Thursday, May 16, 2024
Lights out at about 11 p.m., back on at 3:30 a.m, out again at 5:45 and up at 6:55
Prednisone, Day 4. I woke up with a very sore right shoulder and limited ROM in my left shoulder, bilateral sore wrists, looking forward to ingesting my 4th prednisone around daybreak. . . took the prednisone at 5 a.m. with my overnight steel cut oatmeal. I got up at 6:55, pain in both shoulders especially the right one, and very stiff fingers, tender hands. Am I expecting too much relief too soon, considering what bad condition I was in on Monday, needing help to get into the Honda, requiring a wheelchair escort at the VA? I bounce between wondering whether I may be misdiagnosed, unhealed by the prednisone and accepting that I'm in much better condition than I was in on Monday when I took the first dose.
Lust for Life; decrepitude and attitude. I'm reading an article by Elizabeth Keating in The Atlantic: "Questions We Don't Ask Our Families, But Should." She writes that when her mother died, she realized how much she didn't know of her life. I had the same feeling of regret as I worked on my memoir years ago, my own mother having died in 1973 at age 51 and her own mother having died when my mother was only 6 years old. What was her life like growing up with her Irish immigrant father and 3 brothers in the 1920s and during the Great Depression? As a young wife during World War II and the terrible years after the War? With my father (with whom I didn't speak for 13 years, but that's another story) I was able to ask some of those questions when we reconciled, especially when he lived with us in his last years. As I sit here on my recliner, typing this at 4:30 in the morning at age 82, how I miss them both, so many memories still and so many regrets. I'm thinking of Emily in Our Town: "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
A sentence that caused me to pause as I read the essay was this: "I wish I had a fuller sense of [my mother] as a person, especially how she was when she was young, with a lust for life." What can one say of "lust for life" in old age, when one is like Robert Frost's The Oven-bird: "The bird would cease and be as other birds / But that he knows in singing not to sing. / The question that he frames in all but words /Is what to make of a diminished thing."
Perhaps Cicero's most famous essay is De Senectute, or On Old Age. In it, he defends the value and advantages of old age against those who see only Frost's diminishment and concludes"
…my old age sits light upon me…, and not only is not burdensome, but is even happy. For as Nature has marked the bounds of everything else, so she has marked the bounds of life. Moreover, old age is the final scene … in life’s drama, from which we ought to escape when it grows wearisome and, certainly, when we have had our fill.
It is the last clause that I think of in illness, incapacity, dependency and pain. Freud theorized that we are all governed both by a Life Drive and by a Death Drive, Eros and Thanatos. He thought that we all hold an unconcious desire to die which is countered and overridden by the drive or urge to live, to reproduce, to thrive and enjoy pleasure. Many, maybe most, psychologists and analysts take issue with his theory of a Death Drive, but the older and sicker and more diminished I become, the more I am inclined to believe it. I am often like Dr. Doolittle's Pushme Pullyu, acting to prolong life my life with medications and doctor visits at times and at other times wanting to "get it over with," as my father would often say about experiences as different as enjoying dinner and going to a doctor's appointment.
After he turned 80, Henry Miller wrote an essay called, appropriately enough, On Turning Eighty. He wrote:
If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “Fuck you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.
What I note is that there are a lot of "if's in those sentences, starting with not being a cripple or an invalid, having good health. To the extent the opposite is true, to that extent life becomes a burden from which, in Cicero's words, "we ought to escape when it grows wearisome and, certainly, when we have had our fill." I am reminded of an evening, decades ago, when I accompanied Tom St. John to a Milwaukee Rep perforance of A Christmas Carol (because Caela wasn't feeling well.) Before the perfromance, we had dinner and a drink in the course of which Tom remarked, for some forgotten reason, that he wished he could live forever, but as a perpetually young, healthy guy. I said it sounded like living in Hell to me: eternal life in the same condition, at the same age, in a state of stasis, like Paul Cook's descripton of Heaven in the original Bedazzled film:
“You know how it is: you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whisssh! you’re seventy: you’ve been a lawyer for fifty years, and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you.” The Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town.
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