Four Fears of Old Age
I have not seen my accomplished college classmate Tim Page in many years. But we have interacted more on social media than we ever have in person, despite living on the same street, in the same city, a half-hour walk apart. Are social media friendships genuine? Depends on how you conduct them. As with anything, some people are good at them, some not. Prof. Tim is great at them, I’ve gotten better over the years, and we are both a little shy.
Tim is an essayist par excellence and his social media pals get free reads (in miniaturized form). Here is a recent post, quoted with permission:
Things I’d never dreamed would make me anxious someday:
Going up or down the stairs of a double-decker bus.
Taking a shower within the context of a bathtub.
Having to make any conversation after 7 PM.
A contact high from walking through a cloud of pot smoke on the streets of New York.
Your thoughts?
My seven-sentence response seemed to merit de-miniaturization, if that’s a word, so here it is, if that’s a transition.
Fear of Stairs
During my junior year in college, I fell down a flight of stairs in the university library. Miraculously, I failed to break my neck, just one episode in a long line of failures and second chances.
I hobbled back to my dormitory where a pre-med student saw me limping with my ankle grotesquely swollen, but not broken, as though it had a baseball embedded in it. Imbued with the fellowship of man that students sometimes have, especially in what was then a men’s college, he took me to the emergency room. There he fussed loudly at the staff until an ER doc — who had undoubtedly seen worse, even that night — bandaged the sprained ankle.
For months afterward I hobbled around on crutches, prompting a student-newspaper friend to refer to me as “the sick man of Europe,” a historical reference to the declining Ottoman Empire. He meant it in a friendly way. I enjoy seeing pictures of his children on Facebook.
Since then I have been afraid of stairs. Not terrified, just afraid, especially when going down them, having nearly broken my neck that way. “Live and learn” may be a cliché but it’s also lifesaving advice. I take my time, letting my hand ride above the handrail in case I need to grab it. I’ll use it when I need to, my fear of breaking an old man’s fragile bones trumping my post-covid-era fear of germs. I’m vaccinated for covid; there is no vax for a broken back.
My college years were the happiest of my life up to then, and still compare favorably to much of what followed. My only job was to learn and make friends. These were the greatest luxuries I could imagine. During my years in the labor force, I would often wish I could return to that life. In my semi-retirement, I have done just that, though not in the classroom, but in a great city.
But it all could have come to an abrupt end if I had tumbled down on the hard zigzag vertical killing field of the university library stairwell and smashed the head I was feeding. My dream of becoming a writer/editor might have ended there.
Fear of Bathtubs
Another happy moment that nearly became a sticky end was in a London hotel located near the Chelsea Football Club. (Outside the U.S., the word football refers to what Yanks call soccer. But you knew that.) It was the fall of 2022 and this was the first trip my traveling pal and I had made for five years, our transatlantic explorations having been interrupted by job loss, financial challenges, and then covid. I’ve often wished we had traveled in 2021, when we were freshly vaccinated and every desirable destination was deserted, but we didn’t overcome our pandemic isolation until the following year.
Tim doesn’t like showering in a bathtub. I don’t like showering in a badly designed tub and that’s what stared me in the face, or in my tender bits if you want to be picky about it, at a hotel near Chelsea FC. The tub’s bottom surface was the most concave I’d ever seen. No tub bottom is ever completely flat but this one had an especially life-threatening curve that made standing upright a near-death experience. The lack of grab bars and a decent suction-cup bathmat made matters worse. Instead the tub had a textured anti-slip surface that didn’t work very well. I wondered if the hotel chain were trying to improve the gene pool by knocking off a few football hooligans.
I knew exactly how dangerous it was. Each day I devoted one-hundred percent of my attention to getting into and out of that tub safely, whether I was bathing or showering. On the last day — and I swear my attention never wandered, not for a fraction of a second — I went down. To break my fall I grabbed at the shower curtain. The curtainrod came loose and I fell on the bathroom floor, wrapped in the curtain, with the rod on top of me, landing hard on my ass.
Something happened to my lower back that persisted for the rest of the trip and several months afterward. It didn’t incapacitate me, but was always with me, and made it harder to handle my baggage. Later I developed sciatica, possibly as a result of the British bathrub fall, followed by an Ambien sleep-eating fall in my kitchen at home.
