At my age, you have buried your grandparents and parents and are next in line. Your calendar contains appointments with your various doctors, and most of your friends and neighbors, a wasting asset, are in the same boat, and Charon is manning the oars. Or to borrow a metaphor from Auden, we “crowds upon the pavement are fields of harvest wheat.”
Once the street where I live was largely populated by persons in their middle years, then by people long in the tooth, but now more families with kids are moving into homes whose previous owners are gone — to the afterlife or its waiting rooms, the retirement home or hospital.
Down the block a few years ago, a man was reaped after a brief hospital visit where they healed his ills, but gave him a drug resistant bacteria which produced sepsis and the end. Across the way is a woman whose knee replacement went even worse than mine. I could go on from house to house, like a census enumerator, counting the many and varied ways death has darkened their doors.
My high school class numbered about two hundred souls, and now the “In Memoriam” section of its website numbers over fifty — and rising fast. Bridge players, who are my wife’s only reason for living, regularly fall victim to a fatal grand slam and renege on life. Soon memorial service days may outnumber game days.
A good friend of ours is being subjected to one test after another to discover what ails, her with no relief in sight. Her husband received an infected porcine heart valve that has caused him years of unpleasantness.
These may be the golden years for the healthcare industry, but have less luster for the customers. We are at the mercy of the luck of the genetic draw, the ingenuity of the researchers, and the competence of the clinicians and caregivers. Living in such a precarious situation makes one afraid to turn on the television or read the news.
For instance, the blood pressure medicine I’ve been on since the last century turns out to be imported from India and China, and for the last four years has been adulterated with a carcinogen. No doubt cuts to the FDA budget in order to fund a tax cut for the billionaires
made the policing of pharmaceuticals too expensive to allow an earlier discovery of the peril. Or maybe this is a ploy by isolationist drug companies to restrict Americans to higher cost domestically produced medicine.
In a recent innocuous chat with my allergist, I asked if I should use distilled water with the Neti Pot he recommended for my sinuses. “Of course,” he said. “You don’t want to get that brain-eating amoeba they had trouble with in Louisiana.”
I BEG YOUR PARDON! WHAT BRAIN-EATING AMOEBA?
But am I really surprised? No. This is actually just an ordinary day in the geriatric life. My doctors used to be ancient graybeards when I didn’t need them. Now when I do, they seem scarcely out of knee pants. Too young to have aches and pains let alone life-threatening maladies, they are disturbingly blasé about the many threats to my survival that crowd alarmingly into my consciousness day and night.
So, when I ask my orthopedist whether the decaying of my joints is normal for my age or if I am a victim of a genetic predisposition, he suggests cheerfully that it could be both, and either way I’m stuck with it. And with him, of course. When I ask my internist if my waning ability to remember the answers to the Jeopardy clues in time to beat the TV contestants is the start of senile dementia, he administers an unreassuring test that suggests if you can remember five numbers in a row and draw a clock face showing 3:30, you’re good for now. But this subtly implies the inability to remember your own name is probably coming soon.
None of these healers has assured me I won’t have to suffer Dantean torments, won’t have to endure perpetual pain, or galloping idiocy. Nor do they reassure me that when the bad news arrives they will help me find an easy way out. John Webster, the Jacobean playwright, assured us that “death hath ten thousand several doors,” but a doctor-assisted escape hatch is only available in a few jurisdictions— California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
Where I live, you are on your own. Help is illegal. We are reminded that the Hippocratic Oath states: “First, do no harm.” But there seems to be a codicil: “Second, regard every patient as the goose that lays the golden eggs, and keep the poor old fowl breathing as long as he’s insured.”
Several months ago when doing my daily walk around the block on bad knees, I turned the corner and came face to face with a huge red hawk tearing at his breakfast on the sidewalk. I scared him as much as he scared me, and he flapped into a the top of a stately tree where he eyed me balefully.
He left behind the corpse of an opossum, on whose viscera he’d been feasting. Since then I have not seen the hawk again. But rather disturbingly the rotting cadaver of the possum has remained alongside my route— shrinking slowly into a deflated pile of fur and bones. I know just how he feels.
And now I am afraid to sit out in my yard with my creaky knees propped up for fear the hawk may be sizing me up for lunch. They say old age isn’t for sissies, but what does one do if one happens to be an aging sissy? You can no longer run, and you sure can’t hide.