FROM MY LIFE

Musings On My Aging And The Years Ahead

Am I the only one having thoughts of how much time I might have left?

With my next birthday, it will be just thirteen more years until I reach the age my mom was when she passed away.

That’s a thought that has been on my mind frequently in the past months.

Somehow, there’s always another thought that follows that one: Gran only passed away when she was almost eighty-three.

My next birthday is towards the end of the next month, and then I turn fifty-seven. My mom was seventy years, one month, and eight days old when she passed away in 2017. What if it’s written in the stars and I only reach the same age as my mom?

The thought is like a giant hand throttling me.

Maybe that’s why I then think of my grandmother, as it gives me the respite of another thirteen years.

This train of thought makes me wonder: am I the only one middle-aged woman who thinks of this? Of the years she might have left?

In the last years of her life, my grandmother took care of her partner who had dementia, and who gradually became more abusive. He would threaten to leave the house, and when my gran tried to stop him, he would hit her. Sometimes he sneaked out of the house, causing her hours of stress until the police finally found him and brought him back.

He went to a daycare center when it got worse, but only for one or two days in the week. My grandmother was adamant about taking care of him herself, despite her advanced age. The social worker suggested she should have him admitted to full-time care, but my gran refused.

Within a week, after she had finally agreed to have him admitted, she had a heart attack. She pushed the emergency button — she lived in a flat inside a care home — but when the staff checked on her, they thought she was asleep.

The next morning, my aunt found her unconscious. She had only one kidney, and it had stopped working as a complication of the heart attack. The doctors couldn’t get her kidney to function, nor could they get in a central line for dialysis, and my grandmother decided it was enough. Eight weeks after the heart attack, she passed away.

My mom hated going to the doctor, but medical programs and procedures had always intrigued her. When her boss offered his managers the opportunity to go for a full body MRI scan, she jumped at it.

The result of the scan was a shadow on her right lung.

I recall so many times when she told me ‘that stupid company’ didn’t want to leave her be, and kept on sending her emails enquiring whether she had gone to her doctor yet for further examination. When I said that maybe she should go to the doctor, she said she would.

She never did.

It must’ve been four years later that she received the diagnosis of COPD. She had been a smoker from her teens up to about her sixty-fifth year.

I didn’t link the COPD to the shadow on her lung. She might have.

Halfway through 2016, my mother started an exercise regime to expand her lung capacity. She started cycling on the home trainer for two minutes, rested for an hour, then cycled for two minutes again. The next week she did three minutes, then four, until she could manage ten.

She also started walking to the shopping center for her groceries. It took a month for her to be able to walk the three hundred meters there and back without sitting several times in between.

Then, on New Year’s Eve that year, she got ill. She said it was because of the residual material in the air after the fireworks. What she didn’t tell us until much later was that her condition rapidly deteriorated. She went from cycling several times a day and walking to the shops twice a week to leaving the house in a wheelchair in a month.

She had coughed up blood, and it took her two weeks to muster the strength to go to the doctor. That same day she had X-rays done and the next day, the doctor knocked on her door.

Lung cancer, he said, and it doesn’t look good.

Five and a half months later, she passed away.

A cousin of ours is a general practitioner, and when I sent him the results of the MRI scan of six years earlier, he confirmed that was probably the start of the cancer.

When those thoughts about when my mom and grandmother died fill my mind, I also remember the cause of their deaths.

I don’t go to the doctor every time I have a cough or a pain, but I go more than my mom ever did. Also, I have a check-up done every three years, to make sure everything is still fine. And, I take part in every population survey which applies to me — currently breast cancer, and colon cancer.

My motto is to rather check one time too many than one time too little.

If any of those examinations would have a questionable result, I will have it followed up.

Then there’s my grandmother. In taking care of her partner, she put herself on the back burner, even when the social worker said she couldn’t keep up the pace and had to also think of her own wellbeing.

We all know stress is detriment to our wellbeing, be it you get a cold every other month or, like my grandmother, something more serious.

With my husband’s health issues, much more rest on my shoulders, but in the past two years I have carved out time for myself. I have to live my life too, despite taking care of him.

I have so much I still want to do — I’m not ready to think about the end.

Those thoughts about how many years I might have left pop into my mind at random times, but they are not consuming me. In fact, thanks to those thoughts, I’m taking care of my mental and physical health, living every day to the fullest and working at being the woman I really am.

I came to some life epiphanies later than others, and whether I have thirteen or twenty-six years ahead of me, I plan to make the utmost best of them.

We only get one shot at this life, so better make the best of it.

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