A shopping trip

I had to take Peggy to the airport at 4:30 this morning, so, hating crowded stores as I do, I went grocery shopping on the way home. The main aisle of the store was crowded with young male stockers pushing large dollies. I watched in awe as they joked with one another while lifting heavy boxes, and I thought about how recently I could have done the same and how much I took it for granted. I recalled working on a roof one day when I was their age, and my employer/helper was in his sixties. Out of the blue, he paused and watched me for a long moment, and then he said, “You are a master, and I’m a past-master.” So did it seem to me today as I watched those young men. What was easy has become hard, and what was hard has become impossible. I used to do bicep curls with 45-pound dumbbells, and that was easier then than lifting a 30-pound bag of cat litter was this morning. How can it be that so much of my strength is gone, and I can’t get it back? Walking hurts my knees, exercise that helps my back hurts my shoulders, exercise that helps my shoulders hurts my back, and each of my two kinds of sleep apnea just keep getting worse, as does my memory if not my intelligence. I am made ever incredulous by my decline. Yet, as I watched those young men, I felt equally incredulous that in four decades, many of them will be as I am now. After all, they looked like gods, and gods are eternal.

When I took karate, I was impressed by tales of aged karate masters who had vanquished gangs of young hoodlums. I believed at the time that all ails could be remedied with diet, determination, and exercise, and that age itself could be postponed indefinitely. Now, I know the extent to which bad luck can overpower strength, and age can overpower anything. Still, it was hard for me this morning to believe it for those young men, just as it’s still hard to believe it for myself. I keep hoping that I will find a way to improve my situation, yet the years bring only decline. Despite my best efforts, I can’t turn it around, and the pills I take to ease the pain will almost surely shorten my life.

My friend, Gordon, died this year at 87. I remember him best for looking me in the eye with the haunted look of the Ancient Marnier as he said, time and again, “Old age ain’t for sissies.” I considered his warning trite, and got tired of hearing it, yet he said it with an earnestness that left no doubt but what the realization was eternally fresh in his mind, which I’m sure it was as he became ever more tormented by his failing body. Just as he never adjusted to his decline, so might it be for me, yet I have another friend who’s 94, and while he says he’s bothered by the fact that he can no longer do much of anything, I never see him but what he seems happy. I ask myself what he has to be happy about when all he can do is sit in a chair and watch TV. My best guess is that (a) he’s simply wired that way, and (b) unlike Gordon, he isn’t in pain, pain having the ability rob anything of enjoyment. I can not tell you what a burden it is in my life, yet I’m ever aware that there’s no law that says it can’t get even worse (it almost surely will), but there is a law that says narcotics can suddenly stop working. Oh, but how I dread that day.

* I wasn't so young in the photo, being 43 at the time, but it seemed appropriate since I was mugging for the camera. The picture was taken at a hot spring in Oregon's Alvord Desert.

Two days

The first day

If the number of hours that the average believer prays for himself and his loved ones was stacked-up against the time spent praying for world peace and an end to hunger, which stack would be higher? It was a funny question to wake up to, but it’s the one I had after a horrific night last night, a night spent, frankly, looking forward to death. I thought I would have beaten this broken back problem by now—just as I once thought I would beat my shoulder problems—but this is the two month anniversary of my fall, and I’m nowhere near well, and it scares me so much that I’ve shed tears over it, this being the first time in my life that I cried because I was afraid.

In America, at least, when you complain of pain to whomever you see before you see your doctor, you’re asked to rate it on a scale of one to ten with ten being the worst pain imaginable and none of the other numbers being defined. If you ask your questioner to define the difference between, say, a pain level of four and a pain level of six, what do you think she (it’s always a she) will say? “Well, six is two points worse than four.” The query becomes a game in which the patient tries to guess which number he needs to give in order to have his problem taken seriously while avoiding any suspicion on the doctor’s part that he might be exaggerating. I realized last night that I’m no longer going to answer the question because it’s bullshit, and I’m sick of bullshit. I put up with way more of it than would seem necessary, and I’m sure you do too.

