Mortality and Other Annoyances: When the Body Speaks the Soul Listens

This is a substantially revised version of a piece I posted on this blog on March 14, 2012. It is published simultaneously on Medium.com, an interesting new venture in blogging. 

They tell me that I’m going through the “aging process.” I always thought of that as something that can be fixed with a pad of steel wool and a can of Rust-Oleum. I’m now informed that it is far more cosmic than that—something I had begun to suspect a few years ago after a round of doctors appointments to check on a few maladies of seeming little consequence.

What I discovered is that the “aging process” is a default disease. Floaters in your eye? Just part of the aging process. Ringing in your ear? Yeah, that just goes with age. Bladder not fulfilling its part of the deal? Growing old has its issues.

The thing is that while there may be a default diagnosis there is no default treatment. While I am a reluctant pill popper, I figured that surely something as universal as this “aging process disease” could be annihilated by a fat pill, pink in color, with letters like 6YTK inscribed on them. Far from it. Turns out that everything requires a different pill and each one costs something like $357.62, unless you inquire about a generic version, in which case it costs $4.98. Glad I asked.

I’m starting to get annoyed, however. It’s the little things. I’m always happy to get those 10% senior discounts; my longstanding reputation as a good steward (which my kids translate as “cheap”) overcomes admitting that I am old enough to be worthy of this act of benevolence on the part of the local merchants. But just once it would be good to have them inquire as to my eligibility rather than have it assumed. I want to be carded when ordering Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast.

It may be that part of this is punishment from beyond. I used to travel a lot and that put me sitting across many hundreds of tables accompanied by many more hundreds of people, often seniors. Most of these dear folk seemed able to talk only about the side effects of their various prescriptions, the bedside manner of their physicians, and the latest Medicare loophole to exploit. I know my eyes glazed over. I know I muttered silently something to the effect of “Dear God, why me? Why oh why me?” I’m now wondering if this is the Affordable Health Care version of the Myth of Sisyphus, whereby one is sentenced for all eternity to push a Tylenol up a long hill with the tip of his nose, only to reach the peak and watch helplessly as it rolls back down again.


But now here I am, knees that bark at me, an insidious disease working its inexorable way with me, and all the other ailments that accompany a body’s natural slow decline. Is this it? Will I be remembered as that guy with all those problems he talked about at dinner—ear-ringing, shoulder-aching, back-tightening, eyes-matting, knee-throbbing, belly-expanding, mouth-drying, Parkinsons-pending, arthritis-invading, libido-impairing, memory-fleeting, weight-adding, bladder-misbehaving, hair-thinning, skin-splotching, and on and on?

If it all comes down to this life starts to feel kind of trivial. But I know better. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t grudgingly admit that this rant is something of a dodge, allowing me to use my aches and pains as a way to avoid thinking critically about my own life, mining it for its moments of satisfaction, but also fessing up to its failures.

Others have done it, often by memoir or poem. Somerset Maugham called it The Summing Up. Anatole Broyard admitted to being Intoxicated by My Illness. Mary Felstiner put words to her pain in Out of Joint: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis. Elizabeth Wurtzel tapped a responsive chord that resonated across American culture in Prozac Nation. Mary Gordon‘s memoir depicted a familiar theme in The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for her Father.

There is something about this stage in life whereby one simply understands that he is declining. For some it comes at an earlier age—there is no promise that we will all get our threescore and ten. I can’t pinpoint a day or month, but I know that in recent times I have found myself looking backward far more than forward. I don’t mean that in some maudlin, self-pitying sense. Not at all. But my body reminds me every day that there will be limitations on the path ahead.

At the same time I have realized that the path already traveled still has something to teach me, that my soul still yearns for fulfillment, and that these waning years still offer me a chance to discover anew the heart’s desires. I do not know what form that will take, whether it will be by word or deed. I just recognize that my body’s fragility nudges me to find that path on which I have journeyed all my days and to somehow redeem it through rediscovery and new discovery.

So there it is. I need to quit this ranting and get back to that path. Now, if only I could find the darn thing. Where are my glasses?