{"id":36668,"date":"2018-10-22T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T05:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36668"},"modified":"2018-10-02T09:48:01","modified_gmt":"2018-10-02T13:48:01","slug":"qotd-aging-gracefully","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/10\/22\/qotd-aging-gracefully\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Aging gracefully"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, for the first time, a young girl, French, offered me her seat on a crowded bus. I was surprised at how deeply I resented her. Health looms over the elderly like a threatening monsoon. No ache is innocuous. No lump or discoloured, sagging patch of body is ignorable except our toenails, which become the most sordidly repellent things in all nature. We covertly examine ourselves and our effluvia for the premonition of the dark humour that will carry us away. There is no such thing as a routine checkup. They are all life-or-death appointments.<\/p>\n

Doctors start all their sentences with \u201cIt\u2019s only …\u201d But we\u2019re not fooled. This generation is also the one that lingers longest over its departure. Death came to our grandparents with a clutched chest and a searing pain. For us it\u2019s a slow, humiliating series of it\u2019s onlys. What we worry about is dementia, a condition that did not exist in the popular lexicon when I was a child. Mind you, we also thought cancer was as shaming as divorce. Now Alzheimer\u2019s is our abiding fear, the thing we can\u2019t forget.<\/p>\n

My chats with contemporaries are like bridge games where we try to fill in the gaps in each other\u2019s sentences to make one coherent conversation. My dad died of Alzheimer\u2019s. I once asked him how he was feeling: \u201cOh, quite well, except you know I\u2019ve got this terrible disease, what\u2019s its name?\u201d So we go to the gym, we have trainers, I do Pilates. But it\u2019s only maintenance. I\u2019m not looking for a beach body, there\u2019s no New Me in the cupboard; I just want one that\u2019s supple enough to put on my own socks.<\/p>\n

After giving up drink and drugs, I continued to smoke about 60 a day until 12 years ago and then I stopped. And people said, \u201cWell done! How did you manage it? What willpower!\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t feel like well done. It felt like a defeat \u2014 the capitulation to fear. When I started smoking at 14 I was golden, immortal. I smoked around the world; I took pride in my ability to smoke with elegance, panache and skill. Smoking was my talent and I gave it up because I lost my nerve.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t miss the cigarettes, but I do miss the me that smoked so beautifully.<\/p>\n

A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times<\/em><\/a>, 2014-06-29.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, for the first time, a young girl, French, offered me her seat on a crowded bus. I was surprised at how deeply I resented her. Health looms over the elderly like a threatening monsoon. No ache is innocuous. No lump or discoloured, sagging patch of body is ignorable except our toenails, which become […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,41],"tags":[598,243],"class_list":["post-36668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-quotations","tag-aging","tag-medicine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9xq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36669,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36668\/revisions\/36669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}