucks to lift heavy objects, and innumerable do-it-myself
devices to enable me to actually do
otherwise-impossible things myself,
have enabled me to remain proudly independent.
However,
a few things have gotten too painful or tedious to do at all anymore. Others, I’ve
had to modify my approach and my expectations. Also, I seem to have grown some
common sense. I hike half as far as I think I can; I consider the route down
before I go scrambling up a bank or rock-face; I look for the easiest access to
a fishing spot instead of sliding down the nearest bank. I tell someone where I’m
going on my lone forays in the surrounding state forests. I wear sturdy boots,
carry a staff, and use strap-on cleats or snowshoes in winter. If this is what I have to do
to keep on fishing, geocaching, hiking, and enjoying the wild places, I will do
it.
Last
year I entered the phase of life where appointments with medical professionals
began to take up a significant portion of my time. I put my foot down with my dentist;
after the first extraction, it was a good long time before I had to face losing
more teeth. But, since the loss is inevitable, I refuse to waste time and money
(Medicare covers none of this) on more than four visits a year or seeing a
specialist. In consequence, although my parents promised I’d be able to eat
apples and corn-on-the-cob to a ripe old age if I just took care of my teeth
(They promised! They lied!), both foods are a distant memory
and I have problems just biting into a sandwich, especially one with lettuce,
tomato, or thick lunchmeat. Once these next two molars are gone, I can’t
imagine how I will chew, either.
Last
spring my glaucoma, diagnosed twenty years ago and comfortably dormant, flared
suddenly acute and I suffered over three agonizingly-anxious weeks with a high
probability that I would go irrevocably blind before the initial surgery; then
two more weeks of worry waiting for the second eye to be done. Now I’m on
three-times-a-year monitoring in addition to my regular exam. This experience really
made me think how quickly a person can go from happy-go-lucky to being unable
to do anything they did before. For all that this emphasized the fact that I am
on the downhill slope of the famous Hill, it also made me appreciate that I can still do most of the things I love
most in life.
The
important thing is to keep stubbornly trying, keep actively searching for ways
to do those important activities, and never, never give up. My thinking has
changed a bit; I understand that my days are numbered and those ahead are
considerably fewer than those behind. But I intend to make them count. I learn
new things daily, balancing out the things I’ve forgotten; the latter are
mostly trivial things, like where I put down my iPod and why I walked into a
certain room. I retain my enthusiasm, eagerly going out to fish or find
geocaches, visiting people and performing my volunteer work with diligence and
energy. What I lack in ability to focus or multitask, I balance out by being
organized and working hard. When I come up short in physical strength, I’m not
afraid to delegate or ask for help… when not using one of my unlikely devices to
make the difficult easier. As for pain, it’s an old, life-long friend. It slows
me down, but it does not stop me.
The
development of common sense may tend to impose limits on me, but as long as I
occasionally stretch those limits so I understand I can indeed go beyond them,
I will never see myself as ‘old.’ I’ve proven I’m more capable than I usually
let myself be on numerous occasions, and intend to keep surprising myself (and
others) to the very end.
Most
of all, I think a sense of humor is a veritable elixir of youth. I laugh while
standing in the middle of a room, wondering why I’m there. I get a chuckle out
of some of the mangled sentences that come out of my mouth when I forget a
word, and some of the euphemisms I substitute. When my knee refuses to lift my
weight up a tall, steep stream bank, I cheerfully say, “Well, that ain’t gonna work!” and look for an
easier way up. When I fumble with a needle and thread, I giggle at my own
clumsiness and put the hemming aside for a warmer, less humid day. As long as I
can laugh at myself and the foibles of age, I feel that my teenage self might
have been right: perhaps I am
immortal.
