Definitely not for sissies

 Getting old. Not since my teens have I felt such angst. At my age, though, I suppose it’s called agita. And whereas people care about adolescent angst and write novels exploring it, old-age agita is a bore for everyone, including the sufferer.

There’s the stress of doctor’s appointments and tests, which fill your calendar, as workdays and social events once did, and any of them may foretell the cause of your death. There’s the lost word or name that signals dementia. There’s the anguish over friends who have died and the sorely missed opportunities to be with them. There’s the horrifying knowledge that if you compliment a baby or dog on the street, the owner of that baby or dog receives your words with dread, fearing you may prolong the encounter. There’s the even more horrifying sense that when you talk to your children, whom you love beyond measure and desperately want to connect with, they subtly steel themselves for your inevitably irrelevant or trite or tedious or, worse, overdramatic utterance. They are polite, responding with painstaking patience, but you know you annoy the pants off them.

As you pace the open pathways of Riverside Park or do-si-do the crowded sidewalks of Broadway, you see your not-so-far-off future: your frail, gray-haired elder sisters in their dowdy dresses, hunched over walkers or listing on canes, an army of old soldiers surviving the odds but sidelined from the mainstream. 

For what do they know of WFH or cold brew? Pokemon or TikTok? When they think of social media, they think of Facebook, maybe, from which all young people have fled. These elder sisters did not invest in Bitcoin. They no longer invest at all; their savings are in bonds or IRAs, if they’re lucky enough to have savings. 

And you are one of them now, though a junior member, trying to get your footing in this new world of yours, where you are unimportant, at best tolerated by those for whom you were once the sun and the moon and held a world of promise. 

Now you are entering the waiting room of death. When you hear about mass shootings, there is a part of you that says, “Take me! Take me without warning, so I cannot prepare or resist. Just knock me out, to be remembered on the evening news in tearful words—and then forgotten.”