BLOG<\/p>\n
SPARE
PARTS & LOOSE ENDS<\/p>\n
If you told me I literally had
to eat poop every day and I would look younger, I just might.<\/p>\n
\u00a0– – – Kim Kardashian<\/p>\n
Trying to stay young is like chasing a dream backwards. It\u2019s\u00a0a demon with bad breath snapping at your heels, a loose end that no matter how\u00a0many times you tuck it in, it keeps unraveling.<\/p>\n
When I was in the ballet during my teenage years, I had a
recurring dream that is a metaphor for the paragraph above. I was standing in\u00a0the wings, ready to go onstage, performing a familiar ritual.<\/p>\n
I looked behind me to see if the seams in my tights were
straight. Check.<\/p>\n
I felt the back ribbing of my tutu to make sure the hooks
were clasped tightly. \u00a0Check.<\/p>\n
I adjusted my tiara to make sure it was securely pinned. Check.<\/p>\n
I touched my ear lobes to make sure my earrings were glued
on.\u00a0 Check.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But in my dream, when I leaned down to tighten the knots in my
pointe shoe ribbons and tuck them in at my ankles, they came undone in my hands.\u00a0I heard the music, I was supposed to be on stage, but no matter how many times\u00a0I tried to retie those ribbons, they kept loosening, unraveling and falling onto\u00a0the floor.<\/p>\n
A life that not has been investigated becomes a loose end. When\u00a0I was in my twenties and I\u2019d retired from the ballet, I turned into a
restaurant parking lot and I was idling, waiting for an elderly woman in the\u00a0passenger seat to get out of her car before I parked. Someone was helping her,\u00a0it was taking forever and I groused to myself, \u201cWhy don\u2019t old people just get\u00a0out of their cars? What’s the big deal? When I\u2019m old, I\u2019m not gonna take\u00a0forever to get out of my car.\u201d<\/p>\n
The arrogant ignorance of that statement became painfully
obvious to me half a century later when I was recovering from hip replacement\u00a0surgery and getting out of my car was a challenge. Maybe it was the LSD or the\u00a0magic mushrooms that made my generation believe we were immortal, that we could\u00a0bypass pain and degeneration. That old age had nothing to do with us. We swore
by a popular sentiment: \u201cDon’t trust anyone over thirty.\u201d I wonder if political\u00a0activist, Jack Weinberg, who is credited with those words, feels untrustworthy\u00a0now that he\u2019s eighty-two.<\/p>\n
While youth is responsible for ageism, the elderly play their\u00a0part in the denial. They just don’t stop to enlighten younger generations about\u00a0aging. They make it seem like a calamity rather than an inevitability. My uncle\u00a0Ted was ailing in the hospital, unconscious, close to death and the extended family\u00a0were gathered in the waiting room to say good-bye. When it was my father\u2019s\u00a0turn, he went into Ted\u2019s room like everyone else, but when he came out, he announced\u00a0in a loud voice, \u201cI think he\u2019s gonna make it.\u201d My uncle died an hour later. I\u00a0guess my father thought if you didn’t acknowledge death, maybe you could get\u00a0out of here alive.<\/p>\n
When I still had the luxury to be in denial about aging, I\u00a0remember being annoyed that elderly people were always talking about their
operations. Now I understand. The older we get, the more our mobility and sensory\u00a0skills depend on spare parts: Titanium hips and knees. Shoulder replacements.\u00a0Tooth implants and crowns. Not the glittery kind. Hearing aids. Eye lenses, canes,\u00a0walkers and wrinkle fillers. It\u2019s like logging onto Amazon and ordering the\u00a0accouterments that will allow us to get up in the morning, move through the day\u00a0with as little pain as possible and stay alert until its time to go back to\u00a0bed.<\/p>\n
If we don’t die unexpectedly, the rocky path that leads us to death\u2019s door is often wrought with fear and loathing in this society. When my mother turned 90, I asked her to tell me about aging, how it felt and how she coped with it. She said, \u201cYou don\u2019t understand. I can’t explain it.\u201d<\/p>\n
I wish she had tried. I wish she had told me how it felt to\u00a0have saggy skin, muscle pain, wrinkles and arthritis. I wish she had talked\u00a0about facing the reality that her future was shorter than her past, that her
eyesight was dimming, threatening her ability to read, the thing she liked best\u00a0in the world. But I also wish she had pointed out the gifts of aging like\u00a0wisdom, patience, compassion. Intuition born of decades of life experience. It would\u00a0have been helpful but she just wasn\u2019t that kind of person. She kept her\u00a0feelings so well hidden, I sometimes wondered if she had any.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cForever young\u201d is what we are trying to attain was our\u00a0motto in the sixties and talking about dying was taboo, as if the mere mention
of it was an invitation. But it isn\u2019t like that everywhere. When I was walking\u00a0down the street in Bali, a large procession of people in colorful clothing\u00a0passed by. A group of men were carrying a casket, there was loud talking and\u00a0singing while children skipped around, ducking under the casket and in and out\u00a0of the crowds. Children there are included in death rituals and early on, they\u00a0come to understand that dying is a part of living, not something to be feared
and dreaded but rather, to be accepted and commemorated. So how do we make the\u00a0truths of life digestible? A spiritual teacher of mine said once, \u201cDeath is\u00a0perfectly safe. Everyone does it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stuart Hodes, an old friend and accomplished dancer\/choreographer,\u00a0who is 97, says, \u201cEverything you do with every particle of yourself can be\u00a0wonderful. My death will be my greatest performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearly he is accepting the end of his life. I recall a\u00a0stunning moment when one of my mentors, Isa, a woman in her sixties with\u00a0cancer, was about to leave us. A group of us had gathered on her bed, watching\u00a0her breathe, when she suddenly turned her head to one side, said \u201cOh, this\u00a0isn\u2019t so bad,\u201d and she was gone. That gave me hope that maybe we don\u2019t die into\u00a0nothingness.<\/p>\n
Everyone doesn\u2019t get to die like Isa did, but as we move forward,
trying to tie up loose ends and getting the requisite spare parts to keep us in\u00a0motion, cultivating the ability to leave the future in the future is\u00a0worthwhile. We may not know where or when, but we know what is eventually coming.\u00a0The old adage about the certainty of death and taxes fits here, but if we see\u00a0spare parts and loose ends as simply the way of things, that replacements are\u00a0necessary and nothing gets finished and tied up with a neat little bow, we have\u00a0a better chance of facing the inevitable with less fear and more grace.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BLOG SPAREPARTS & LOOSE ENDS If you told me I literally hadto eat poop every day and I would look younger, I just might. \u00a0– – – Kim Kardashian Trying to stay young is like chasing a dream backwards. It\u2019s\u00a0a demon with bad breath snapping at your heels, a loose end that no matter how\u00a0many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2157,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions\/2157"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}