TENAKEE SPRINGS — Once upon a time, ages upon ages ago, when I was fresh out of graduate school, I got my first job managing a day-care center for fragile seniors. All of our clients had infirmities of one kind or another and most had multiple health problems but all were still maintaining independence in their own homes – even if sometimes only barely. Our agency provided in-home assistance for those who just needed help with household chores and also a daily program for those who needed a bit more than that. We ran a place where they could hang out, get a good lunch and have their various medical conditions looked after. They were a colorful bunch, sometimes cranky but always interesting and usually great fun to be around. It was sort of like being around your grandparents for a few hours each day, long enough to enjoy their stories and to feel that you were helping but not so long as to feel stuck or burdened.
The ink had barely the dried on my degree and, of course, I thought I knew a great deal more than I did. It should come as no surprise that I learned at least as much from those sometimes-cantankerous old timers as from all the professors in graduate school.
One of the things that fascinated me was the different attitudes and styles that each of them had adopted as they dealt with the losses and frustrations that always come along with the very serious business of aging. Their families were heavily involved in our program so we knew these folks’ histories quite well. Their life experiences had varied hugely of course, and I came to realize that the character traits that we saw day-to-day were really just extensions of how these old people had handled the inevitable low points that come along in any very long life. Over and over the qualities that seemed to be making a difference between anger, resentment and depression for some and a calmer, more peaceful, attitude for others was their ability to maintain through it all at least some degree of grace and good humor. There was no fine line that separated those who took a more relaxed attitude toward their decreasing abilities and those who fought and struggled every step of the way against their problems. We humans don’t sort ourselves out so neatly as that. Nevertheless, something was making a difference and it dawned on me that even in the face of terminal conditions, the ability to hold on to any scrap of Grace and Good Humor went a very long way, indeed.
It was all very interesting in a detached intellectual sort of way but, being in my 20s at the time, it would still be decades before Mortality would come up on my own emotional radar. Those simple observations did stick with me, though, so perhaps there was a bit more maturity there than I knew.
Lately I’ve been forced to admit that it has become my turn. The days of long ago are gone. No regrets, really. They’re just gone. I can barely fix the moment when Youth packed its duffle bag and thumbed a ride out of town for the last time. In its turn, Middle Age came on lugging careers begun and ended, spouses married and mourned, children cherished and then wished well. A couple of years back when I came smack up upon 80 it seemed like I’d better admit that perhaps Old Age had finally ambushed me. Truthfully, I never saw it coming. The simple dodge called Denial was all I’d needed to cling to the fiction that I wasn’t really Old, I was just in a later stage of Middle Age, right? For at least a decade I could have been the poster boy for Denial. Useful as it is, though, Denial does come with it’s own “Use By” date.
First it was the knees. There I was, sharing my daily soak in our hot spring with two of my neighbors, both retired physicians. I was whining about my chronically painful knee. The darn thing was hurting all the time now and even the daily soak wasn’t helping any more. Wasn’t there something I could do for it? They both listened and nodded as doctors do but I thought I caught a look passing between them that said, “Do you want to tell him or should I?” Finally, with great gentleness, one of them said, “Well, Brooke, perhaps it’s simply worn out. It happens, you know.” My inner voice screamed “WORN OUT! What do you mean ‘worn out’? What am I, a used car with too many miles on it?” I calmed down over the next few days and let myself be reassured that it wasn’t quite that bad. They comforted me that joints are almost as replaceable as windshield wipers these days. Replaceable joints? Who knew?
In the course of time the knee was repaired and I carried on. A few years later it was the hip…and then the other hip. Each one laid me up for a little while and a few of the little things changed but I was OK with that. I was willing to let others do the heavy lifting and it was kind of fun to let some young woman hold a door for me. “No matter,” Denial assured me. “Those are just the well-earned perks of Late Middle Age. Let us amble down to the harbor, step into that pretty little sailboat and cast off. We’ll leave all of it on the dock and go Out, just us and the breeze and the sail and the water. If we’re lucky, maybe a whale will pass by or an eagle will swoop down to check us out. That’s always the best part of the day.” And it would be.
Then, last year, while I wasn’t looking, Agility quietly slipped away. What used to be an easy reach was now awkward and painful. One day, I missed a dark cloud coming and learned that Denial slinks away like a coward when the breeze kicks up, the water is cold and things are going to pot. When it scurried away, Denial took Confidence with it. Suddenly things were different in a different way. Agility and Confidence aren’t there in the catalog with hips and knees. No up-grades. In a period of just a month or so the pretty little sailboat slipped out of Here And Now into the receding picture of Back Then.
I’m doing OK. Writing helps and Wendy is always there but…Grace! Good Humor! Don’t desert me now!
