On the Cruel Reality of Aging
When you are hale and hearty you cannot imagine what it is like not being so. You think you will always be strong; you will always be able to do everything you desire and it wouldn’t ever faze you. You can walk for hours and relish every step. You can organize and prepare dinner parties for forty or seventy people and wake up the next day bright eyed and ready to go. A bit of sleep is just what you need to freshly start the new day. You will always wake up and be ready to meet whatever life lays in front of you. You can conquer any problem, and it would not deter you. Then one day you wake up and you do not have the elasticity that you once had. Determined, you push on. What nonsense, you think, and keep on going. Soon other things happen. You get diseases you did not even know existed. You cope with them and watch what you eat, you avoid stress. Just when you think you have overcome that problem, you are presented with another. Your back hurts, you bump into things and bruise yourself. You lose your balance and fall down the stairs, in the bathtub, everywhere. Why is this happening to me, you wonder in frustration? You begin to become more cautious in the things that you do. Your world narrows. You are afraid to drive too far. You thank God for your wonderful understanding husband. If you did not have his love and support, life would be unimaginable. He is your joy, your strength, and your reason for being. He encourages you and tells you that you are doing fine. You believe him. You cannot imagine life without him. He is God’s gift to you.
Then the unimaginable happens. You lose your husband suddenly, cruelly, unexpectedly. Now you are alone in a deep black long tunnel of pain with no end in sight. You wait to die and join him, for life without him has no meaning. How could the love of your life no longer exist and you are still here? How could such a beautiful, wonderful man be dead? How can he have gone and why you are still here? How? How? How? Why? The years go by. You have no health, no joy, you see no reason for being. Your world gets smaller and smaller. You go through the motions of living. One day you spy some spring flowers at a store. You smile to yourself and the love you have for gardening and flowers reawakens. Eagerly you buy a few pots of hyacinths, narcissus, and daffodils. You bring them home and put them in cache pots and arrange them about the house. Their heady perfumes excite your senses. You wait for a warm sunny day to plant them in the garden. That day arrives. You take the pots out, with your gardening tools and stool. You sit on the stool in the middle of the flower bed and begin planting. You lose your balance and tumble off right into a rose bush. Your back is scraped, your elbows, your legs. You cannot move. You are in pain. The dogs come up to you, worried. It’s okay pups. It’s okay.
You think to yourself that you finally understand the helplessness of aging. You finally understand the finality of life. You sit, if you can call it that, against the rose bush, unable to get up. People pass by and casually glance at you over the fence as if it is an everyday occurrence to see a grey-haired woman sprawled in the midst of a flower bed leaning into a prickly rose bush. Then they walk on by. Finally, with great effort, pain, and loss of pride, you manage to turn onto your hands and knees. You stare into the soil beneath you, then slowly, painfully you crawl out. You are dirty, scraped and bruised. You feel at that moment in time that you have lost your dignity, all that you accomplished in life was for nought. You now know how low you have reached. You understand the helplessness and the demeaning signs of aging. Old age means different things to different people. Unfortunately this is what it has come to mean to me.
Where are the golden sunset years when you were to sit back together and enjoy the fruits of what you had sowed? Where are the fond trips down memory lane that you were to share together? Where is the joy that you felt in each other’s company? Now there is only the hollow sound of silence. There is only the looming fear of illness and loneliness. There is no husband to talk to, only his pictures and one-sided conversations. You walk alone until your time comes to leave this earth.
Many years ago, when Peter and l were young and felt the world was our oyster, we bought a framed saying which still hangs in Peter’s office in the basement. It says,
“Come grow old with me, The best is yet to come.”
Hah! What a farce!