The aging family

Reports from the outside world include my oldest brother's stroke permanently damaging his short term memory, my sister's laryngeal cancer probably being fatal eventually and my father having mid-stage Parkinson's. Being the youngest of an aging family and in my mid 50's, it's entirely to be expected, all of this news. There's probably more stuff going on that I know nothing about, because, in my family system, no one communicates directly about health or illness. It's all grapevine and hearsay, oddly. It's a strange family system habit. I tend to be a lot more upfront about what's up with me, when I have an issue. But that violates the family taboo somehow. I get the impression it's a weird combo of stoicism and superstition. Stoics don't talk about being sick and if you do talk about it, it makes it more real or worse. 

As a family unit, we've been mostly lucky for the past half century. My mother is a breast cancer survivor, for the past 26 years. I'm an alcoholic and addict and deal with depression. I've taken inventories on my siblings and I think we're all alcoholics but that's just my opinion, man. I think my dad is depressive, untreated. My oldest brother was in a serious car accident when he was maybe 23 or so, but he was okay. Beyond these things, there has been very little bad news. 

But as we all age, the news has been changing. My oldest brother's state of consciousness is quite strange. If you call and chat with him on the phone, since he still has his long term memory, he knows who you are and so on. But as soon as he hangs up the phone, he forgets that you just talked. For a while he was pissed off at everyone in the family because "no one is talking to me anymore," but his son showed him proof that in fact, people were, he just would almost instantly forget. So he and I have moved over to email communication, and he can re-read what I sent him. It must be a strange way to go through one's day, forgetting what one just did or said or what just happened. 

My sister told me some of her situation a couple months ago, but doesn't provide updates. I know she went through a course of radiation and two courses of chemo, but I have no idea what the prognosis is. Laryngeal cancer does not have very high five year survival rates. 

My father has never told me anything about his health, ever. He has had some heart issues, and wears a pacemaker. But I know nothing about how that came about. I don't know how the Parkinson's is impacting his daily life at the moment. He lives with my mom, the middle brother and my sister in law, so there is a certain level of monitoring. But at his age (86), I won't be surprised if he needs assisted living very soon, or dies. 

Me? I have chronic irritation of the prostate and elevated PSA, so I may need to get a biopsy. I have diagnosed myself with chronic nonbacterial prostatitis, but my urologist is not impressed by my magical medical skills. His expert opinion is that I have about a 25% chance of having early prostate cancer. Usually treatable without removal of the prostate, but one never knows. Of course I immediately go to the dread of that radical procedure. Even though I am convinced my own diagnosis of nonbacterial prostatitis is correct. 

But this is what life is like, or more accurately, what life is. My sister was floored by the news that my 86 year old father has Parkinson's. But I draw on my essential pessimism and fatalism and my first reaction (which I kept to myself) was "I wish him release from suffering, but it's not a surprise." I am feeling very matter of fact about all of these inevitabilities. The recently deceased Philip Roth said, "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre." This may be especially the case for all of us who have not exactly lived clean and healthy. Stroke from smoking and drinking and no exercise, laryngeal cancer from smoking and ethanol, Parkinson's-- no one knows. The clock is ticking on my own elevated risk for certain cancers due my having been a heavy smoker for 20 years and drinking alcoholically. The stats show that, if you get about ten years out from quitting smoking, your risk of smoking related cancer plummets. No one is quite sure about being abstinent from alcohol. Next year I will be ten years out from smoking, so we'll see, if we're lucky. 

We age, we get sick, we die. Or we age, we get sick, our quality of life goes down the drain either suddenly or gradually, and *then* we die. Some people definitely suffer with years of a situation worse than death, in many ways, in my opinion. But that is how we judge it from the outside. I have known many people in these highly reduced quality of life situations who persist in wanting to be alive. Or we age or don't age, die suddenly, and that's that. This is how it works. There are other narrative arcs, but I still get surprised when other people are shocked by illness and death. I know it is not the actual illness or the death itself that shocks people, usually, but the fact that the whole Great Matter is unfolding in a way that affects them. But, unless we are hit by a falling piano and are instantly extinguished, we will always have to deal with illness and death, either our own or that of others. It's just the way it is. So it goes, as old Kurt would say. If he weren't dead. 

Of course that doesn't mean that grief is irrelevant, in the face of the inevitable. In fact, I believe knowing how to grieve is an absolutely essential skill for living a good life. Grieving one's own losses, grieving the illness and death of others. Sometimes simply grieving the swift passage of time, or weird changes that settle in that let you know with finality that what was is no more. 

Currently, my own grief results from the astonishing whirlwind of time's swiftness. I can't come to terms with being 56. I think of the next 20 or 30 years with dread. Maybe even horror sometimes. I sometimes get inundated with a terrible sense of urgency to be accomplishing certain desired outcomes, but that urgency is usually coupled with helplessness to create those situations. This pressure and sense of fleeting and swiftly passing time definitely influences my anxiety about the relationship I'm in, for example. 

I think of being 36 20 years ago and I'm shocked at how quickly those 20 years seem to have gone. How will two decades flash by from here on out? And if I am still around at 76, will it just have been an ephemeral blink? Is there any way to stave off the inevitable regrets, the wishing I had not "wasted time," the feeling of failure? Who is content at age 76 and how in hell did they do it?

I'm also grieving some other changes. Transitions. I had a boss who said once, "We all love change. It's transition we tend to avoid." I have been reflecting on that for the past 16 years. Not sure it is universally true, but it seems applicable in many situations. I'm so good at projecting, I was even starting to get anxious about graduating from my PhD program in a year. How will I survive? 

But the bottom line is that even a long life is short. A person who dies at 90 dies too young, in my opinion. I read recently that people born within the last 10 years or so could easily live as long as 150 years, and maybe that's too long, not sure. It's surreal to look at kids running around and think, huh, they may still be alive in 2168. 

My generation? Those of us who are poor don't stand a chance. We're already history.