Foregone Conclusions

They’re dropping like flies

Or ramping up.

Illness, ailments, complaints.

Falling down,

Breaking hips,

Forgetting our names

Or our children’s names,

Or the title of the movie

they just saw last night

And what it was about

And who was in it

And where they went for dinner beforehand for the Early Bird Special.

It’s all so predictably inevitable.
We all should have seen it coming.
But we don’t or choose not to.
Denial is convenient and dependable.
Until the phone rings in the middle of the night.
The hospital stays.
The change of pace and lifestyle and self-reliance.

“Assisted living” become bad words.
We’re not supposed to say them out loud, certainly not in front of them.
Denial is convenient for them, too.
No one wants to face mortality.
We’re all invincible until we’re not.

We take turns navigating the path of least resistance
Until we hit the end of the road and the doctor starts using words like
Managed pain
Quality of life
Durable power of attorney
Do not resuscitate
Last rites
Last wishes
Last will
Last testament

Lists of lasts.

We live everyday knowing the ground rules.
But time has a funny way of whizzing by at the speed of sound while we’re all living
quietly desperate.

Above all, they remember their medicine.
The pink pill in the morning for blood pressure,
The blue pill for cholesterol (but never with grapefruit) and the blood thinner to
prevent another mini-stroke.

Prevention is now the name of the game.
Prolonged life, outliving their peers (and spouses).

My mother can’t eat anything green anymore.
Leafy vegetables can cause the blood to coagulate.
She doesn’t even want to risk a cup of green tea.
My mother used to read to me Green Eggs and Ham.
Now she can only eat carrots and egg beaters.

She and my stepfather (who turns 80 in March) live in an over-55 retirement
community in Las Vegas.
Their backyard is on the 9th hole of a golf course.

They play golf and mahjong,
Watch reruns of The Sopranos and Entourage.
Low-impact socialize with their friends and neighbors, many of them widows and
widowers, flaunting their senior discounts.
Tee-up. Tea time. Tee-off.

They pass the time, leisurely.
They keep busy.
They shop at CostCo, buy in bulk—which implies longevity—and throw away what
spoils.

They obsess about the Dow and the price per gallon of gas.
Hoard their money with growing concern
as their bodies continue to shrink.

They visit a few times a year
to stock up on photos of the grand kids.
Then come home and surround themselves with picture frames
filled with forced smiles, missing teeth, little league uniforms. Symmetrical family.

The cleaning lady dusts the frames once a week, along with the silk floral
arrangements—who wants to be bothered with tending and watering?

The bottles of medicine on the kitchen counter continue to multiply, like bored bunnies.
Ritualistic, variegated.
Washed down with tap water and willful optimism.
The anti-depressant in the morning.
The Xanax at night.
A pill for everything in between.

Sickness and death are profit centers.
Captains of Industry.
Dependable, steady.
Supply and demand.

Someone will always find a way to gain on what’s lost.

They still worry about us, their descendants.
Do we have enough money?
Are we eating right?
Are we warm enough?
Are we happy?

They want the good news, the positive spin,
and we give it to them.
We don’t want them to worry.
We’ve got enough to worry about.
Stress triggers more ailments for them, relapses, setbacks.
We tell them everything’s fine.

They can’t hear us so well; it’s the TV in the background turned up to high decibel.
They shout to each other in the other room and relay the highlights of the phone
conversation while the phone conversation is still in progress.
They forget they’re on the phone and start their own sidebar.
They don’t let you get a word in edgewise.
They need to hang up to eat dinner or to watch their program.
They eschew efficient technologies,
like TiVo and voice mail.
They don’t need anything they don’t already have.

They drive us and each other crazy.

They’ll miss their spouse’s most annoying character traits first and foremost once he
or she is gone.

We’ll yearn for the empty phone calls that we barely tolerated as they kvetched and
recounted the mundane and we half-listened while we checked our email, cooked
dinner, folded towels.

They always remember our birthdays… until the year they forget.
You are not the first thought that comes
to them that morning.

And everything about them we took for granted
will haunt us the most.

It’s not what they would have wanted.
Still, we’ll internalize the guilt.
Fuel for the fire of grief.
The void left behind.

What remains are photos of them,
Impossibly young, healthy, vibrant, mischievous, smug, hopeful, lost, indelible.
Framed in our living room, family room.
Permanent fixtures now.
Black and white, color.
Comfort and joy.

Equal parts tribute, honor, duty, and love.

Our children will notice we’re slowing down a little.
Morning brings new aches and pains.
Gray and errant hairs sprout.
Night creams are applied religiously.

Some of our friends have cancer scares.
A few die, too young, what a waste.
Not the natural course or order of things.

Our days are all numbered. Primed.
Our lives need to stand for something.
Like our parents’ lives did,
even if they were seemingly inconsequential
(self-proclaimed nobodies)
while they were here.

More and more we start to look like them
And act like them.
It’s there in our reflections and mannerisms. And expectant eyes: the same need to
feel needed.
The same appetite for what isn’t said.

We’re so much more like them than we’d ever want to admit.
They saw it in us.
No wonder we didn’t want to look back or listen
too closely.

Their aging terrifies us even more than it terrifies them.

Intellectually, we get it.
One day we’re here.
The next day we’re not.

It’s the rite of passage we spend our lives avoiding.
It makes so much sense that it’s incomprehensible.

The body gives out, falters, breaks down.
The paperwork piles up.
Files. Forms. Receipts. Bills.
Records documenting their existence.
The living are left to decide, find the right context, impose order, pack up, soldier on.

Sooner or later, we all end up in a box.

Neil Landau