Tag: aging

Passing another milestone

So, I turned sixty-five the other day. I am now one of those characters that the blurb on the back of a novel sometimes refer to as “elderly.” In fact, over sixty is usually enough to warrant that description in a synopsis. Of course, once you get here you realize that “old” is one thing—you can feel that in your knees—but elderly, surely that must be closer to eighty.

American Presidential age.

With senior citizenhood come certain benefits, especially if you are of modest means, but the application processes can be fraught and demeaning. However, I did manage to take advantage of one of the services that come with age—I claimed my annual free eye exam. I’ve been struggling for some time, assuming that all I needed was new glasses and determined to wait unitl my birthday because the meagre benefits applicable toward glasses on the benefit plan I’ve been paying for also roll over this month and I would at least be able to save something on what is inevitably an expensive purchase. Ah, but I don’t need glasses after all. At least not yet.

I need cataract surgery.

If I was struggling with eye strain and dizziness before, now it seems ever more profound and constant. Especially because surgery (fortunately covered by government insurance) is probably six months away. Or more.

I’m not sure if this is where I thought I would be at this age. Are we ever where we thought we’d be? So many of my contacts are much younger, fretting about turning thirty (imagine), agonizing over turning forty (as if). But if there is one thing about getting older, the more milestones you pass, the less ominous they seem. I thought fifty would be profound but it passed without comment and ushered in a decade that would be upended by illness, grief, and unexpected opportunities to travel distant lands. Then sixty arrived in the pandemic and my plans to mark it with flair faded.

So here I am. Living in the city, but walking every day through forests and along the river. Reading interesting books. Content to be writing about them on my own site—an exercise I take very seriously. Happy to have a rewarding (volunteer) editing gig with a great team. And grateful for a local group of friends who are my age or older to remind me that getting older does not mean you have to act your age!

Photographs copyright Joseph Schreiber

Entering the autumn of my life: A reflection

Here, where I live, autumn arrived with beauty, warmth and vibrant colour. I can only hope these past few weeks stand as a good omen for the coming year. A glimmer of light in the midst of a seemingly endless global pandemic.

Today marks a milestone for me, one I have dreaded, on and off, for the past year. It is my sixtieth birthday. It feels odd to say that. Without a long standing cohort of peers, friendships reaching back into high school or college, I have friends who are older and friends who are younger—some thirty years younger or more. There is a certain agelessness afforded by the way we reach out and make contact in the internet era.

I was late to open online engagement. I was guarded and relatively anonymous during my working years. I had to be. The sudden, unexpected end of my career opened a very different door. One without borders. One that has led me across the globe to places I never thought I’d ever see, meeting and making new friends along the way.

Yet, there have been great challenges, great joys, and many long, lonely nights.

Now, as I turn sixty, I am in better shape than I’ve been in years—a cranky right knee and diagnosed bone loss notwithstanding. In fact, it is the latter factor that has done more for my commitment to regular daily exercise than any other half baked New Year’s Resolution. I walk, hike, and  run at least four days a week, and complete a strength/weight training routine on alternate days. That’s why the fantastic weather we’ve enjoyed during this year of social distancing has been so welcome—there’s rarely been an excuse not to venture out. But I wonder if getting out onto the trails and disappearing into the forest for an hour or more, no matter how important for my physical health, has served as an escape from something else. Something I don’t want to face.

Reading and writing has been difficult. I’ve fought with blockages on both fronts. I realize I’m not alone in this during these exceptional times, however, when I’m out and on the move—especially running—I feel free. The focus on the body is a release from the weight of thinking about my life. To run rough trails your attention has to be on where your feet are. For a time you can forget your troubles.

But, back at home, I can’t help looking back. Measuring the challenges, the joys and the lonely nights and wonder what I have to show for sixty years. My life has led me down pathways and trails I could never have anticipated—I suppose everyone can say that when they stop along the way to take stock—and, especially during  this unique moment, the road ahead is less than certain. That’s the reality of being in the world.

So, on this first of October, 2020, I have to be glad that I am still here in the world, with so many friends and promises. I’m also very fortunate to have a network of pathways and trails that I do know intimately. I have, after all, been following them for almost half my life. They offer certainty and refuge in uncertain times.

And what could be more important than that as I enter a new decade?

Feeling it in my bones: A reflection

When I published a series of poems in the journal Poetry at Sangam last October, I could not anticipate how prescient the following passage would be:

a shiver of unease
runs its course across
my shoulders, shudders
down a rocky spine
to dissipate
through fissures
in this sleeping
mountain
mine

The vertebrae of my imagined backbone have come to haunt my movements this past month; I am suddenly aware of every step as it reverberates through my skeleton. A bone scan in January, ordered by my psychiatrist, revealed I have osteoporosis. I knew it was a real risk—my birth gender and family history have always figured in my calculations—but I assumed that the possibility lay somewhere in the future, when I was older, or, that is, older than I already am. I was, however, unaware of the impact on bone density of a medication I’ve been taking as a mood stabilizer for over twenty years. My family doctor, scrolling through his cell phone during our appointment to discuss the test results, insisted he could find no sign of a connection. It is there, I have since checked, but it’s now too late.

