I understand why women, especially, do plastic surgery so much now. It’s really hard to age and have other people look at you in a way you wouldn’t recognize being looked at. It feels like they’re looking at somebody else. But they can’t know the you that’s really you if they just met you and you’re older.
They don’t see that 15-year-old is still in you. They don’t see the 20 year-old, or the 30 year-old. They see whatever they think is in front of them, and that is not at all what they’re truly seeing.
This elder phase of my life is not one I asked for – it’s not one that any of us ask for.
My doctor’s office had a sign in one of the exam rooms that read: “Don’t regret getting old – it’s a privilege denied to many.”
I both agree with that and disagree with that. I remember watching my relatives age, and really felt like, ‘wow death is often by 1000 cuts.’
It’s accepting the indignities of an increasingly hurting body, or a body that doesn’t want to operate the way you used to be able to operate it.
It’s such a strange design, this human body. And there’s also the reality that even if we live beyond 100 years – it’s just a moment in the expanse of time.
And who wants to live 100 years if the end of that is barely being alive or functional?
My grandfather, at 102 years old, didn’t know why he was still waking up. He could barely see, he could barely hear, and it was just existing – it wasn’t being functional in the way any of us would want to be functional.
Maybe science is working on that, and the other side of that is I wouldn’t want to be here forever either.
We are a largely warring, selfish, greedy people bent on this planet’s destruction. As one of my very dear friends said, with a broken heart, “we could’ve made this a paradise.”
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© seekingsearchingmeaning (aka Hermionejh), Making A Way Blog, 2010 – current
