OK I GET IT I AM OLD-NOW GET OVER IT
One of my favorite Peter Paul and Mary songs is, “The Great Mandella” which is about the wheel of life. The mandella refers to the great circle of time in Hindu/Buddhist belief.
In the chorus it says, “Take your place on The Great Mandala
as it moves through your brief moment of time.”
I have always had the sense that life is lived on a wheel and that if we live long enough and full enough, we will end it very close to where it began. I saw it most vividly with my mother in her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. She went from a fully active adulthood, to starting to forget, to a full decline. During that process she lost confidence and began to retreat from the world around her. She eventually went to a residential facility until she started to wander and had to be transferred to the locked in section.
She knew me until she didn’t. She lost the ability to talk and chew and feed herself. She sat uncommunicatively in a diaper in a wheelchair with no awareness of the world around her. In the end an aid fed her from a three partitioned bowl with three different colored mush that was spooned into her mouth and then spit out and recaptured on the spoon and reinserted again.
While watching that feeding I remembered her in her full vitality, feeding my babies who were sitting in their diapers, spitting out the mush only to have my mom recapture it and reinsert it. It was my last visit.
I think of that last visit often as it is the script of my worst nightmares. I think about that visit when I grasp for a word or can’t remember what I was just about to say after someone jumped into the conversation and when the opportunity to reenter the conversation came, it was gone.
I remember when it first started to happen to my mom I was frustrated and angry at her. Worse, I made fun of her for forgetting or being overwhelmed. Maybe it was just old age and not Alzheimer’s that was to come, but why wasn’t I more patient, more tolerant, more forgiving?
I imagine a year of therapy might supply an answer but I’m not sure I want to hear that revelation.
Instead, I want to make sure it does not happen to me. I live in dread of that tableau of my mom being fed, only in this scenario I am wearing the diaper and spitting out the mush.
If it comes there is nothing I can do about it, but for now I am comforted with the fact that either all my friends are in pre-Alzheimer’s, or more likely this is what natural healthy aging looks like. We forget words, we can’t remember names and we don’t know where we left the keys. We can’t remember what we ate for dinner yesterday but fondly remember the first girl we kissed 55 years ago.
One more thing has not changed. My kids make fun of me, lose patience with me and do a lot of literal or metaphoric eye rolls. Something I don’t recall doing but may have since in my youth they hadn’t invented the term, eye rolls. So, starting today I am developing a new mantra.
“OK I GET IT I AM OLD-NOW GET OVER IT.”
When I come to my children or younger sales people with a technology question, have patience with your help. I may have no tech skills, but I do have my dignity. Do you know from where and how far my generation has come? There has never been a time when so many innovations have happened to a single generation.
I was born along with another baby called television. It was black and white, had a screen with a 6-inch diameter, and looked more like a heavy piece of furniture than an entertainment center. It had rabbit ears for receiving the signal and part of the watching was having your father get off the couch and adjust the ears every 15 minutes.
When color came in it was like we all had cataract surgery and could see again. Cable TV expanded our menu. We metaphorically went from having a choice of frozen tv dinners to going out to a gourmet restaurant every night.
Our entire life schedule had been ruled by what was on tv that night and if you went out you missed what everyone was talking about the next day. Then came the VCR and you could control what you watched and when. It was true liberation. Then came high def tv and suddenly all these beautiful actors and actresses had moles and dermatological issues that makeup could not cover up.
Then came seemingly paper thin TVs with HDMI hook ups and hundreds of options to decide on (and of course no manual since they don’t come with the product anymore) …..Enough, it was more than I could bear so I called out for help and I could hear the eye roll on the other side of the phone.( I would have seen it if I had face timed the call but that is another problem). It was mantra time.
OK I GET IT I AM OLD-NOW GET OVER IT.
Sometimes I have a conversation with my kids. We decide that I am going to do something. A week goes by, and I get a call asking how it went.
“ How what went?”.
“ Don’t you remember you were going to…..
Call the doctor for an appointment for the persistent dry cough
Send your grandchild a birthday gift
Try out their recommended recipe
“No, sorry I got busy and forgot”. Cue the eye roll
OK I GET IT I AM OLD-NOW GET OVER IT.
Different people have different relationships with money. Some are savers and put away a quarter of every dollar they earn. Some are spenders and spend $1.25 of every dollar they earn. Seniors, not all but many, tend to spend less of what they have accumulated in their life. For some it is because they fear running out of money. For some it is the desire to leave their heirs an inheritance to help secure for them a better life when they are gone. Inflation is something that younger people have never experienced in their lives until post Covid.
We seniors went through the 70’s and the oil embargo and 13% mortgages. We understand inflation and yet talk all the time about how expensive things have become. It does not matter if we can afford more expensive things, there is a reluctance to spend on what we think are overpriced items.
If we are financially comfortable and share our ambivalence about buying something that we feel is a rip off, our kids are on our case to buy it.
They also have some very creative ideas about activities and experiences that we should spend our money on, like taking three generations of our family on a cruise or a trip to Europe. We might indeed be able to afford it, but we might also be very cautious regarding how we handle our money. In short:
OK I GET IT I AM OLD-NOW GET OVER IT.
Why is it that golf gets it and almost no one else does?
I started playing in my early 60’s a few years before retirement. It was part of a comprehensive plan for retirement. It was outdoors, it was social, and it had some exercise.
I was embarrassingly awful. I took many lessons and relied on the kindness of friends who would play with me even though I was beyond incompetent. I took many lessons and practiced regularly and finally began to show some improvement. My aspiration was to someday break 100. I was getting close and finally did it once or twice. As my skills improved the distance I could hit the ball diminished. One of my regular players who has played golf all his life told me it was time to move up to the senior tees. I was hesitant because in the summer when in Canada I play with younger players and didn’t want to hit from a different tee.
My local friend told me that if you hit your first 2 shots as well as you can and still do not reach the green you are hitting from the wrong tee. Golf recognized that and established different tees for different ages and different genders. I acquiesced and now consistently shoot in the mid 90’s.
Golf understands that as you age you can’t do physical activities as well as when you were younger and so it compensates for it. In short, golf more than anyone or anything else gets my mantra.
OK I GET IT I AM OLD-NOW GET OVER IT.
Now the challenge is to get everyone to think like golf.
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