Both were compounded by an inadvisable exercise regimen that was prescribed to strengthen the muscles attached to my knees. It was a good idea for an old guy trying to avoid a knee replacement, but a bad idea to trust that aggressively expanding physical-therapy chain, where I never saw the same person twice, and struggled with billing issues. Eventually, with help from a better physical therapist, the vertebra slipped back into place, and now I am whole again.
When I got home, I ordered a new bathmat for our own bathroom. It was longer than it needed to be. Cutting it down to size provided a rubber suction-cup square that rolled up easily into a sausage and made our next vacation a lot safer. Now we would never travel without it.
The tub and I have an amicable relationship at home. I have never tried its patience by failing to use a rubber mat. The tub is deeper than any I’ve seen in a hotel, allowing luxurious baths with full immersion, sometimes with bubbles, and occasionally with a guest.
When the tub’s porcelain had worn down to its black cast-iron exoskeleton, I pointed out to the landlord that it would soon rust and become structurally unsound, triggering either an alarming failure or a full tub replacement. He paid for an expensive refinishing for which I am grateful. I pamper the epoxy surface with Lysol Foaming Tub Cleaner and the soft side of the scrubber sponge: only the best for my sweetie.
Basically, I’m afraid of things that might kill or incapacitate me, especially when they have nearly done so. This seems perfectly rational. Prof. Tim and I are in accord, perhaps with some variation in backstory and emphasis.
Fear of Evening Conversation
Tim and I are not evening people. We have different reasons. Tim has discussed one of his reasons in his book Parallel Play, about his late-in-life diagnosis with Asperger’s Syndrome. Another is a medical issue that has imposed additional challenges and limits, which he has bravely chronicled in social media. Another is age, our common concern.
Engaging socially is hard for me at the best of times. My reluctance to do it in the evening, when my energy is at its lowest, is bound up with other issues that include insomnia, drug dependence, weight gain and loss, sleep apnea, and the Circadian rhythms. Confused yet? It comes down to one thing: I cannot get a good night of sleep unless I go to bed and get up early. The evening is when I unwind and reduce my heartrate in preparation for sleep. If I don’t do it, my body will punish me — not only with sleeplessness, but a host of other problems, leading to an inexorable decline in physical and mental health.
The timeline runs like this. Insomnia: I first experienced it in the late 1980s. Drug dependence: By 2000 I was relying on a sleeping pill, an antipsychotic medication to boost the effect of the sleeping pill — though I’ve never had a psychotic episode — an anticonvulsant sometimes prescribed for bipolar disorder, and melatonin. Weight gain: During the 2000s and 2010s I steadily put on weight, ending up clinically obese and three pounds away from the threshold for morbid obesity. Sleep apnea: By 2019 the heavy nightly sedation, combined with advancing weight and age, had made my throat lazy, accelerating my snoring (partial blockage of the throat) to sleep apnea (full cessation of breathing). This occurred many times per night, and my brain would jolt my heart to wake me up and avoid, well, death.
My age was not under my control — but I felt I might work on the meds and the weight. Starting in 2020, at the outbreak of the covid pandemic, with the help of a new doctor, I dumped the bipolar drug entirely, replaced the antipsychotic with a lower dose of something more appropriate, cut the sleeping-pill dose in half, and adjusted the melatonin dose and timing (best an hour before bedtime). Ditching the antipsychotic was probably what saved me. The pounds melted off my body in little more than a year. Today I am about sixty pounds lighter than before. People react to me differently. Friends and neighbors are surprised at how well I look, at how much energy I have. Some of it goes into a renewed cultural life, new friendships, and the occasional hot date.
Basically, I conquered medication-related weight gain to restore my overall health. Let me emphasize that I do not starve myself. Instead I stuff myself with fresh vegetables, lean protein, and a six-ingredient salad until I feel almost too full. I spend a lot amount of time on meal prep, most of its spent slicing veg. And yes, there is room for the occasional sugary treat. I don’t believe in draconian diets — if your diet makes you suffer, you’re doing it wrong.
