Diary of a Gimp

I have two sources of decline; my MS and my aging. Many times have I tried to differentiate their respective consequences, but doing so frankly is a fool’s errand. So I just lump all of the symptoms and effects together, as separating them is irrelevant to me. Since I live in this body full time, I don’t really care what’s causing its distress; I just want figure out how to adapt, innovate and overcome whatever difficulties present from either or both conditions.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this aging/MS stew, is that inside, I feel like I’m still in my 20s and fit as I’ve ever been. I recently spoke with an old friend with whom I’d shared an experience of being draftees from our same state and town. We are the same age, and his spine is degrading to the point that he must use a walker to get around. A mutual friend of the same origins who recently died of cancer, reported the same self-perception prior to his death, as did my father at age 92. It is, in fact, such a deep view of the self that only viewing a mirror or photograph disabuses of us that notion. And even then the mind struggles to reduce the dissonance.

Perhaps we have to maintain such a fiction. Perhaps we’d all go nuts if we didn’t. Think about it for a moment. What if we felt our aging every day. We soon would be defeated by our own perceptions. No one would ever reach their 60s without considering, or actually completing suicide out of despair.

My father used to say, “Aging is not for the young, they could never handle it.” Indeed aging requires one to rally his strength and resources just when one is feeling least able to do so. One must go beyond one’s own wish to take to the proverbial rocking to live out one’s days in peaceful repose.

But then why the need to live? I have addressed this more in a later post, as yet to be completed and published, on what happens after death. Let me just say here that you and I are unique people. That which makes us who we ar, never existed before and will never exist hence.

This concept can be debated statistically I suppose. Perhaps some mathematician some day may prove its fallacy. But you are you. You perceive your self as having your own chair at the banquet of life. And since we can only know what we perceive, either sensorily or metaphysically, I will never know precisely how you think and feel nor you me. (See the works of Aristotle (Empiricism), Parmenides (Early Metaphysics), George Berkeley  (Subjective Idealism), and/or David Hume (Radical Empiricism) for more developed discussion of this topic.)

Those of us with chronic diseases remain aware of the delusion of the incorruptibility of the body. The aged remain aware of the delusion of the immortality of the body. We who are both chronically diseased and old perhaps see beyond the delusion – even if unwillingly – to the nature of life itself.

With that, let me say that all human life is precious and sacred. (I will not enter the discussion of the sanctity of the life of such animals as apes, or cetaceans, or octopuses as that is beyond the scope of this post.) With that awareness, I must view each day, perhaps each hour, as sacrosanct. That awareness is the greatest gift of getting old.

I wish for you, dear reader, that awareness without the infirmities I’ve mentioned. Unfortunately, until you enter old age yourself, your understanding of the true value of life and being alive will be intellectual, or perhaps emotional, but until you get there yourself you will not know it. Live long, and prosper.