Fun with Aging

Apparently, I’m getting better – my recovery is now progressing rather nicely. How do I know this? Despite NOT doomsurfing (OK, truth? Totally limited surf action – HONEST!) last night, I could NOT manage to breach the walls of Lullaby Land.

Apparently, I need less slumber time and am returning to my usual abby-normal sleep habits.

I’m truckin' farther down On-the-Mend Road. That’s the good news.

I had a ripping yarn to pass my slumber-free hours and Coco was purring on my chest. It’s the second (and, sadly, last) in Sharyn McCrumb’s Jay Omega series – Zombies of the Gene Pool. No, it has nothing to do with actual zombies OR tanks of genetic material

In the 1950s, eight young men, dreaming of literary immortality, buried a time capsule with their science fiction stories and cultural relics from the time. Now the capsule is being dredged up… (source)

Here’s the only irksome bit – the eight young men are now in their early 60s. Of the five who haven’t given it up to the Grim Reaper already, two are depicted as ancient, frail and decidedly rickety. One is in the early stages of, presumably, Alzheimer’s. Another is still terribly weak from a heart attack suffered two years before.

Only a third of this crew is alive, hale and hearty at this not-THAT-old point in their lives.

I’M in my damn early 60s and, if not for January’s bean surgery and August’s spine slice-a-rama, I wouldn’t be this weak and fragile. Also too, my current condition, as noted above, improves with each passing day. I doubt I’ll ever be able to benchpress my own weight again but, PHFFFT, why would I want to?

I remember going with my father to his 50th high school class reunion. He and his classmates were all 68-ish years old. Daddy was in relatively good shape then – not the Olympic form of his youth but he was doing fine and dandy. One of his classmates was in a wheelchair and, to my ignorant early 40s eyes, looked more like a decrepit, near death 90. I asked the old man “he’s the same age as you? How can that be?”

His answer – “we all age differently.”

Me and Pop in our (much) younger days

Truth!

A vibrant, energetic woman from my high school class died at the age of 58 from frontotemporal dementia  – an uncommon type of dementia that causes problems with behaviour and language.

I couldn’t, until my strange and difficult recovery from January’s noodle surgerizing, imagine what it must’ve been like for Connie to lose words, names, memory; to find herself behaving oddly/differently.

Now I can. Mentally, I’m back to being as on the ball as ever – quite possibly more so. Physically – my strength WILL increase. I just gotta keep working it.

Back to McCrumb’s Zombie book though – she was somewhere in her early 40s when she wrote it. In the US, that’s a little past life's, average, halfway point.

Does 60+ years of age look so fragile, brittle and bleak to everyone 40 and under? Sure, getting older is a daunting and sometimes exhausting endeavor but, fer fuck’s sake, it beats the alternative.