musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Is Old Age worth it?


I realize that at my time of life, I should be grateful that I still exist; that there’s a me rather than simply a him -a memory registered however tenuously in those friends who are still able to remember things. Of course, I hasten to add that I am grateful that, so far at any rate, I am still in possession of relatively unaided health and am unencumbered with artifices that mimic normal interactions with those not au fait with my declining abilities. Still, I suppose it’s obvious that I am growing old no matter any attempts to disguise it.

But even if I’d died in my youth, death would still be the inevitable consequence of living. Surely the question eventually has to be asked: what, if anything, was it all about? And much as I should not send to know for whom the bell tolls (I already know it tolls for me), there are those for whom the question itself is meaningless: purposeless, since an answer would not change anything; answerless, because to label something as an answer suggests there is a way to prove it is correct. I do not stumble uninvited into this sort of conversation, but there are times I feel the urgency of the offer.

The other day, I was wandering through the off-leash park that skirts the oceanfront in West Vancouver; it always takes me a while because, dogless myself, I stop and pat every animal that greets me along the way. Sometimes, if I am in the mood, I choose a bench and let the dogs come to me as I watch the freighters make their way beneath the Lion’s Gate Bridge into Vancouver; but sometimes it is not only the passing dogs who decide to visit.

“G,” I heard a voice say as I felt someone sit on the far edge of my bench. It is an uncommon thing here to share a bench uninvited, so I immediately turned my head to see who had decided the trespass was worth the risk.

“It’s Sarah,” the voice clarified. “Remember me from those Buddhist lectures a few months ago? We were sitting beside each other and you offered me some gum because I was coughing…”

I thought about it for a moment and then chuckled at the memory. A rather elderly lady in the seat beside me had started coughing, and people around us kept turning their heads to show their disapproval. I’d only had a stick of gum to offer her, but it seemed to work. Although we’d gone together for a cup of coffee in the lobby between lectures, I never expected to see her again. But, Karma, eh?

A little dog was lying at her feet, and both of them seemed exhausted. “I take Tickles for a walk here whenever the weather permits,” she explained, “But he usually tires me after a while and I have to sit before we go back home.”

She smiled, looked at Tickles for a moment and then sighed. “But, I suppose I’m living in the moment now, like the Buddha suggested…” She seemed to think about it after she said that, and then shrugged, as if the ‘moment’ was still an unsolved mystery for her, no matter how the lecturer had tried to explain it. “I mean the present moment seems to slip through my fingers like water all the time, so I can never be sure that whatever I’m doing is actually in the past before I can label it as present… Next thing I know I figure I’m in the future looking back at it… it’s all so confusing.”

She picked Tickles up and as he lay quietly, still panting, in her lap, she smiled when she stroked his head. “He’s so lucky he doesn’t have to worry about his ‘now’ I guess -he just lives in it… And then, when he gets old, he dies. No regrets, no worries about whether he has accomplished anything in his life. He just is, I suppose… Until he isn’t, and then, well, who knows, eh?”

Her fingers caressed her little dog and it looked up at her with a knowing, loving expression in its eyes. For a moment, I saw the same expression in her face. “It’s not fair, is it?” She shifted her attention back to me. “Tickles knows about Life without having to go to a Buddhist lecture, or listen to the likes of Oprah Winfrey.”

She saw the question mark on my face and decided to quote the more assimilable wisdom of Winfrey: “She said something like ‘Living in the present moment means letting go of the past and not waiting for the future. It means living your life consciously, aware that each moment you breathe is a gift.’ I just can’t seem to do that,” Sarah explained, “And I don’t have all that much time left to me to learn how…”

She sighed again and asked me what I thought of the whole ‘living in the now’ thing.

I smiled and attempted a little shrug. “I don’t know why ‘now’ is regarded as being so valuable,” I said. “I go to these lectures every so often to see if anybody has discovered some better answers in the interim, but apart from changing the order of their words, they all seem to be saying the same thing.”

She nodded her head in agreement. “So… what do you think, G?”

I shrugged again -modestly, I hope. “I’ve always thought about ‘now’ as a kind of metaphor -although I’m not even sure I’m using the right word to describe my thoughts…

“I think of Now as a person who wanders through a door into a big room. He knows who he is, and as he looks around he sees a few people he knows, and a few items of familiar furniture here and there against the wall. As he checks his surroundings more closely, though, it becomes apparent that there are many people, many things, he doesn’t recognize, but because they are mixed in with the rest of the crowd, he doesn’t see anything unusual about the room. In fact, he gets used to the quiet confusion there after a while as new people enter, and others leave…

“The past and the future always mingle, don’t they? It’s nothing to get upset about; Now is simply one face in a crowd of soon to be recognizable things… What’s the harm in that? It’s still a joy to be in there with them all I think.”

Sarah, all the while was nodding her head and smiling as she listened. “You know, come to think of it, I imagine that’s how Tickles and I go through life. We both love to visit the room with the leash-free area in it: new friends, new adventures, and then we go home to my little condo and sleep the sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of Care, to quote a long-time friend of mine.”

She reached out and touched my arm for a moment. “Thank you for that, G.” Then she gave my arm a quick squeeze, deposited Tickles on the ground in front of her and stood up to leave. “I hope I see you again -I’m here most days…” she added and then padded off on uncertain legs as the little dog scurried around her feet to hurry her up.

I rose from the bench and continued my own walk, but this time in another direction along a quiet dirt path through a nearby copse of trees; I needed to think about what I’d said to Sarah. I’m not sure what made me confess my thoughts to her -I’d never put them in proper order in my own head before- and yet, although we may never meet again, the two of us seemed to agree. It made me think of the last stanza of one of my favourite poems by Robert Frost:

‘I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.’

Perhaps it has…

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