Who's Going to Die First?
Working on a new narrative ...
Sara and I have always agreed about who was going to die first: it would be me.
This was part of the delegation of duties worked out by every long-married couple. I mow the lawn; Sara makes the beds. I handle technology; she manages insurance. And—until just the other day—I was in charge of age-related breakdown. Sara was going to be healthy forever.
It made perfect sense. Not only am I four years older, but I’ve got a proven facility for breakdowns. Torn rotator cuffs (climbing accident on Whitehorse). Ripped adductor tendons (day 87 of a run streak). Failing knees (general abuse and genetics). I pick myself up and carry on, but this stuff has got to take its toll. It only follows that I'd be the first to go.
We’ve woven these injuries and assumptions into the narrative we’ve built together during our 33 years of marriage. In this narrative, Sara was invulnerable. Never mind that she has this one floppy ankle that’s prone to twisting, and she breaks out in hives if there’s a speck of dairy or gluten in her meal. Other than that, there’s never anything wrong with her.
But our little story took an unexpected turn the Wednesday before Christmas. More than a turn, it was a SNAP of the distal radius bone in Sara’s wrist, suffered when she tried to catch herself from a fall. And then, in a kind of slow-motion cascade, x-rays led to DEXA bone scans and blood tests and a little outpatient surgery to screw her wrist back together—and there went our little fantasy that she’d get out of this aging process unscathed.
I hoped that I’d find some neat way to encapsulate what we both learned from this incident … but it’s not working out like that. Instead we’re “enjoying” a sustained and ongoing examination of our attitudes about aging, death, finances, food, the advice offered by the medical establishment, etc. In our discussions I occasionally trot out my fatalistic bullshit, suggesting that since we’ve already procreated, our job here on earth is done, so why bother sticking our fingers in the dike of aging? Sara bats this aside easily, choosing instead to consider what concrete steps we need to take to slow the advance of aging and ensure our maximum enjoyment of life.
I’ve written and discarded thousands of words trying to sort this out. While the break in Sara’s wrist was very successfully repaired by a delightful and extraordinarily competent surgeon named Mary Kate Thayer, the break in our narrative won’t be repaired so much as reconstructed to suit our new understanding. And that will take some time.
While I work on that, I remind myself of some of the things that make life worth living:
I think you're living out retirement and your second half the best way anyone could. You're spending time with family you love, doing the activities you enjoy and taking some adventurous risks by climbing a few mountains! As for who will die first, that discussion is secondary to which of our children will be forced to take us in and let us live in their basement when they're making the big bucks. Reminding them of this possibility keeps them humble ;)
Aging isn't a battle, it's a slaughter. But you still gotta go down fighting.