I prayed last night—my situation being that desperate—not to some supernatural entity but to a place within myself that I used to visit when I needed guidance, but the existence of which I have come to doubt. My prayer went, “Wisdom be in my head, and in my understanding. Wisdom be in my eyes, and in my seeing. Wisdom be in my mouth and in my speaking. Wisdom be in my heart and in my thinking. Wisdom be at my death, and at my departing,” these being close to the words that I loved when Father Hale said them every Sunday at Redeemer Episcopal forty years ago. Last night, they came from my lips like a stillborn baby so decayed that it disintegrated in the hands of the midwife. I was shocked, even horrified. I had expected little of good from the ancient words—a momentary connection with peace, youth, health, safety, community, idealism, and the beauty of morning light through stained glass, perhaps—but I didn’t foresee disgust, and it hurt me to realize how hardened I’ve become. I’ve tried to hold, at least metaphorically, to that which I once found beautiful, while gently letting go of the ugliness, but I have failed.

Then a song about heaven (from my fundamentalist childhood) came to mind, but I can’t remember which one. Christian music touches me more than spoken prayers, even really old and quaint spoken prayers like the one I had just said. Who wouldn’t want to go to a place where everyday is a picnic with your loved ones in resplendent surroundings? Singing holy, holy, holy forever-and-ever-and-ever might sound like a complete bore, but having your every dream realized would be okay, or at least I thought so when I was a child who loved to run for joy well past dark and had no desire whatsoever to “get things done.” Like the pain scale, church is a game with serious overtones, or at least it became that way for me. As for how it affects other people, I can only take their words and compare them to their actions, and on that basis, church appears to do more harm than good.

Of course, that is religion. God is another matter. I don’t know why I think about God more, I suspect, than almost anyone who believes in God. I have often said that I too would like to believe in God, and so here I stand, ripe for conversion, so convert me. Show me the error of my ways, so that I too can hold a happy view, a view that gives meaning to a life of pain, a life from which I will be extricated within twenty years or so as if I had never lived, all this pain for nothing, and with the sure knowledge that nothing I did in life will have mattered except to a very few people who will also be dead soon if they’re not already dead. Like the believer, I would like to wake up in the morning to see God peeping lovingly through my window, instead of awakening to a universe of insensate matter and energy that rumbles through the hallways of time and space, knocking against one another for no reason while creating and destroying an endless succession of worlds in the cold, dark void of space. All I ask is that you make your God consistent with the facts. Not a perfect God who nonetheless created an imperfect universe and was forced to die so that he could forgive its imperfection, but a God who provides answers rather than provocations, a God who is both worthy of worship and consistent—as opposed to oxymoronic—with reality. 

The next day

Yesterday, I became so desperate to escape the pain and fear that I put on a great big Fentanyl patch (big for Fentanyl is about an inch square), and it left me wide awake and deliriously happy last night, not every moment of the night, but most moments of the night. How am I to wrap my mind around the fact that the things that I think make me happy or sad have no power except inasmuch as they stimulate various parts of my brain, and that no person or event can stimulate those parts quite so profoundly as drugs? I love nothing and no one like I love Peggy, yet even my happiest moments with her are accompanied by the crushing knowledge that, before too many more years, one of us will die and leave the other alone. After enough Fentanyl, I can say with the apostle:

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

Drugs make the universe into a toy that was put here for my pleasure. Why then, am I not an addict? I don’t think I have any choice in the matter. Flip one chromosomal switch, and I’m one way; flip another, and I’m the opposite. Maybe this is why 5% of people are atheists, but even if we’re right about the irrationality of theism, how much credit can we take for our insight? 

Brewsky was behind me as I finished this post, so I took his picture. As you can see, he is sitting on a small ladder, and, yes, I have been using that ladder as well as the ladder that I fell from two months ago. I re-floored and repainted this room just before my fall.

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." Shakespeare

I can’t save that which I love; I can but ameliorate the damage for a short time even while knowing that I myself am sometimes the cause of that damage. For instance, no one has hurt Peggy more than I, yet I am the very person most devoted to her welfare. If I have damaged other people less, it was only due to the emotional distance that separated us, for I have often been needy even while taking a hard line. I wish I could have been warmer, more caring, yet I imagined at the time that I had given them all things good, and that it was they who had failed me.

