Will ya still need me, will ya still feed me...

Yesterday I was 64.

Hard to believe, since at one point in my life I seriously doubted I would live past 30.

Even harder to believe that only two siblings (I have six), one of my kids (I have three) and none of my grandkids (I have two adult ones) wished me a Happy Birthday, although I received more than 25 wishes from friends scattered across the globe.

But I have lived past 30...and 40...and 50 and 60, but it makes me pensive. It makes me think about the people I have loved in my life, the people I would have given my life to shelter and protect...and it makes me wonder: if I knew this would be the outcome, if I knew this would be the result, would I have done it? Would I have given up as much, worked as hard, sacrificed as much, willingly subjected myself to the many heartaches that came with my life, if I knew that at 64, I would essentially be forgotten, written off, ignored?

I probably would have, because that is what you do when you love someone. Even if I knew what was in store, I probably would not have let myself believe it and continued down the same road, given up the same things, repeatedly offered my heart and my trust and my faith...because that it what you do when you love.

But McCartney asked a very prophetic question and in the case of my family the answer, obviously, is mostly "no."

Old age ain't for sissies

You’ve heard the expression “old age ain’t for sissies,” right? Well, I’m here to tell you it’s true.

Next month I am going to be 64 and I cannot believe how much my body has deteriorated over the past decade…especially the last year. I have been reasonably healthy most of my life…ok, I’ve had some serious challenges from time to time, but I’ve pretty much conquered most of them…but lately I find myself facing certain—shall we say “structural”—challenges that are almost certainly more related to aging itself (and the result of body abuse in my youth) than anything else.

Most people express surprise when they find out how old I am. I am fortunate in my genetic heritage because, despite my age, I am still regularly perceived as being 10 to 15 years younger than I really am. I don’t have much grey in my hair, and what I do have I have coloured away…a nice, natural-looking strawberry blond that suits my complexion and doesn’t scream “she dyes her hair!” In fact, it is close enough to my natural colour that when it starts to grow out, it is barely noticeable. I don’t have much in the way of wrinkles…I am podgy and that helps to plump out the facial skin…and I use a very good (read that “costly”) moisturizer to keep the dry skin at bay. I have always had dry skin (not much in the way of pimples as a teen, either), but as I age it gets drier and flaky.

But in just the last couple of years, not only is age beginning to show, I am beginning to really feel it. Suddenly…just since my cataract surgery in October…I have permanent bags under my eyes: dark hollows surrounded by puffy bags so pronounced, I can see them if I look down. Last year I tripped up some stairs and broke a bone in my foot: the x-ray revealed a big toe so afflicted with arthritis it should be immobile from the damage (it isn’t…I can flex it fine…but sometimes it hurts like a mutha…).

When you get older, your body begins to deteriorate and, popular wisdom aside, your diet and fitness levels in your younger years have much less effect than you would like to think. We each carry a genetic timebomb that, like it or not, will begin to assert itself despite our best efforts, provided we live long enough. This is why, despite all the hype about diabetes, for example, being a lifestyle disease, you will find fitness freaks who discover they are diabetic anyway…those genes trump anything and everything you might try to do to overcome them! (We have fat, sedentary diabetics in my family…we also have slim, active ones.) That’s no reason to let yourself go and court the Big D, of course, but if you are counting on stringent dieting and arduous gym visits to keep it away, you are starving and punishing your body for nothing. If you’ve inherited the genes for diabetes from both of your parents, the best you can do it stave off its onset…I wasn’t diagnosed until 63, my husband’s grandmother wasn’t diagnosed until her 80s…but you cannot turn off your genetic inheritance with diet and exercise, no matter how fervently you believe otherwise.

One thing young people don’t take into consideration is the kind of damage they might be doing to their bodies with their diet and exercise programs. Sounds counter-intuitive, but the things you do in your youth can come back to haunt you, big time, in later years. A youthful diet low in calorie-laden (but calcium rich) dairy products, for example, can set you up for bone density problems later in life (most of those calcium tablets don’t have much benefit aside from enriching the companies that make them…your body simply excretes calcium that is not taken in through diet); regular strenuous exercise can wear or damage tendons, ligaments, even muscles and joints…things you won’t think much of as your young body heals up…things you will remember and regret when, in later years, you develop chronic tendinitis, joints aching from wear, even surgeries to repair damaged muscles. In my early 50s I had to have surgery to repair a torn abdominal…originally damaged in my youth due to exertion and exacerbated by pregnancy. Over the years it grew from a little “lump” next to my navel to a tear so big I now have a scar more than 12” (30+cm) long on my tummy and two Kevlar patches inside!

