Gracious Aging

Living into the 90s and experiencing ups and downs as health declines and fails is quite a trial.

I'd like to report, however, that I have one friend who is negotiating these ups and downs with relative good cheer.  

She's 99% ready to leave this earth but also very patient with the day-to-day indignities.  I'm amazed that she is not angry or sad.

Most younger people look at the problems of extreme old age and hope their lives will end earlier.

Perhaps because I spent four years accompanying my mother on this journey, I myself view being in an assisted living residence with equanimity.  It's a peaceful life surrounded by others without the kinds of worries and pressures that plague earlier years.  (A skilled nursing facility, on the other hand, is not good news.  It's more of a warehouse where people are pieces of meat, showered roughly, wheeled in and out of meals whether or not their false teeth may be in their mouths.)

What seems unendurable today--such as wearing Depends--can become just another event later if one lives in a cheerful place with kind caregivers.

When I was in my twenties, in the 1970s, I was close to my grandmother and observed her dealing with cataract surgery.  It seemed awful to me to have a surgeon cutting into one's eyes.

Today my perspective has changed.  I'm 67 and starting to feel the effects of growing old.

I didn't feel old when I got my Medicare card, or when I started collecting Social Security or began noticing increasing wrinkles and gray hair.   

Yesterday, however, when I sat in my ophthalmologist's office and scheduled a cataract surgery, it happened.  I'm where my grandmother was, and now I know I am old.