Just the way it is

Not long ago, a commenter posted to a Gothamist story about vaccination, “Life is worthless, particularly for the old and sick. Let ’em die!” Though startling, this was just a harsher expression of the widely held, mostly suppressed contempt behind the OK Boomer meme. Younger folks are just so over older folks. And I take that to heart. Most of my friends and I are colossal, complacent, out-of-touch bores. And truly our time is almost up. 

The pandemic has merely heightened the clarity of just how close our time is to being up. Virus or no virus, we’re on the precipice. Though I lost only one friend to the coronavirus, someone I hadn’t see in decades, I did lose several friends to other illnesses during the past year. And their deaths have driven home how quickly and unexpectedly life can change and send you plummeting toward death.

For some people, this awareness might create an impulse to seize the moment, avoid wasting a second of “your one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver calls it. But for dark souls like me, the awareness merely intensifies ever-present hypochondria. When I was strapped into a heart monitor for 10 days after complaining of breathlessness, my cardiologist called to tell me the result was “perfect.” So no need to worry, right? Well, not exactly. There’s always lung cancer—and really not so farfetched for a cancer survivor who was treated, in part, by being seared with radiation. And lord only knows what’s causing the neck ache that won’t go away (though, to be truthful, it hasn’t gotten any worse). The feeling of impending doom has affected even my normally glass-half-full husband, who was tortured for weeks by fears of losing his sight to macular degeneration, only to have a thorough eye exam result in the diagnosis of a harmless “floater.” 

So far so good. We’ve been lucky. But we know our luck will run out. We talk about it every day. How we’ll manage the inevitable. Who will cook when my husband is gone? Who will buy his clothes if I go first? Last night I tripped on uneven pavement and went sprawling onto my hands and knees. I was sore, but my husband was the one who shook with fear. He knows, as I do, that one day soon, one little misstep will send one of us to into pain, dependence, dementia and death. That’s just the way it is.