Aging isn't easy and I'm only starting to enter the really bad part of the journey.
Earlier this summer, I was treated to a very honest post by a Cape Cod innkeeping couple. Kudos to them. It seems to be politically incorrect to admit that aging is not something to look forward to. Baby boomers are supposed to be vital, "aging well". We will be dancing when we are 90, when we aren't training for a marathon.
B.S.
Aging isn't fun as anyone of a "certain age" knows. For every tale I hear of an 85 year old woman walking, swimming and enjoying her great grandkids, there is one of an eighty-something year old crippled with arthritis, or drifting into the final stages of dementia.
With my mother in law up here due to the storm, I see this close up. I am treated to her sharp memory and stories, but then I see her in pain, of her wanting so much to be up and about. Where she is staying there are too many stairs to climb to get to her bedroom. She needs a special toilet seat. She misses her recliner - the motorized type that helps her up and down.
She values her independence but that independence comes at a higher and higher price each day. The grab bars she depends on. The "I've fallen" wristlet she wears. The next fall she must dread, because she's fallen several times and each fall is harder to recover from. Inside her head, I know she is 25 again. But her body does not respond to her 25 year old thoughts.
Sorry, but you aren't going to tell me there is anything golden about that.
It's tough. I watch my vibrant, amazing mom who is only 61 but pained with Parkinson's age by the day. She'll have moments of bounce back followed by overdone-it days. Thinking of you.
ReplyDeleteI hope you are able to focus on all that is golden about aging, but it's easy for me to say now (39).