Young active lifestyles often include lots of outdoor activities…I spent a lot of time on horseback, on motorcycles, driving a convertible, laying on the beach in skimpy swimwear, hiking in the boonies…lots of outdoor stuff with lots of skin exposed. I am fair skinned and light eyed and in my youth, sunscreens had not yet been invented, nor were UV-protected sunglasses widely available. Despite public pronouncements by a certain arrogant and grossly misinformed supermodel, you do need sunscreens, especially if you are light skinned because skin cancer is a reality, it is the most common form of cancer, and sun exposure is the leading cause. And, believe it or not, those cute, cheap sunnies from the drugstore or trendy boutique are not doing you any favours…if they lack UV protection and you have light coloured eyes, you will end up like me—cataract surgery a full 10 years (or more…my late husband had cataract surgery in his 40s) before the average: UV rays not only damage your skin, they damage your eyes as well.

How many times have you fallen off a horse or a bicycle, while roller blading or ice skating, while skiing, or playing some sport like basketball or volleyball? We often just shrug off the bumps and bruises, but sometimes they are more serious than we know: George Eads (Nick Stokes on CSI) fell playing basketball and actually fractured his lower spine. But because he could walk around he never sought medical treatment for it. Ten years later his spine was x-rayed, the fracture discovered, and he now has five screws in his back, holding his spine together properly. When he hits 60 or so, its gonna come back to haunt him even more.

I have a condition in my lower spine called “lumbar facet syndrome.” Six years ago, in response to my complain of crippling pain in my lower spine, I was x-rayed and told I had degenerative disc disease. No cure, not even palliative care…I just had to live with it. Last year it was x-rayed again, this time I was told the condition was facet syndrome. Again, no cure, no palliative care. And so I live with it…but it has its costs.

I trip a lot…I trip because the problem is worse on my left side than my right, and when I walk, my left foot doesn’t raise as high as my right, so any unevenness on the pavement, a tile that is not laid exactly flat, a lump in the carpet, a dog toy I don’t see…any one of these may catch the front of that foot and trip me.

I have trouble getting up from low seats, even if they have arms. Between the compromised abdominal muscles (yah, they are “repaired” but that doesn’t mean they are as good as new) and the fact that the left leg doesn’t have the strength the right one does (the facet syndrome involves nerves being pressed upon, causing both pain and weakness), if I sit in something where my butt is significantly lower than my knees, I may need help getting back up.

This, of course, means I can’t sit on the floor…or even get on the floor to look under the bed for my shoes. It means going up stairs is a problem because only my right leg is strong enough to lift my body up the steps. Getting things out of low cupboards can be daunting…I have bend from the waist and hope I can find the desired item before the blood rushes to my head and I pass out.

Long walks are out of the question unless I load up ahead of time on codeine (a medicine that is blessedly available over the counter here). A shopping expedition always begins (and often ends) with a codeine tablet.

My Grandma Violet lived to be 89 years old. In her later years, she had trouble sleeping, often waking at 4 am and unable to go back to sleep. For most of my life, I have slept like the proverbial log, but after I broke my foot last year, sleep became elusive. Now I have my delicious “log” nights intermittently, sandwiched unpredictably between “wake up every hour” nights and “can’t get to sleep, can’t stay asleep” nights. All things being equal, it appears that aging is beginning to affect my sleep as well as my waking hours.

It is easy to be contemptuous of the aging and the aged. And it is so easy to say 1) “I’ll never be like that,” 2) “I’d rather be dead than old or infirm,” or 3) “I hope I die before I get that way.” But saying and doing are very different things. My late husband had a dear old auntie who was horrified at her brother’s last decade: a stroke victim, he spent his last 10 years of life paralyzed and being cared for my his wife and, later, by a nursing home. So horrified was this auntie that she told all and sundry that if she had a stroke, she was not to be kept alive through “artificial” means (like IVs, feeding tubes, etc.). In her 90s, Auntie had a stroke…and I discovered that even the most horrific averse training…like watching your brother taken care of like a baby for his last ten years…can mean nothing when you are actually facing the Grim Reaper. Auntie changed her mind in the hospital bed and spent her own last days in a nursing home, unable to swallow or speak, communicating in writing and being fed and hydrated through a tube.

And so I say again, old age ain’t for sissies. It takes guts to get up and do the necessary tasks of living when every bone, joint and muscle hurts and you know that it will not only be worse by bed time, it won’t be any better tomorrow, either. It’s easy to suffer through a painful tendinitis when you know with therapy and meds, it will be better in a few days or weeks…it’s not so easy when you know that if you stress that wrist just a tiny bit…like pick up too many plates from the table at one time…it is going to pain you for days…possibly forever. When you have to decide on how much necessary work you will do based on your ability to stand, walk, or bend, your life becomes controlled not by your desires…or even your pocketbook…it becomes controlled by pain and endurance, one of which increases, the other of which decreases, based on the things you did decades past and thought nothing of.

