A highschool classmate recently died of “complications from Alzheimers”.
Though we were just acquaintances in school, over the subsequent years a friendship developed to the point our families socialized together on occasions when we were in the same part of Florida.
The first any of us outside of his family had any inkling that something was wrong was several years ago when some of us classmates were together during which he couldn’t find his car keys twice in a few short hours. Though we all noticed, we shrugged it off probably because we didn’t want to accept the possible reality.
When he didn’t show up for our class reunion two years ago we first learned of his Alzheimers. This past fall his wife told us he had gone into a “memory care” facility. A couple of us inquired of her about going to see him — but she advised he wouldn’t know us. So preferring to remember him as he had been, we didn’t go.
“The elderly” — of which I am now one — have to accept certain realities that nothing in our youth really prepares us for. Sure, many of us have seen our parents’ generation age and had to deal with their physical and mental deterioration. But watching it — even helping them through it — is different than living it.
We all have to accept diminishing physical ability long before we encounter declining mental faculties. The other day I noticed my neighbor (in his early 40s) wearing a knee brace.
When I inquired what happened, he pointed to his kid’s basketball hoop in his driveway and said, “Thinking I’m still a young man!”
I said, “Well, get used to it – because it just gets worse!”
Everyone has had (or will have) a “thinking I’m still young” episode when your body reminds you otherwise. I’m acquainted with a retired professional baseball player (now in his late 60s) who told me he used steroids while he was playing (before they were banned). He said the media mischaracterized why so many athletes used them.
According to him, though there were a couple of exceptions (he wouldn’t name anyone) who used steroids to enhance their performance, most used them to recover from injuries while continuing to play. He said, “The competition for your place on the roster is always young, while you get older.”
Injuries at that level of competition are inevitable, and when you are young and in prime physical condition, you recover quickly. But not as you age — and in professional sports, he said, “30 can be old age.”
So as we age, we all come to accept (or are forced to accept) physical decline at some point. Though it’s a pain in the ass (sometimes literally), unless it relates to a life-threatening malady most of us don’t get too stressed about it. But it ain’t that way when you notice your mental faculties aren’t what they once were.
When you reach 3/4 of a century in longevity, as I will in few short months, at some point you’ve had the internal conversation about which you’d rather lose first — your physical or mental ability to continue to live independently.
So far, I’m managing physically — despite a triple by-pass, the accumulated residual aches and pains of a lifetime of sports injuries, and just plain “gettin’ old”.
But I’m beginning to have to deal with my mind not being what it was. What I could previously dismissed as “senior moments” are no longer so easy to ignore. Here is an example.
Last week I wrote a three-part column about democracy. In Part One, referring to the alliance between Athens and Sparta that had preceded the Peloponnesian War, I erroneously confused the location of a battle. A trivial error, that didn’t matter to the point I was making.
But though trivial in context, it is a big deal to me. Not because of the insignificance of the error, but because of how it occurred.
At the time I wrote it I was thinking of the correct location, yet my brain transmitted to my fingers to type a different location — and I never noticed it even during proof-reading. It was akin to a form of dyslexia — but I’m not dyslexic.
The error was brought to my attention by a reader. While some may have snapped at the reader for a nit-picking “fact check”, I thanked him for telling me.
Like finding out I can’t athletically perform as I once could, this factual error alerted me to the reality that my mental faculties aren’t what they used to be.
I’d like to laugh it off as merely another ‘senior moment’. Unfortunately, I can’t.
My intellectual acuity has been at the core of my professional achievements — and now it seems that acuity may be diminishing. Just as my body doesn’t perform as it once did, the same now seems to be true of my mind.
I’m determined not to whine about it, or let it slow me down. I’ll continue to rant in my columns as long as the publisher lets me. I’ll just have to triple-proofread everything I write.
I’ve told my family and friends… if they notice something I say or do that seems nonsensical, please tell me. I want to know about it to determine if there is a pattern. Apparently certain patterns can indicate if it’s mere aging or something more serious.
Of course there is another way to look at this. A psychologist I utilized in my prosecution days, who regularly dealt with dementia patients, once told me that, in a way. dementia could be an enjoyable phase of life.
“You aren’t responsible for anything you do. You can say whatever comes into your mind, and no one takes it seriously. You can’t remember what you did yesterday, so you meet new people and have new experiences every day. In a way it’s like carefree childhood!”