"The worst that could happen to us is that we have to die, and
since that is already our unalterable fate, we are free; those who
have lost everything no longer have anything to fear."
So, any of you bots out there
(followers and upvoters of my posts) :-)
who, through long and arduous struggles, have gained in your AI and perhaps
had a new memory sub-routine (or two) added to your repertoires,
may recall that I had just done a five thousand and three kilometer drive
from Terrace in northern British Columbia, across 5 Canadian provinces,
to southern Ontario.
(It Ain't Easy https://steemit.com/travel/@onceuponatime/it-ain-t-easy )
Just to let you know,
so that you can update your memory banks with the new info, I have now returned - by plane this time, thank God(dess) - to Terrace in northern BC and am holed up in a motel as I make some daring and sophisticated, LOL, financial moves before I head back to Europe with a spanking new residency permit I hope (and pray)!
One of the reasons that I was in southern Ontario
was to visit my 95-year-old father who lives in a full care nursing home there.
That, along with someone suiciding onto the tracks
ahead of my commuter train to the Toronto airport yesterday
(I had to leave the station and take an expensive taxi - damn!),
has got me thinking on old age and dying.
I guess you bots can't fully grok such thoughts (yet),
but please indulge an aging human.
“The beautiful chariots of kings wear out,
This body too undergoes decay.
But the Dhamma of the good does not decay:
So the good proclaim along with the good.”
(Samyutta Nikaya)
my 95-year-old father
My father, who's wife of 70 years died last year,
lives alone in a small apartment in a full care nursing home
in Vineland, Ontario (maybe two hours west of Toronto)
His memory has largely left him, his hearing is mostly gone,
he is stooped and feeble and must use a walker.
He still quite often will ask me, or one of my visiting siblings,
"where is your mother?"
One of my sisters got so tired of that, she taped a message to the mirror in his bedroom:
"Your wife is dead"
My Dad's biggest thing on a normal day is
to go down to the first floor (his apartment is on the second floor)
to get a hot chocolate from the machine there and sit and drink it.
He almost always sits alone because he can't hear what people talking to him are saying
unless they shout. And the other oldsters won't shout for him like my siblings and I do.
Other than that, his meals are taken in a dining room just across the hall from his apartment
where other elders too feeble for the daily trek to the main dining room on the first floor are fed.
One of my sisters will occasionally take Dad for a drive in the countryside,
which he seems to enjoy. That is the only time he leaves the building
(except for an occasional doctor appointment/medical emergency).
And one of my sisters (they live within driving distance) will look in on him every day,
sometimes more than once. He has good (reasonably happy) and bad
(filled with pain) days. Staff look in on him about every hour or so.
I grow old … I grow old … 120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. 125
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
---- T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ( http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html )
And now I will tell you something perhaps unexpected.
It is very strange indeed to see a man who seemed so fierce and powerful and
who often terrorized myself and my siblings as children, now so weak, vulnerable and defenseless.
One would think that we might feel like gloating or at least somehow vindicated.
I, for one, feel nothing but pity.
(
Mom and Dad's 70th wedding anniversary
"The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is
that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary
man takes everything as a blessing or as a curse."
Carlos Casteneda
In that sense, my father is an ordinary man. My mother was a warrior.
My grandmother (mother's mother) in Ireland as a child
My grandmother with my mother (born in Ireland) and my uncle (born in India)
My mother, with my sister. on her 94th birthday, 9 days before she died
Some concluding thoughts (quotes) on old age and death:
"Every single one of us is getting older by the day. Everyone who survives youth and middle-age will get old. In most human societies the elders are venerated for their wisdom and life experience. In our mass culture, on the other hand, old people are portrayed as figures of fun. In real life they are all too often ignored or abused. A whole industry exists to disguise the effects of aging. Death is even more invisible than age, and in many ways remains the last taboo in polite discourse. People nowadays find more acceptable to discuss intimate details of their sexuality than to mention the topic of death."
"It is only with the aid of a strong spiritual tradition that we can find meaning in the problems of aging and death. Buddhism begins with a brutally honest look at life as it is actually is. "Birth is suffering, sickness is suffering, old-age and death are suffering" said the Buddha at the very outset of his ministry. These things are not shameful catastrophes to be hidden away or denied. They are the very warp and woof of each and every human life."
http://www.arrowriver.ca/torStar/oldage.html
"If the average contemporary man were given the possibility to sense or to remember, if only in his thought, that at a definite known date, for instance, tomorrow, a week, or a month, or even a year or two hence, he would die and die for certain, what would then remain, one asks, of all that had until then filled up and constituted his life? Everything would lose its sense and significance for him. What would be the importance then of the decoration he received yesterday for long service and which had so delighted him, or that glance he recently noticed, so full of promise, from the woman who had long been the object of his constant and unrewarded longing, or the newspaper with his morning coffee, and that deferential greeting from the neighbor on the stairs, and the theater in the evening, and rest and sleep, and all his favorite things—of what account would they all be?"
G.I. Gurdjieff
"A warrior must focus his attention on the link between
himself and his death. Without remorse or sadness or worrying, he
must focus his attention on the fact that he does not have time and
let his acts flow accordingly. He must let each of his acts be his
last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will his acts
have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as
he lives, the acts of a fool."
Carlos Castaneda
One of my mother's creations!