Coming as it has with a dreaded milestone birthday on the horizon, I met this diagnosis with sadness and a new kind of fragility.

I’ve resisted sharing any details publicly for a while. As upset as I was, I feared it might be discounted—I mean, it is something you can live with and my condition is essentially borderline at the moment; my upper lumbar region scores just within the osteoporosis range, while my lower lumbar and hips are in the risk range. But anyone who has observed the physical disintegration this disease can cause, who has been close to someone who has fractured bones and lost mobility, cannot help but fear a future in which they too are hunched over and hobbling along. My mother was increasingly crippled by osteoporosis and, although she lived to the age of 82, by the end she was a weary, frail little bird, ever at risk of falling, with a spine ultimately so twisted that she basically suffocated slowly during her final weeks.

All my life I have struggled with a deep discord between my body and my existential sense of being—my self—a disconnect that transition from female to male shifted but did not resolve. Of late I had taken to mediating it through movement. When a stride flows smoothly I feel good. There have been plenty of times in my life when walking was difficult for a variety of reasons, but since I moved to a location with a network of challenging paths and trails snaking across the embankment just minutes from my building, walking, hiking, and short bursts of running have become vital to my sense of well-being. My first thought when I learned I had osteoporosis was that this might change. Weight bearing aerobic exercise is essential to building bone, or fighting off further loss, but many of the online sites I visited warned against hiking and jogging, suggesting instead walking and ballroom dance.

Excuse me?

If I wasn’t feeling instantly aged with the bone scan report, I suddenly felt antique.

So, in addition to adding calcium and vitamin D supplements (and taking a few risky forays into the woods on dangerously icy trails because I refused to give up gracefully) I made an appointment to see a physiotherapist at a sports medicine clinic. It’s been great. We’re working on appropriate exercises to increase joint flexibility, core body strength and balance, with the goal of allowing me to develop a set of regular stretches and a weight training routine to complement my aerobic activities.

And the best thing? She doesn’t see why graded jogging or running cannot be part of my overall effort to slow, even reverse the bone loss.

It’s a strange thing, this recent shift in my relationship with this body, this space I was born into that has always been such an uneasy fit. I’ve struggled with a mood disorder, come to terms with my gender identity and survived a cardiac arrest but somehow this feels different. It feels like coming into a new awareness of the fragility and the strength of my skeletal frame has offered me an opportunity to grow into an new organic connection with my body. To truly take ownership of it as I head into this new phase of life.

To finally wake this sleeping / mountain / mine.

Blue Monday meditation: Thoughts on writing a life (again)

I took a long walk today for the first time since crippling pain seized my lower back on January 2nd, followed by a week of temperatures in the -28 to -35C range that kept me close to home for the first half of the month. Now, with temperatures above zero under heavy grey Chinook sky, it felt good to be moving again.

Since Christmas I have had to guard against a seasonal tendency to slide toward despondency; on occasion I even found myself drawn down dangerously dark corridors. I am ever more aware of growing old, feeling isolated from the culture around me, and concerned that I have lived a life completely out of step with the rest of the world.

I’ve always been anachronistic when it comes to television or movies or music, but nothing makes me feel stranger than the complete alienation of my own experiences as a differently gendered person from the transgender dialogue that has become so prominent recent years. I don’t understand it. I feel that it has taken my voice away, invalidated my reality as someone who transitioned twenty years ago without the supports, protections, or pronoun politics of today. And worse, I fear it has stifled my ability to be honest about the costs of the path I’ve chosen.

So what about my reality? Does it have any weight at all? And when does a lived story begin to take shape, begin to make sense?

Over the past few years I have asked myself these questions, entertained scenarios, crafted neat narratives tracing crisis to closure. But every time I imagined I was nearing not only an answer but more critically a direction to guide my desire to examine this life in writing, something would happen to unspool the thread I’d been so carefully winding.

An unforeseen opportunity would arise; an unexpected twist of fate would knock me off balance.

I have long wondered what to do with this existential morass, slowly and steadily accumulating more days, months and years as I found myself unable to do more than collect, in fits and starts, stray notes in a random collection of books and files. Hidden, tucked into closets, real and metaphorical.

The other day I finally started writing in earnest. I would like to confess that at last a path has opened up before me, that a map has made itself clear, a puzzle into which all the various pieces of my story have suddenly fallen into place.

But, of course, life doesn’t work that way.

Life is not a novel. It cannot be edited; it can only be lived. And if any narrative construct can be observed, it can only be seen in retrospect, buried under all the diversions, denials and delusions we rely on to get through the responsibility of living in the moment—the messy business of being in the world.

And is that evolving target I am writing toward. All that I have been. All that I am. Whatever I may yet be.