Worn

“ You really have to go see your doctor about this.”

“ I just don’t understand why it hurts the way it does.  Something’s not right.”

“That’s why I’m saying talk to your doctor.”

This conversation went on for the better part of a year, maybe longer.   Every chance I had, I would put my hand—either one of them—into Joe’s and practically beg for a massage.  He never resists.  (That’s a big advantage in any mate.) 

I began to notice a perennial soreness—not really pain—when I was doing some full body weight exercises under the guidance of a trainer several years ago.  I would finish pull-ups or pushups on a bar and the palm of my hand would hurt.  Then it would go away.  But the sensation kept returning even after I no longer was doing the regular exercises that had first seemed to cause it.

“We know what the problem is,” my young doctor told me after he had quizzed me and looked at the X-rays.  “Severe arthritis.” 

“Severe?”  I asked.   “Why severe?  The pain isn’t great, if indeed it’s pain.” 

“A lot of people come in here with far less arthritis than you have,” he said, pointing to the absence of cartilage between bones in the thumb, “and they’re complaining of pain that is nearly unbearable.” 

Wow.  I’d better be thankful for a high pain threshold, I suppose, that I don’t exactly believe I have. 

So my primary care physician was correct.  Arthritis, he had said, was the probable cause.  And here I have prided myself for so long that I’ve had none of that ugly stuff.  Should I be surprised that, after years of running, my knees pop and crack like kindling?  Should I be shocked that when I do yoga my spine now speaks to me in unmistakable tones of bone rubbing on bone?  Or that my hands, incessantly typing, washing, playing piano, needlepointing, would finally say farewell to the last traces of cartilage?

Entropy.  Things tend always in the direction of disorder, decay, disarray.  Refrigerators, cars, toys, human beings:  nothing excepted.  I am lucky to have come this far with so little worn out.  It won’t go on forever.  And there are things to take to make it somewhat better, or at least endurable.  Ibuprofen.  Cortisone injections if need be.  Surgery if it really gets past bad. 

What is much less easy to take are the daily reminders that I live in a society that really cannot stand old, worn-out things—or people.  If I am praised it is because I look younger than I actually am or because I am “so active” at my age.  Passivity and dependency are not only unfashionable but unthinkable.  There are exceptions, of course.  Once in awhile someone recognizes the value of experience.  Some actually respect wisdom. 

There are things more painful than arthritis.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016

  

Aging

Written in 2012

            We in the family called him “Tad.”  He was my mother’s first cousin, one that from the tone of her voice when she spoke of him or from the light in her eyes when she saw him, was perhaps her favorite.  A pretty good artist, Tad once responded to Mama’s commission to paint for her a fairly large rendition in oil of a still life of magnolia blossoms.  A better painting was his depiction called “Autumn at Tiger Bay,” the memory of the woods around their ancestral farm.  Not only talented, Tad was incredibly good-looking.  A head of coal-black hair that never turned to very much gray, sharp features, dark eyes with a kind look all gave him beauty.

            Tad—Calvin King Burroughs was the real name he bore—died recently at the age of 93.  His son sent me a bevy of photos taken throughout his father’s life.  One of the earliest shows an incredibly handsome youth in army uniform with his company in World War II.  In other snapshots he is playing with children, then grandchildren, dressed in a dinner jacket on a cruise perhaps, showing up for graduations, plucking oranges from a tree, sporting a cowboy hat, sitting in a backyard with extended family all around, holding the hand of his wife, a graceful man in his old age.

            Not all of us are so lucky as Tad.  Bodies fall apart sometimes at a very early age.  Bones snap, muscles weaken, teeth gray, brain cells atrophy.  Few of us, in youth or mid-life or even well past retirement age, figure that we will be among those who fade and wither away.  We imagine that we will escape the ravages of age, or most of them.  Go to a nursing home?  Not I!  Lose my memory?  Not if I can help it.  Become stooped, hard of hearing, bleary-eyed?  Never, as long as I am committed to being young.  Tad was lucky that way.  I talked to him a couple of years ago. His memory was incredibly sharp.  His good looks never succumbed entirely to wrinkles and spots.

            Fighting mortality, falling for one promise after another than we can beat death, is the chief human preoccupation, the seed of all our neuroses, the foundation of our gargantuan schemes for amassing power and control.  All of it is about staving off the inevitability of death.  Saving us from aging is a growth industry.

            Mortality is a gift, one of the Creator’s finest.  We are born, we live, we die.  Why fight it?  The issue is not how long we can look young, but how we can live every day to the fullest, gracefully aging all the way.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012