I awakened just now pondering one such instance that has haunted me for 38 years. It concerned a friend who often brought me small gifts. One night, soon after giving me such a gift—I have forgotten what—he said that it would be nice if I sometimes got him something. I became outraged and accused him of only buying things for me so that he might get things in return. I later realized that this was a hard line indeed, but maybe I believed it at the time. As with the form of his gift, my interpretation of his words has been lost; I only remember that he had made me happy with a gift and then taken away my happiness with a complaint. We both could have spoken better, but what haunts me is not the feeling he expressed, which was reasonable, but my response, which was unconscionable. We remained distant for five years, and he died a possible suicide soon after we rekindled our friendship. Long reflection upon incidents that I never imagined I would remember has shown me that, where I was a victim, it was often to my own petulance and obstinance. I didn't realize how soon I would run out of time to grow-up and set things right, or how quickly my life would be littered with corpses for whom my remorse is meaningless.

Last week, I went to a Harvard-trained Korean neurologist who has honors and credentials out the ying-yang. We discussed two issues. One is a hellacious tingling from behind my right shoulder to the thumb of my right hand, and the other is my failing memory. He told me that the tingling originates in my fifth cervical vertebra, which I killed (literally) several years ago while taking Yoga in a failed attempt to alleviate the pain in my shoulders. As for my memory, he said that it isn’t bad enough to be labeled Alzheimer’s, but that it’s bad enough to suggest a 10% chance that it will progress to Alzheimer’s within five years. I reminded myself that pain, stress, depression, and drugs all have an adverse effect upon memory, that some such changes are reversible, and that it’s often unwise to put much stock in a diagnosis that appears to have been hastily made. He ordered an MRI of my neck and drew six vials of blood, half of which were immediately wrapped in tin foil. I won’t see him again for two weeks, but I went online tonight and got the results of the blood tests. One of my abnormal results is rare in the absence of liver disease, but then again, it sometimes indicates a disease of the nervous system or connective tissue. As with spot diagnoses, I know that it’s unwise to put faith into one test once done, yet the result is consistent with my increasing worries about my liver and kidneys due to the years that I’ve taken strong drugs daily for pain. In fact, I am awake now because of pain. The night being half over, I would ordinarily take an Ambien (narcotics keep me awake), and it would enable me to doze in and out a little, but because I’m determined to take fewer drugs, I’m unwilling to allow myself to take anything.

What with these concerns about dementia, liver failure, my customary pain (which, without the pills, seems to be enveloping my entire body), and my more recent tingling, I’m finding it harder than usual to maintain a positive outlook. I regret this for my sake, but also for the sake of those people who care about me, particularly Peggy. Even with all that I’ve gone through, I never lost sight of the fact that I was still able to bring a measure of good to her life, and I worry that this might not continue. If it doesn’t, I would be left without a viable option, a thought that brings me back to where I started this post. Not only can I not save the person I love most; the worst pain she will ever have might befall her because she loves me. I can but do my best to spare her as much of it as possible.

Stumblers

I stumbled today just as my father started stumbling when he was about my age—64. He was also in pain everyday, although he never talked about where the pain was or what it felt like; he just groaned, grimaced, and threw tantrums. Another thing he did was that if someone asked him how he was, he would say, “Not good,” 100% of the time, but then he would change the subject. He drank to keep the pain under control, and that might have increased his stumbling, but not by much.

Not many remodelers walk around the job site with a can of Miller High Life sticking out of their striped overall pocket, but he did, and his employers kept rehiring us, so I guess they didn’t object too much. We worked for everyone from teetotalers to hardcore alcoholics, and I liked them all. I remember one of the alcoholics saying that he had pretty much traded eating for drinking. Before I knew what lushes he and his wife were, I thought she was simply the friendliest person I had ever known, and I became angry when my father suggested otherwise, but he was right, and I was naïve.

When I wanted to say something nice to my father, I would tell him that he could work as hard as a man half his age. It was a bit of an exaggeration, although he was able to work nearly full-time until he was his mid-seventies. I had no idea how devastating age and pain could be, and therefore no idea how remarkable he really was. Now that I spend a fair amount of time trying to remember what it was like to not hurt every minute of everyday, I often recall that he still had ten working years ahead of him when he was my age. I’m not even optimistic that I’ll be alive in ten years.

I don’t know if my father starting drinking more in his sixties in order to quiet the pain in his body or the pain in his mind. Now, I wonder the same about me in regard to drugs because they just don’t help that much unless I take enough to pass out, but drugs are what I know to do, and I would be hard-put without them, although, along with pain and age, they isolate me. Just yesterday, I realized that I no longer have a single friend other than those whom Peggy and I see together and who, I suspect, tolerate me for her sake.

Dad was 73 and mixing concrete at the time of the photo. That’s me in the bellbottoms.