What a Drag it is Getting Old

I just got off the phone with my mother. Lately it seems every conversation with my parents requires the delivery of bad news; the death of a family friend, an accident, a financial struggle, stress surrounding uncertain futures. There is a quality of increasing hopelessness in the stories they tell, a coming resignation. 

My grandmother, a diabetic in her mid 80's, just received news that she will need constant care and supervision due to her medical condition. Now in Florida, she was previously in a nursing home in New York, after she had been hospitalized from a fall. She will have to go back north, like a recaptured prisoner, to return to the home she had once escaped from.

For the elderly, there is a cruel kind of symbolism in sustaining an injury from falling. I imagine when you get to be that age you realize all of life is a kind of fall, and your inevitable impact with the hard cement has already happened, you just haven't completely lost consciousness yet. Our lives are the sound of rain falling.  The passing of time, the body's motion through space as it tumbles; losing youth, agility, acuity, happiness, health, independence. 

Growing old is the loss of freedom. Bereft of the freedom from death, mostly. But also the freedom from fear. With old age we walk as though on a tight-rope, every step slow and practiced, myopic. Gravity assails each footfall, while we walk on earth constantly quaking. 

We are all the boulder pushed by the loving hands of Sisyphus, who weeps not for his fate, but ours.