Living, Dying, and Living Death

The labors of helping care for my father have me reflecting on the body, old age, health, illness, incapacity, and the experience of life. My gut impulse is to recoil from the possibility of being alive in a condition similar to his. I think to myself, oh fuck no, off I go should I ever face being immobile, severely disabled, reliant on the basic care of others to empty my catheter bag and wipe my ass and lift me up into my walker or wheelchair. 

Of course, a few different possibilities present themselves to counter this gut reaction. One is the old frog in the boiling water idea, where old age slowly and somewhat imperceptibly robs me of various faculties, but none of it is dramatic or pressing enough along the way to spur suicide, although the end result would be identical to where my father finds himself. Connected with this may well be the fact that we seem to be in the habit of staying alive, and maybe we compromise again and again and again as the years go by, accepting ever more threadbare pleasures and experiences as trade off for insisting on the misery of existence. Another thought that occurs to me is that it is not a simple matter to kill oneself on one's own, and anyone who assists risks criminal charges in many states. 

In other words, there are a multitude of ways I recoil at being in a disabled and miserable old age like my father, but a great many ways that precisely that could happen. At which point I realize I'm just spinning around in what if thinking and who knows what the future actually holds? A Facebook friend of mine posted a couple days ago that her hale and hearty father, 78 years old, given to 45 mile backpacking trips and bicycle races, dropped dead in one minute from a massive heart attack, in spite of no previous indications of trouble. My sister's husband, also, an example of bitter ironies. He waited a few years for a liver transplant, and finally accepted that he was probably going to die from liver failure. But miracle of miracles, he got the call that they had a liver for him, and the transplant worked. That was about five years ago. He lived a pretty good life in the intervening years. But then, boom, dead of a heart attack. No warning or any indication of heart trouble. And dead at 61 years old, no less. 

So I get it, in my mind, that worrying about the exigencies and vicissitudes of old age and what if this or that is bootless, yet the realities are so present for me these days that I can't stop. 

On the positive side, what I am seeing inspires me to continue taking care of myself. Yoga, good food, sleep hygiene, cardio, basic measures to try to age well. Mentally also—keeping active, staying challenged. Showing up for emotional sobriety, meditating, and maintaining at least some strong friendships, also. I am a lot more conscious of making choices to age well, in whatever ways are possible and do-able for myself. The good side of this is that the incentives are present, not future. I feel better now, and that's good motivation. I think in many ways I am healthier now than I was at age 30, barring unavoidable changes in body chemistry. 

But I still feel haunted by the specter of a terrible old age, characterized by poverty, scarcity, suffering, chronic pain, incapacity, grinding loneliness, and being trapped in both my body and my situation. The downside of having a very vivid imagination indeed. 

The greatest blessing, it seems to me, would be to wish someone the most pleasant and enjoyable old age and a good peaceful death. It is more and more apparent to me that these experiences are more valuable than I previously realized.