Most of us either think we will never decline in our later years…or that we will simply not live to pay the piper. But if you look at the numbers of Baby Boomers entering retirement age every year, you have to face the fact that the odds are that you will get that old…and unless you live in a padded cocoon, you will begin to experience physical decline. And it is then that you will discover just how strong and indomitable you really are.

I will never grow old…

Well, I’ve discussed it with my husband and we’ve agreed: I’m not going to get old, I’m going to stay middle aged until I die.

You see, in six weeks, I turn 62. This is an age where women are presumed to have acquired a full set of wrinkles and a crop of white hair. We are referred to as “senior citizens” and “pensioners” and, by the cheeky young crowd, “old people.” And therein lies the problem.

I don’t have wrinkles…oh, the middle-aged phenomena of deepening naso-labial folds and creases between the eyebrows have arrived, but it hasn’t gone beyond that. I don’t have any visible grey hair and my hairdresser reliably informs me that she blondes only a dozen or fewer at each visit.

I don’t have a dowager’s hump, no liver spots, and the skin on my arms and hands have just this past year started to lose its plump moistness and show the damage wrought by years of driving convertibles and riding horses in the hot afternoon sun. Okay, the knees are creaky and the spine isn’t what it used to be…but in truth, the knees started to go when I was in my teens, and the back has been a problem since I was rear-ended on the freeway when I was just 28. Getting tossed from a horse ten years later didn’t help it any, either.

When I look in the mirror I don’t see a 60+ gramma…and apparently nobody else does either. I don’t have the money…or inclination…for cosmetic surgery, although I will admit to using high-quality moisturizing creams. What I thought was a blessing in my teens…sufficiently dry skin to ward off all but the most detremined pimple attacks…has become my curse in aging: dandruff of the face…skin so dry it literally flakes off. But still, none of the facial skin crevasses and roadmaps we ordinarily associate with advanced age.

Some of this has to be genetic. My maternal grandfather died at 79 and was less than half grey. My paternal grandmother died at 89 and, while she had the prosaic head of white fluff, the lines on her face were so few that she literally had the stereotypical visage of a woman twenty years younger. My genes are good so, despite years of abusing my skin with cheap make up and too much sun, I could lie and say I was 45 and probably get away with it. Young people still call me “tannie” here (“auntie,” a term of respect for a woman a generation above you)…so far no one has called me “ouma” (“grandmother”).

So, what is the issue? Well, for one thing, people perceived as being old are often dismissed. In this peculiar world of ours where substance is subordinate to the superficial and dumbness has become a virtue, the accumulated knowledge, experience and wisdom of the elder has become valueless. And the older you get, the more you seem to be disdained…and disrespected.

This has always been a curious thing to me, as I have long been a person to like and admire the older generations. As a kid I loved hearing about my grandparents’ childhoods on farms out in the Great Plains…farms with no electricity or running water, farms where horsepower was actually provided by horses. My grandparents were repositories of fabulous tales and storied skills and abilities…how to make sauerkraut, bake bread, butcher a hog, draw a boil, darn a sock, grow tomatoes, can cherries, make plum jelly or a berry cobbler.

Aside from the ancient skills, old people always seemed to know stuff. My grandparents had a contemporary, Millie, whose hobby was cake decorating. Whenever we went to her house there was always a plate of cupcakes so beautifully decorated it was almost a sin to destroy their beauty with eager teeth and tongue! The best lemon meringue pies, the finest homemade sausages, the most beautiful examples of the needle arts all seemed to come from their contemporaries. Younger people, like my mother, who actually had less to do thanks to such things as canned vegetables, automatic washers, vacuum cleaners, and other modern conveniences, always seemed to be more pressed for time…which manifested in slapdash meals and careless housekeeping…and a complete disinterest in practicing many of the old skills and passing them on.

Personally, I think old people are cool. They not only know lots of practical stuff, but their years of experience have given them not just experience and knowledge, but wisdom as well. It is nigh unto impossible to develop wisdom absent the experiences that teach one lessons, but somehow, in today’s world, wisdom is less favoured than brainless, mindless, flinging oneself into something and learning nothing from the outcome.

Privately speaking, I like the age I have achieved, but I dislike being dismissed for irrelevant reasons. If I were to offer my opinion on string theory, I wouldn’t fret at all about being dismissed because, after all, I know nothing about it. But to be dismissed for no more reason than I have achieved a venerable number of years, to have my accumulated experience and wisdom deemed invalid simply because it comes from a person above a certain age, is simply unacceptable.

I know I can’t change the world, and it is not possible to change the minds of people who are certain that they know everything there is to know of value. So rather than fling myself pointlessly against the barricades of prematurely shuttered minds, I’ve decided to make an end run around the biases of the witless young know-it-alls and just lie about my age.

Besides, isn’t it better if people think I am just 9 years older than my husband instead of 25?