I could hardly stand to read about John Edwards’ wife.
Back in the late ’90s when my own wife endured several biopsies, I honestly thought she was going to die. I sat in that horrible little waiting area outside the operating room that first time knowing I could be facing the worst moment of my life, but I was wrong. Our Christmas trip from Maryland to Iowa to visit her folks that year was the best one ever, and I’ve never gotten a better present.
There are a lot of things on my mind just now as I look down the road: life and death, health and illness, pragmatic strategies for the years ahead and the issue of ultimate surrender. Goes with the territory, you might say. I have no idea how the rest of the world gets by, what kind of thinking (or not thinking) insulates people from the terrors of regret and guilt. It’s not easy, dealing with these things, and yet there’s not a single other person in the world capable of it but myself. No doubt this is a feature, not a bug, although “fixing” emotions through dogma, diet, drugs, sex, maniacal activity, or sitting in a church sometimes seems the primary human preoccupation on the planet. More than one way to leave reality in the dirt, that’s for sure.
I’ve harped on this a hundred times, I know, enough that it must seem like the raving of a scruffy lunatic standing outside in the rain. But everyone is outside in the rain, they just don’t feel wet yet.
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Someone said: “It takes a lot of courage to grow old.”. I believe that with all my heart.
My Dad had a better saying: “The ‘golden years’ is bullshit.”.
Right on both counts.
I was going to say I wasn’t aging well today, but maybe I am. I’m certainly not getting any younger. Not having done any of this before, however, I have no way to judge. I could be doing a fabulous job of falling apart and not even know it.
The last point made me laugh.
Pried me loose, too.
Dear John,
Some musings re this and your previous reflection that “actuarial tables are not the friends of the healthy”….
We all figure to beat the odds that the House lays against us. The actuaries assume that a 60-year old will, on average, get to be an 85-year old; a 92-year-old will make 94 and a 101-year-old will celebrate 101 1/2. At some point someone doesn’t get there. My dad, recently dead at 92, beat the odds till the very end. His beginnings were pre-diluvian – no indoor plumbing, electrification or internal combustion machines; no education beyond 8th grade in a one-room schoolhouse; no wonder drugs or reliable doctoring. (A sister died in child-birth.) Then came little things like Depression and War and thirty years of toting a mail bag in the West Texas sun, trying to raise three children on inadequate salary, burying two wives. When he stopped working at 62 the military/civil service pension he started to get was based on the House calculation of those days that he wouldn’t get to 80. He did that in spades – he took those suckers for a bundle. He stayed put in the little house he bought for $3,500 (his only asset) till almost the very end. I reckon he’s delivering parcel post to St. Peter nowadays.
I don’t claim to be made of the same stuff as my old man, but, like him, I always reckon to beat the odds devised by the pointy-headed guys who deal in averages – I with my own loved one, who had a bout of cancer one year and a stroke the next but is still truckin’ five years on. If my father could be an optimist in his ninth decade, I ought to be capable of some cheerfulness in my sixth. The actuaries would say that a third of my life (but what happened to the first two thirds?) still remains. That’s comforting – especially since, of course, I hope to beat even those odds.