September Trials

I never expected to be where I am right now.

I do, however, remember noticing that sometimes old age advances in sudden events. A woman is 91 and well and active; she falls and breaks a hip, and it is the beginning of the end. Because she can’t walk, she loses respiratory health and declines rapidly.

I have not fallen or broken my hip. I merely pulled a muscle, while doing something I knew in my head to be unwise, though it presented itself as necessary in the moment. I leaned over to pick up a scarf on the bottom of a bin. The twinge of pain when I stood up again became, very shortly, crippling stabs with every step. That got better with medication and then suddenly worse. This led to x-rays and the revelation of how far my degenerative arthritis has advanced.

My habit of walking in the afternoons, up and down the road with hiking poles, has been replaced by navigating from bedroom to kitchen with a walker. Cleaning the house, cooking meals, getting in and out of the bathtub, even getting in and out of my front door have become unmanageable, and I am temporarily in the home of my son and a generous, efficient and energetic daughter-in-love.

I confess that I came here voluntarily, because my injury coincided with a warning that lightning storms were likely to cause sudden fires in the forest in which I live. I knew I could not move quickly, though my life might depend on it. So here I am, not just provided for but pampered.

Be warned. Life often works like this. If you go, can you come back? If you quit, can you start again?

For various reasons the time here seemed propitious to get new lenses for my glasses. For this, since I did not want to buy new frames, I had to surrender the glasses off my face for dispatch to another city. My glasses, you understand, are little crutches through which I see messages on my telephone, the dear words in my Bible and the text of the only book I brought here with me. I can write this complaint only because of my ability to dictate the size of this font. And now I see what  a lousy time this was to have another handicap.

The words “It’s for the birds” popped out of my mouth one day. Then I suddenly thought, Who would wish this on a creature so cheerful and self-sufficient as a bird? This is not for birds. It is for people who have lived long lives, using and abusing their temporary bodies, people with health insurance and cushy beds and the ability to invent better ways to pick up a dropped Kleenex or get a scarf out of a bin. For us, this is normal; sorry to tell you. Whoever read my x-rays and wrote the report claims it is rather typical for my age group.

That’s why I am whining about it in this column, because these blogs are supposed to be about helping yourself grow old and if I were not a normal 91 year old human I would not be qualified to open my mouth about it.

With a strong light over my shoulder I can struggle through a few pages per day of Jeremiah, to whom I am attracted lately, because he complained more eloquently than I. Of course he had bigger issues. The bad news was that a foreign army was coming to pillage, destroy cities, massacre the people of Israel, and finally take the remaining citizens captive to a foreign land. Along with making this announcement, Jeremiah raged at his fellow citizens that God was going to let this happen because, as a nation, they deserved it.

And then, after surely scaring the daylights out of anybody who was listening (though these were few, it seems), Jeremiah invested in a piece of land. A relative owned it, giving him first-rights when it was for sale, and God agreed with him that he should put down his good silver and take the deed. This document was signed and sealed by Jeremiah and witnesses, and an extra copy was made. Because it needed to last a long time, they stored both copies in a clay jar.  

Imagine the headlines, if this happened in Washington. The doomsday preacher investing in real estate, expecting to profit, the papers would say, from the panic he deliberately created!!

Bloggers would have a field day, expounding on Jeremiah’s obvious hypocrisy, forgetting the rest of his message, the part about coming back, the hard-to-believe truth that such a catastrophe would not be the end of the world. There would be survivors, and they would be back home to rebuild.

Right now this story seems like a needed parable on life. Faith involves patience.

Healing my aching back needs time, a lot of it, and a lot of pills (if I can judge by the size of the prescriptions my doctor wrote). And soon I will be going to a physical therapist, the same gentleman who persuaded my shoulder to function again after I tore the rotator cuff, the one who enabled me to walk again after the worst ankle sprain in the history of ankle sprains. Jim will persuade me that I can and show me how.

I am not walking around repeating platitudes like, “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” Because in my opinion, very little is right with the world. However, if God’s in his heaven and Jim, the therapist has a space for me in his schedule, there is hope.

With help I will find a way to go home and cook my own pot of soup and make my own bed, because lunch delivered to me in the recliner—that’s for the birds, who would sing with gratitude and then fly. (I can do neither.)

I envision some changes. I may live simpler. I may even do something drastic, like rewarding somebody young and strong for pushing my vacuum cleaner. And, later if not sooner, I intend to retire this walker to the basement storeroom and get reacquainted with my hiking poles. 

I am not sure how I will do this, but we stand on our experience, right?  When we have done it, then we will know how. And, even if we can’t…an arthritic spine, a forest fire, missing eye glasses, a global pandemic, captivity in Babylon…it is a new trial, not the end of the world.