My Personal GPS

It’s not been a very good couple-o-weeks here in LaChapelle Land.

First, there was the back pain. Then, just as that was working itself out, I did something stupid and worked it back in.

Then on Friday, I got bitten—or clawed—by a small dog. It was being walked by a 12-year old who didn’t have a good grasp on the leash. When I’d already passed them on the sidewalk, the dog whipped around and did something nasty to my leg.

First, the pain, then the blood, then the mayhem.

Long story a little less long, the next day I made my way to a drugstore mini-clinic. Had the 2-inch long tear washed and steri-stripped; got a tetanus shot and script for antibiotics; then went home with instructions on how to clean and dress the wound until it—hopefully—closes.

Over the last several days of tending to the back and the wound, I’ve become a bit cranky. Like my father, I don’t do pain well, especially when caring for one injury aggravates the other. And when together they take up so damn much time.

What to do, then, other than take the Alleve and the antibiotic, wash the wound and ice the back, try and minimize the pain from each, and seek advice from the proper professionals?

Easy: along with changing the back patches and the wound dressings, I need to change my attitude. OK, not so easy. But the "Woe is me" internal chatter only keeps me in the woe.

What helps, not surprisingly, is meditating: lying still or walking, I slow down my breathing and with each breath, repeat a word that calms me. This practice, I’m hoping, will also calm the pain. Or at least distract me from it.

The three words I’ve been using—my personal GPS—are gratitude; patience; and serenity. Each in its own way helps remind me what’s needed to change my attitude.

Well, that, and a nice cold glass of Harp at my local sports bar. (We love you, Javy.)

Aging Gracefully

Several years ago, I entered a writing contest sponsored by Real Simple magazine. As I recall, the assignment was to list 10 secret ways to age gracefully.

Now, I wasn’t quite sure why these ways—tips, really—were supposed to be secret. Especially as they’d be published in a national magazine.

As for gracefully, it didn’t dawn on me until I read the winning entries—I was not among them—that in this instance, gracefully could be equivalent to beautifully, well turned out, fashionably.

In other words, how can we keep our looks and our fabulous style as the birthdays and the decades pile on? "Hey, foxy lady, how can you outfox Mother Nature?"

Now, I’ve never been especially foxy, and certainly not beautiful or fashionable. Even when being courted in my 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s by Eddie and Philip and John and Bill, I didn’t wear much make-up, if any, and went in more for comfy than stylish clothes and shoes.

Now, in my 70’s, I realize that my definition of graceful aging reflects those life-long habits, having less to do with body and more with spirit, attitude, purpose, and, of course, good health.

So here's my rejected list, which I titled 10-not-so-secret ways to age gracefully. 

It almost wrote itself those many years ago, and now I offer it as a writing prompt to my readers. Have fun with it, and if you’d like to share any or all of your list, please email me at madmoon55@hotmail.com. I may want to post some of the submissions on my blog.

1.  Be grateful.  

2.  Become a mentor.

3.  Write your family stories.

4.  Move your body. A lot. Walk, bike, swim, dance, whatever.

5.  Be grateful.

6.  Take risks, especially in love and in work (paid or unpaid).

7.  Learn a new skill or retrieve an old one: drawing, skiing, playing the piano.

8.  Stay outraged by injustice, no matter its form.

9.  Live in your body, not some idealized version thereof.

10.  Be grateful.

Compos(t)ing A Life

Because I apparently don’t have enough to read, I’ve yet another selection for my bulging bookshelves: Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying, by Sallie Tisdale.

It was reviewed in last week’s New York Times by Parul Sehgal, and, as the title suggests, is about dying. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the review:

But in its loving, fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live. There’s a reason Buddhist monks meditate on charnel grounds, and why Cicero said the contemplation of death was the beginning of philosophy. 

OK, so not just about dying, but also living. No surprise there, I suppose.  Why even bring up death if you’re not going to eventually circle back to life.

Which puts me in mind of a quote from Henry David Thoreau in Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

It’s the living deliberately part that I’ve tried focusing on for the past 15 or so years. And then when the dying part looms, I want to decide the where, when, and how.  This has been true for me since 1964, when I watched my mother die from breast cancer. She was 50 and I was 20. It left a lasting impression.

I had an essay published three years ago that includes a reference to that seminal event. Here’s an excerpt:

Years after my mother died, I imagined an alternative ending to her life, earnestly writing the intimate details in my personal journal. In that scenario, I, the awakened hero, steal into her hospital room in the dark of a May dawn, ease her small comatose body into my arms, then carry her out of there, into the car and home, to that particular place I know she’d have wanted to finish it: her own unassuming, but familiar backyard.

In this image, I place her carefully on terra firma, where she can lie with those things that had given her life its most elemental meaning—the garden, the flowers in bloom, maybe the dog and cat—to breathe her last. In this image, she now wears a faint smile in place of the awful death mask that covered her face on the day she actually died.

As for myself, I’d take this lovely fantasy a step further, saving anyone the bother of having to stuff my remains in a box. Because now, in this enlightened era, one can have one’s remains decompose, within certain natural areas, with or without the box.

In other words, one can opt for a green burial, an environmentally friendly way to leave our beautiful green planet, the kind of ending my nature-loving mother would have loved.

And so, not surprisingly: like mother, like daughter.

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For more information on green burials:

http://sections.chicagotribune.com/primetime/2015/09/18/#?article=2606801

To read the NYTG book review:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/books/review-advice-for-future-corpses-sallie-tisdale.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbooks&action=click&contentCollection=books&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront