Letters to the Editor
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Life is too short, or too long?
I've had to smile at all the 20-somethings' vitriol in these letters. I lost my mother when I was 24 and she was 60. The last few years of her life were filled with endless complaining about endless health problems. My dad made it to 80, but joked that he was the "6 million dollar man" because that's how much Blue Cross had probably spent to keep him alive through all his various cardiac and vascular problems. And I used to think all their whining was just a self-absorbed pity party. Like other writers, my parents were "old" when they were my age (almost 53). They could never have kept up with a teenager on a bike ride, or tried anything new, it seemed. Their zest for life had been replaced with deteriorating health and depression.
But, as I reach the age at which my mother had her first heart attack, and find myself slowly but surely being limited by the inevitable decline of my mind and body, I realize now what my parents went through, although I have yet to suffer any problems as serious as theirs. But I refuse to complain to my son about it. There is no way a younger person can understand or sympathize with aging until they feel the losses themselves. So I don't feel anything but amusement at those letters. Their day will come, and then they'll understand. And hopefully realize, as I have, that I was more self-centered when I was in my 20s and had no interest in or sympathy for what my parents were going through, than I am now that I actually have something to complain about.
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Chuck Yeager
I don't think about age much now since I just graduated from college, but your article reminded me of Chuck Yeager.
I just finished reading his autobiography and it's full of life lessons.
Here's one of the quotes near the end of the book that I thought of when reading you describe how you can no longer play football and other sports:
"You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up."
~Chuck Yeager
Yeager, obviously, wanted to be a test/fighter pilot for the rest of his life. But age caught up with him and he retired when the military decided he was too old to deal with the daily rigor of being a test pilot. However, he still flies as often as he can.
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When did I start getting old?
When did I start getting old? The day I heard "Born To Be Wild" on the Easy-Listening station...
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Are Age and Time Important?
Does age have anything to do with time? It’s too relative for me to worry about. The fact I’m 65 on 6-5 is not important either.
After I noticed at Gary’s age that I had too pee way to often and learning I had an enlarged prostate, I started finding all kinds of physical problems that scared me. Reading about an herb that would extend my life and then see it debunked six months later, or which vitamin I should or shouldn’t take, didn’t help. To stop this information barrage, I returned to a life philosophy that I came up with on my own.
My grandmother raised on a North Dakota farm on the Canadian border didn’t have medical or age angst. Her medical information news consisted of rumors and bible reading. In her rural community you didn’t talk to a doctor unless things were very serious or grave. Her only reading material that she devoured, the Sears and Montgomery Ward’s catalogues, weren’t much help either. When you spend your first harsh winter in a sod house, go through a 40-foot snow tunnels to get to the outhouse, live through dust bowls and tornadoes, you don’t worry about age, you meet each challenge, like starting to bowl at 86.
Today, we have too much health knowledge thanks to the information age. Advances in technology and medicine tell me that those two guys 21 and 25 that wrote back-to-back letters to Gary, will have a much longer time to feel and develop their health angst. They stand a good chance of living well past 150. Whether that gives them a better life depends on two things: global warming and life attitude.
Their angst won’t come from what remedy will extend their life They won’t have to fret about keeping organs healthy, since stem cell science will repair them. No matter the medical wonders, they still will have to worry about how they see their life. Their longer journey will give them a lot more time to think. That could be both good and bad. Good if they understand my life philosophy, the difference between want and need, bad if they don’t.
My philosophy turned my life around at age 12. I was alone and crying in our garage about the madness in my family because my mother was bi-polar. I didn’t know the name of the condition. I did know that my dad beating me up because of my mother’s manipulations wasn’t going to stop. Nor were her very negative messages about my unworthiness. I decided the way to get away was not by running away. I would stop her power over me and my life by understanding that although I might want her to treat me differently, I didn’t need her to for me to love myself. I said I wouldn’t let her or any other people tell me who I am. That each view I had of life’s ups and downs, were mine, not theirs.
So how long I live or how I age is far less important than how I give myself the power to enjoy it.
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not laughing at the article, for once
I'm usually impatient with articles about aging from people in their 50s but I've been thinking about decrepitude a bit because of a recently diagnosed eye problem more typical of people in their mid-60s (I'm 36), and because my two young daughters seem hell-bent on growing older and learning to do new things - I can see an imaginary graph with their capabilities line increasing over time and mine decreasing; all I wonder about is when the two lines are going to cross over...
Plus, with my family's track record of heart disease, it doesn't do to take things for granted.
All of which to say, it's probably never too early or too late to be aware of the fact that you've only got but so much time, and you'd better make the most of it. I've got nothing to complain about, but it wouldn't kill me to get off my ass and / or enjoy what's around me more often... I'm willing to freely admit, BTW, that probably doesn't include pneumatic 20-somethings. As alluring as their thong underwear and spinal tattoos are, I am not; and, I think the missus would probably be unimpressed.