Aging Gracefully
Dylan Thomas told us to not go gently into that good night, that old age should burn and rave at close of day, and we should rage, rage against the dying of the light. I think of that poem often and remind everyone that Thomas lasted all of thirty-nine years. The stories of his death comport well with his thoughts of raving and raging at the end. He literally drank his way into a bronchial spasm and while in a comatose state at St. Vincent’s hospital was visited by his somewhat drunken Irish wife (he was Welsh) who had flown in from London. She supposedly demanded, “Is the bloody man dead yet?” After she became riled up, or should I say raged up, she was carted away in a straightjacket, whereupon the poet slipped away into the dying light, never recovering from his coma. The man died as he lived and lived and died as he preached.
Few of us have that sort of drama in our death, much less our life. One of my favorite statistics (and we all know how much statistics can lie) is that at the end of WWII, the average life expectancy of the American male was 64 and yet the age of retirement as defined by Social Security, was age 65. That’s a great business if you could find it. Well, lo all these seventy-five years later, the Social Security Administration has pushed the age of retirement up to 66 while the life expectancy of the American male at birth is now 79 years. That belies the reality that at age 65, an American male can now expect to live to age 83 and an American female to age 86. What used to be a very short and perhaps sweet retirement cycle is now a long and protracted retirement cycle. Dylan Thomas told us to rage against death and suck the marrow out of life while we were at it. American retirees now have 18-21 years to rage and rave away. That is a long time for raging and raving.
I, for one, do not know how to either rave nor do anything gracefully. I have just never been very fond of partying for some odd reason. It starts with not particularly liking the taste of alcohol and then, when I did acquire a taste for Scotch as a young banker, I found little or no reason to pursue it further. I have enough ways to get stupid all on my own and don’t need a depressant like alcohol to do it for me. As for mind-altering drugs, my mind is fertile and obscure enough all on its own that I never felt the need to further modify it with the help of hallucinogenics. So, I have no intention of adding raving and raging as part of my retirement program. I would like to become more graceful in all senses of the word, but there is probably only so much I can do to make that happen as well. It is hard for someone who is 6’5” (on a good day and if I hang myself by my ankles for a few hours) and weighs in at a relatively trim 345 pounds (thirty lighter than when I started this retirement juggernaut) to do anything resembling graceful.
I spend most of my day out of doors until weariness overwhelms me and I am forced to retire either to my spa (technically still outdoors) or my sofa (two are inside and one is out on the deck if the weather is nice enough and its not too hot). That damn back hillside has become my existence. I trudge up and down it for one reason or another all day and then wonder why I awake at 3am with deep leg cramps, especially in my hamstrings. It got so bad last night that I lay down in my closet in the dark and did every stretch I could think to do to work out the kinks. While it was the legs that screamed the loudest, it is also the neck and shoulders that demand attention. I have Andrew my massage therapist come by every Tuesday and the really works the legs a lot to good effect, but I can’t get a massage every day even though I feel like I need it sometimes.
I know that I have no reason to complain too much about my physical condition in retirement (at least not yet), but I suspect that many of these maladies would just get ignored in a workaday world where they get lots more attention in retirement. Kim and I made a deal a few years ago, she would stay fully compos mentis and fall apart physically while I stay physically OK and have my brain wither away into some addled state of disrepair. It was meant in gest, but there was some underlying truth to it. Kim and her siblings seem to have more than their share of physical issues ranging from joint problems all around to diabetes and cancer here and there. I and my siblings, on the other hand don’t seem to have those issues and we seem able to just keep ticking like that proverbial Timex. By the same token, I have certainly noticed more memory gaps the older I get. It starts with grasping for movie star names and such, but there is generally a deterioration of my overall memory bank such that it goes a bit beyond just names and is now somewhat invading the realm of places as well. I’m not yet peeing in the umbrella stand, but its early days so far.
Just before you get to our exit on the 15 heading North, there is a Memory Clinic, the name of which I can’t quite recall. Whenever we pass it I say to Kim that she should just put me there when it gets bad enough. I would agreeably check myself in at that time, but I doubt I’ll remember where it is. There was a great movie to that effect called Still Alice with Julianne Moore. Alice is a linguistics professor who gets early-onset Alzheimer’s and literally watches as it erodes her faculties. She devises a plan such that when she can no longer function on her computer, a message will pop up that tells her to go up to her bureau and take the pills she has put there for herself. She is determined not to burden her family and prefers to end her life when she gets to that nonfunctional state. The flaw in the plan is that between the computer and the bedroom she forgets what she is going for and never finds the pills to euthanize herself. It’s a poignantly sad tale that is probably repeated in many forms every day as the country ages past their otherwise intended lifespan thanks to the marvels of modern science.
If I could sign up for a set exit plan for myself when I reach a point of dysfunction, that would be wonderful. But the world doesn’t usually give us that option as much as it perhaps should. I believe that the ethics of aging will need to be reviewed as people more and more age past their natural lifespans. The ethics and necessities of an 8 billion-person world may require some repondering. I feel like I retired both at the right time and with the right trajectory, which is to say, a soft landing with some part-time work to occupy me and enough physical capacity (knotted hamstrings notwithstanding or perhaps not able to withstand, or maybe again without ability to stand) to keep myself gainfully engaged for most of the day.
Today is an exception. Maybe the reason we retired sorts find a place in the sun to go to die is not just to have nice sunny days, but also to not leave ourselves with too many rainy indoor days like today. I am doing this morning what I usually leave for the later part of the day after the sunny outdoor work has had its way with me and my hamstrings. This is the third story I am working on, which means I am at loose ends. I suppose I should be happy that I took up writing years ago for exactly this purpose and that I still enjoy doing it. I’m sure I dilute my writing quality through over-writing, so maybe I best end by just saying that my readers should hope that I can continue aging gracefully, which, for this writer, means having enough other things to do to restrict myself to one story per day.