Getting Old is Not for the Faint of Heart

Surviving this far into my fourth quarter means I’ve said already said my goodbyes to a number of family and friends who didn’t. Survive, I mean. Well, of course, they DID survive, but just on a different plane, you know?

An afterlife belief is not shared by everyone, but if you do believe in something besides The Long Sleep, you may believe that when you die you will be welcomed by a great white light, see your relatives there to meet you, or, like Linus, hope to see the Great Pumpkin one more time. Or more traditionally you may pray that you will be seated at the left hand of the Lord, for instance.

This last is more in keeping with my own Christian/Catholic upbringing and does sound attractive, I gotta admit. But, really, who knows? Maybe the next step will turn out to be the Astral Plane, a concept which I like ‘cuz it gives us some flexibility.

I’d like my CAP (Corner of the Astral Plane) to include my best girl Irene, (although given respective genetics we both expect I’ll get there first), the rest of my family especially including my dad and mom, brother, sister, my step-dad Clel, cousin Elayne, Uncle Bob and especially my Aunt Joy, a person so friggin’ wonderful we gave her name to our daughter. (Well, it’s her middle name, anyway.) And Irene’s family, if they’ll have us. And, when it’s their turn to come, our kids are invited, and a very few of our friends and so on.

Given a choice in the matter, I would also like my CAP to have all my deceased dogs (and there are many), but if that’s too tough an ask I’ll go with Puella, Jake, Spyro, Rocky, Buster, Connie and my all-time best dog and best friend, Desi, who passed away this year from enough illnesses to put down a horse but was enough of a good ol’ boxer clown-dog to make me laugh right up until the day before she died on the vet’s gurney with us both holding her paws. Even now I’m smiling about her drooling all over our floors. I’m smiling even though it hurts to think about her. So maybe I will go out this evening and talk to her a bit. It’s been awhile, the moon is near-full and she always liked nights like this. Damn dogs, anyway.

While I’m out, maybe I’ll also check in on K.C., too, our one and only and very brave little kitty. Way too young, she had a stroke, went blind, but could climb up on our couch, kick off whichever dog was occupying space, and purr for awhile.

All the above is merely painful distraction. What I really want to talk about is the difficulty of getting through the process of ageing, dying, and then to wherever it is we are going. And the older I get the harder it all seems; not just for me, for all of us.

I have a friend, who, barring the miracle we pray for nightly, says he will pass inside the next two months. He is in great spirits about this, gets visits daily from his grandkids, friends and weekly from his minister, and, pain-free with the nifty drugs these days, seems to be enjoying his time. But his wonderful acceptance, and drugs and ministers and so on, probably doesn’t hold a positive candle to the ability to get up by himself to go to the bathroom, which he can no longer do. This doesn’t seem fair for this great a guy, does it?

(Ed. Note: I’d appreciate not getting “Life Ain’t Fair” comments from my faithful readers. Does it sound like I don’t get that? Give me a break.)

On the other side I had a friend, gone quite recently to my everlasting regret, who tried hard to survive through several very difficult surgeries and I think basically died just recovering from the last. He had family by his side and I know how much that meant to him. Maybe he was the best senior pickleball player I ever met. I wrote articles about him and his pickleball play. Now I wish I’d written a book.

Now that I’m on the subject maybe I should write about all the folks who are struggling with some damn thing as they move towards “their number”, a concept a friend of mine uses to describe our individual expiration dates. This sounds like a interesting religious concept, this thing about each of us having a pre-destined expiration date. And I guess if we use this expiration date as our metaphor, we could say that each of has the experience of the milk beginning to get bad and, much as we try, we can’t stop that process entirely.

There are so many stories. We hear about families who have come together wonderfully in order to care for an aged parent. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work that way. We had a lovely friend who passed away this year after several years of lingering illness, including multiple fights against cancer. There is lots to say about her struggle, she was strong and sassy right to the end. It got to the point that she couldn’t talk but she could still text, and it was when she finally didn’t respond to a text for two weeks that I checked and found she was gone. I cried for a hour.

But there is lots to say also about the friggin’ terrible changes this struggle created in her husband who started out a barely nice enough guy and during her struggles got worse and worse until he became, first, even more of an asshole, then a recluse and then crazy and has since disappeared. She was an angel and was good to everybody; he was, in his best days, just low-grade-asshole-ok and wound up good to nobody or for anything. Thank you, y’all who came and took care of her when he wouldn’t, or, too charitably, couldn’t. You know who I’m talkin’ about and who you are, but if you don’t, you live in a small town in Ohio and in a larger one in SW Utah.

This makes me think about hell and I wonder whether there really is such a thing. In my view I’m finding my CAP and staying there, and I will welcome old friends and family and dogs forever and ever, amen. There are some folks however that I hope never get that chance, and when I say never I really mean it, as in “screw this forgiveness thing and this Purgatory thing, let’s fry ‘im up now and get a head-start one next Saturday’s bbq!” The guy above can head up the line.

You know, the above says more about me than anything, doesn’t it? But you know I have no idea what’s going on now, and of course much less about what will happen not that long from now when I get sick and pass on. I’ll hope I am right about this, and I’ve written plenty about this before. But I don’t know.

I do know two things. Beforehand, while I’m sliding down that slippery slope, I’d rather not be alone. And afterward, I just want a few things if He believes I should have them. My tiny CAP, the folks I mentioned, and my dogs, and if she chooses to come, my kitty. I’m not sure how much else one person needs, really, even if it’s for eternity.

I couldn’t list everything and everyone if I tried, so here’s to us all, still in the struggle. Some of you have had brain surgery, others have contracted something God-awful like Parkinson’s, an old high-school buddy of mine is strugging with MS but seems to be losing. We all are slip-sliding away, all of us trying to be at least a little upbeat about it, as in “Heck, it could be a lot worse.” Your very real struggles are my struggles, and you inspire me. In fact, I’ll forget for just one minute about our first-responder heroes, you are my heroes in this piece. And down the line when you hang up your reins at last, know you are welcome to stop by my Astral Plane and hang any old time. We’ll even keep the light on for ‘ya.