Temporary problems

K and I were chuckling one morning over the sign in our hotel’s fitness center, which stated the typical disclaimers to ensure that the equipment would be used in a safe and lawsuit-preventative manner. At the end, the sign warned, “If you experience discomfort, discontinue activity.”

K snorted. “If I followed that, I’d never get out of bed!”

True, that, and perhaps increasingly true as one gets older. As a fictional character famously said, life is pain. Perhaps less cynically, life is at the very least uncomfortable much of the time, and for all that we might like to think that discomfort can be conquered a la mind over matter, our minds are often pitiful prisoners in a cage of bones and meat. Happy now? Wait a few hours. You’ll at the very least need to eat or drink or pee or poop, and if it’s late summer and you live amidst farmland and you suffer late-summer allergies, wait a few minutes and try to remember how comfortable regular breathing feels. Sure, those are all temporary issues, but wait a few decades, until you are firmly in the second half of your life, and find yourself wondering if the only temporary thing in your life is you.

Boy, that’s cheerful. But I’ve just come back from visiting my family in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s put me in a bit of a dolorous mood. Don’t get me wrong; it was actually a very nice visit. This area is a great place to visit in general, whether you like being active or being a glutton or both in equal parts, as K and I do. It was also an important visit because my parents are quite old and have experienced their share of the kinds of health woes that come with quite-oldness, and to be uncheerful but honest, each time I see them could be the last. 

Funny thing, though: each time I see them I’m struck by how good they look. Usually when you see someone infrequently, you expect to be shocked by how they’ve changed from the way you picture them in your head, as opposed to the person who sees them all the time and fails to notice the effects of time. But this time I was once again pleasantly surprised by how healthy they appeared and acted. My mother insisted on cooking dinner one night. My father has written a book he’s trying to get published. Yes, my mother told me nine times what she was going to cook for dinner because she’s become forgetful about some things, but the meal was still delicious and nobody got sick from it, so I’d say that’s success. 

As for my father, this book of his is something of a white whale. As near as my sister and I can figure out, it’s supposed to be a textbook of sorts, one that will revolutionize education as we know it, or something, hell if we know. We’ve seen it. It’s not going to revolutionize anything; it’ll be lucky if anyone gets to read it besides us. Oh, it’s coherent enough—that’d make a swell cover blurb, wouldn’t it?—and I’m glad he gave himself a project like this, one that keeps his mind active and gives him a sense of purpose, but part of that purpose is a bit grandiose and delusional. This visit he made sure to corner me and agree that should the book be accepted for publication after his death, I would review the “galley proof” while my sister would take care of the contractual matters. Sure, Pop. Will do.

That wasn’t all, though. “I finished writing my Christmas cards last week,” he informed me after we’d polished off Mom’s dinner. “The addresses and stamps are on the envelopes but the envelopes aren’t sealed yet. If I die before I send them out, your sister is to write the date of my death on the cards. That way everyone can be informed.”

K, sitting between me and my father, nodded politely. I laughed. Hard. “Oh, that’ll be awesome. ‘Merry Christmas! I’m dead!’” I couldn’t stop laughing or cracking wise; Mom’s dinner threatened to erupt from my nostrils. “‘Woooooh! I’m the ghost of Christmas present! Happy holidays from beyond the grave!’”

My father didn’t get upset. Even though my visits are infrequent, he’s used to my smart-assery by now, and when you’ve lived nearly 90 years, I suspect you learn to let a lot of things roll harmlessly off you. Some things can’t ever be rolled off, though, and despite my jeers, I understand perfectly well why my father had written his Christmas cards in August and given his daughters these morbid duties. He’s trying to get some kind of control over the one thing beyond anyone’s control. At some point, temporary issues become permanent. My father’s eyesight is bad, and when he turns 90 next year he knows he’s going to lose his driver’s license. He already can’t walk very far, and this limitation of mobility—and freedom—isn’t going to go away with a little bit of rest, the way my recent shin splints will if I don’t screw it up by trying to do a 20 miler this weekend because I have seen the future and it makes me want to run really fast and really far in the time I have left.

Even people who like pithy aphorisms often make fun of the one about how you should live each day as though it were your last. Jeez, if I did that I’d be even more depressed than I am now, either that or completely strung out on happy drugs. Truth is, though, at the point where you are living each day as though it could be the last, you aren’t likely going skydiving or running with the bulls. It seems like your main focus is on acceptance. You do what you can but acknowledge what you can’t, and you try to be OK with that even if you won’t ever be entirely successful. There’s a lot of discomfort at the end of your life, but disclaimer signs to the contrary, you continue activity as long as you can.