No Regrets...Just Disbelief

 

When I first started this blog, eighteen years ago, I named it “Coming to Terms With Middle Age.”

I don’t remember exactly when I changed the name.  But it seems to me the “middle age” boat sailed away a long time ago.  Every time I think about something from my past, these days, it comes as a fresh shock that so much of my past was very long ago.

My memories of school are barely accessible across the chasm of the fifty-plus years that separates them from today.

The nineties, which I tend to think of as the more recent past, are hardly more accessible.  That old saw—“Where did the time go?”—invades my consciousness at least once a day.

         In 1991, my 68-year-old mother tripped over an extension cord in her bedroom and broke her femur just above her knee.  Because of encroaching osteoporosis, the break never healed properly, and she used a walker or a wheelchair for the rest of her life.  But the family took this more or less in stride.  After all…she was old.

Last Saturday, we bought a walker at a resale shop for my 68-year-old SISTER.  Decades of chronic back inflammation, inner ear/balance issues and never having decent health insurance have put her in a place where she needs the support/security of a walker to remain acceptably active and mobile.

Thank providence my dad never lost his mental faculties.  He slowed down some, and began to have heart problems in his early 70’s.  But he was dead of cancer before he made it to 80.  It was sad; we were heartbroken.  But he was old.

My older sister’s husband, in his mid-seventies, is declining daily from a dementia that has been creeping up on him for awhile, but seems to have exploded over the last three or four years.  He hallucinates; he inhabits elaborate delusions starring all manner of people and animals only he can see.  She can’t leave him alone for more than about a half hour at a time.  This will surely kill him…he may not see 80 any more than my dad did.  But this will happen within the next couple of years.    

What the actual fuck??!?

Thirty years seemed terribly long in the context of how much older our parents were than us. And now? Three decades have flown by, propelled by the ever-rising winds of time, whisking us to the place where we could never imagine ourselves thirty years ago:

The land of Old. We are old people.  We literally ARE our parents…our parents as we knew them just a very short time ago—old, enfeebled, so much closer to the end of life than the beginning. 

Middle age came and went in a snap.  I never did actually come to terms with it.

And now, I’m face to face with something new.

No. Not new.  Old.     

I can’t even begin to think of coming to terms with it yet.  Because first I have to believe I’m really here, looking it square in the face.  And foolish, deluded me… I am just not there yet.