I don’t believe in exercise either, except for a few morning necessities on the yoga mat, but do try to stay physically active during daylight hours. One of my retirement hobbies is urban exploration: I visit an unfamiliar neighborhood, have lunch, take a lot of pictures, and blog about it. The blogs have added up to two e-books (and counting). By the time I get home, I am exhausted and ready to wind down for the day — and I’ll have something to write about the following day.
Although I managed to beat mild obstructive sleep apnea without the CPAP breathing machine my doctor prescribed, I needed one more ally in my endless battle with sleeplessness: the Circadian rhythms. One of my doctors had been nagging me for years to go to bed and get up earlier, something that would help control both insomnia and weight. As with the drugs, tapering was key; I did it in half-hour increments.
After six months of hard work I finally reached the point where I could get up with the light: at around seven a.m., as opposed to ten or eleven. Now I am often astonished at how well I feel in the morning, at least after a good night of sleep. Daylight is my friend, approaching on little cat feet, gently nudging me awake. On a bad day I get up and feel just OK. In a good day — and I have more of those — I bounce out of bed feeling ready to take on the world. I hadn’t known that was possible.
I call 2022 the year of my revival, 2023 the year of my resilience, and 2024 the year of my release. The new year will, I think, be the year of my resurgence: I will live life even more joyfully. I still struggle with anxiety, but it has gone from constant to intermittent, and on the whole each new day feels like a blessing.
But all my gains would vanish if I didn’t get to bed by 11:30 p.m. and let daylight gently rouse me at 7 a.m. So, like Tim, I need to spend the evening winding down to calm the little bird fluttering in my chest. Sometimes my rather full concertgoing schedule works against this resolve. But I minimize other evening exertions. My reward is that I feel as though I’m living in a stranger’s body. This stranger is having serious fun and enjoying a great city as never before.
Fear of Weed
I won’t attempt to speak for Tim on cannabis. My own history started with a high-pressure editorial job that had me smoking a joint every evening after dinner. I prided myself on keeping a choice selection of high-quality weed, bought in one-eighths of an ounce. It went well with music — for the first few months I experienced chromesthesia, associating colors with sounds. I would put on Bach or the Clash and feel the work-induced anxiety ebbing away, the exhaustion turning into relaxation. And then I would sleep an otherwise drug-free sleep, at least for a while.
This went on for twenty years until one day I lit one up knowing it would be my last. For some time my lungs had been rejecting the hot smoke and I started gagging on it. The pharmaceuticals I was beginning to get from a prescribing shrink — they seemed like a good idea at the time — made cannabis one drug too many, and eventually, the pills themselves would go the same way. So I stopped smoking the friendly herb. I just stopped.
I don’t miss it. My older body and mind need other kinds of self-care. I love my consciousness now; I don’t want to obliterate it. But now that I’m off the elephant tranquilizers, I can be a little intense, and sometimes I need to take the edge off. Music and reading are still refuges. When they’re not enough, I’ve been learning to mix a good martini and cocktails with goofy fruit liqueurs. And though I still haven’t smoked a joint since that last one, I have dipped back into cannabis occasionally, to see how it would fit into my new and better life.
I’ve had the occasional brownie in my happy place, a short-stay apartment in Amsterdam, though only after a day of long walks, staying alert to dodge the omnipresent bikes. I’ve picked up the occasional bag of gummy strips from a local smoke shop, and by occasional, I mean that I threw out most of the first one because it was too “up” and have barely made a dent in the second one recommended by a budtender. I’ve even tried a vape pen, to explore the technology, though my lungs don’t like hot vapor much more than they liked hot smoke.
So my relationship with cannabis is: We’re done, yet never say never. The best way to give up anything, barring a severe addiction, is by being in a constant state of giving it up, dialing it down until it doesn’t hurt you any more. It’s the way I deal with intoxicants, french fries, and certain people.
Now that cannabis is legal in New York, I love walking into a cloud of it on the sidewalk, still mildly astonished that so many people smoke it openly. It doesn’t give me a contact high. But the smell does give me a hit of nostalgia, reminding me of lazy evenings in my old studio apartment, in front of the KLH speakers, playing through side after side of The Well-Tempered Clavier or Sandinista!, feeling at peace, and wondering how long that moment would last. I will say that my reaction to street fumes is strongly affected by the quality of the weed. Once an epicure, always an epicure.
