By Nick Mendez: “I’m Nick Mendez, a fourth year journalism student at Northeastern, a writer, photographer, podcaster and blogger. Check me out at takewitness.com.”
I’ve always been scared of getting old.
I fretted about it in the womb, looking nervously at my umbilical cord, knowing it would eventually leave me shivering and despondent. I imagine my spry prenatal self as appealingly dark.
A scruffy, goatee’d embryo with a smoker’s cackle and socialist proclivities, maybe I flashed gang signs for the ultrasound. Like a condor barring its claws, I might have kicked and scratched in the darkness, struggling to express my prenatal frustration with the Robert Bork nomination.
I inhaled my first New York air with some trepidation. The nurse approached and snipped my lifeline, leaving me susceptible to choke on quarters, roll off a changing table or worse yet end up a Mouseketeer. Birth affirmed my existence, sure, but now death’s frigid stare was bearing down. The clock had started, and each ticking second brought me closer to wrinkly absolution.
All parents sculpt their children like a drooling ball of indulgent possibility. While statistically much more likely to end up working a deep fryer five days a week, to the folks we all start as a sky-bound lard rocket, screeching for approval with increasing coherence.
We’re packed so tight with positive reinforcement that by adolescence we burst with the scornful realizations that we won’t be President or World Series MVP.
Loftier aspirations eventually fall away, and with some luck you escape the embalming confines of home for university, chasing the promise of lavish keggers and eager female company. For a few years that upward trend in coherent thought comes to more closely resemble a bell curve.
For most of my college career I’ve lived adjacent to the Susan S Bailis Assisted Living Community. I’ve only ever gone inside to vote, but I walk through their courtyard daily on the way to the subway or liquor store. There’s a dog park out front: a corroded fence surrounding a square patch of grass where girls peel back the faux-fur trim of their jacket sleeves and pick up crap, while schnauzers scratch at their sequined sweater vests.
Elderly men shamble outside in the spring sun, brush off a seat with a copy of the Metro and sit staring, mouths agape. Packed together they chuckle at the students, all passing hurriedly through without stopping to smell the poop, naive to their acute senses and disproportionate outrage. I think they feel bad for us, but not a spry twerp among us bothers to look up from our mobile long enough to notice, or give a damn.
As it gets colder you might see a man sitting there alone, left to pick at the hastily bandaged memories of roaring American renaissance. The whites of his eyes flicker, like he’s staring at a drive-thru movie projector. His face blushes rosy from all the tail lights, one arm sliding across the bench seat’s foam-green vinyl. His shoulder lowers a quarter inch, inviting a long forgotten squeeze to rest her head, her features a hazy cloud of perfume and lechery.
Realizing that I’m staring, the glance back is enough to shake his day dream, now forgotten all over again. Neither of us bothers a smile, the whole interaction suddenly flooded with remorse, and I walk right by.
I finish school in less than two months. I came to Boston to get a degree, and while my mother will beam for moment, I’m not sure a diploma could affirm the last four years as worthwhile. Somehow the combination of heavy paper stock and gold leaf is supposed to sum up my experience. Now I have an expertise.
Strange that I’m still so affixed on my naivete. A diploma means nothing if I can’t find a job, get that raise, climb the corporate ladder, perhaps win a few awards and best case I’ll even change some things. But somehow I don’t think any of those will feel like adequate affirmation either.
That’s not to say my education hasn’t been fruitful, I can wrap verbs around my fingers more easily, get lost behind a camera lens and chase a lead worlds apart. I’m pretty sure I even know how to use a semicolon. But college was never about finding expertise.
Instead I learned how to crush someone’s heart to bits and not hate myself for too long. I discovered the similarities between sex and politics. How to find my way home drunk, high, bloodied or embarrassed. How to get lost in words, over and over and over again.
I bought tequila shots for a room full of Europeans, built river barges, ran for safety in a police state and nearly died on a speedboat. Living in the city taught me to love the country; living with a woman taught me to cherish my autonomy, and the folks in al-Goma taught me just how well I’d been living.
And I met some amazing people. That’s my affirmation.
Stuck on a ride this intricate, all you can really do is hang on and hope you remember the best parts. One day my kids will leave me at an assisted living community and I’ll be stuck watching coeds pick up dog crap all day.
All I can wish is that someone finally sits down and asks me, “How was the ride?”
Photo Credit: Vanderlin, Hamed Mousumi
I’m banking on the hope that in the next 30 years, science & medicine will progress to the point where we can prolong our lives indefinitely.
I would say I’m not afraid of getting old, but I am afraid of dying. It sounds cliche but I like getting older because with each year I feel so much more confident in who I am andmore aware of where I am going.
I look forward to being old, in a way. Retirement will be great, especially if I somehow manage to save up. I’ll be able to yell at all the kiddos to get off my lawn. What I am afraid of is the sickness that will inevitably come before death. Alzheimers and Parkinsons both run in my family and I might prefer to die than have to suffer either of those diseases.
I haven’t given it much thought, but I think I am a little frightened of getting old. I’m not afraid of dying, it’s inevitable and it gives us a reason to have meaning and purpose while we’re alive. I’m afraid of getting old because I know I will slowly see things that I’ll have held near and dear to me come to an end: parents dying, friends drifting apart with time due to geographical or philosophical differences, our close friends we do stay in touch with dying, and myself physically getting older and unable to do the things I can as a twenty-something. This is probably a naive fear that will loosen its grip on me after each notch I put on my biological belt, but I think we all feel like that sometimes. My grandmother said about a year before she died “It’s not that I’m not afraid of dying, I just wish I could keep on livin’ “. I thought that was pretty cool.
I do not want to get old. I’m 46 and the signs are undeniable, but still, I don’t WANT this to be happening. Why? Because I think I know what it’s like, just a little bit, to be old and infirm.
Over three years ago, I suffered a sever traumatic brain injury and left the hospital in a wheel chair. My six- day stay in a hospital room showed me a little bit what it must be like to be in assisted living. Nurses constantly poked me and fed me various drugs, my girlfriend held the bottle I peed into and the bowls I threw up into. The lights came on without warning at all hours, with nary apology (I understand why, apologies would get old fast). Back home, I learned to use a cane, which guided me through grocery stores and down sidewalks, but not so well that people didn’t offer to help or surreptitiously move out of the way. Now, don’t get me wrong, I appreciated their good will, but being offered help all the time makes you feel, well, old. And I did not like it.
Today I am a lot better, but I’ve had my introduction to old age and it was no fun.
Jeff
http://www.cerebellumblues.com
Nick: you’re post is brilliant, hilarious, and spot-on. Thanks for sharing it with us.
I, too, have nightmares on aging, death, and deep friers. I know the first two are unavoidable, and after four years and a couple hundred thousand dollars of debt, I’m not as worried about the last. For me, the real anxiety lies instead in defining success: when I’m watching co-eds picking up dog crap, will I have a good story to tell?
I shared this thought with a coworker the other day; when I returned from lunch, she’d written the Abraham Lincoln quote, “Whatever you are, be a good one” on my notepad. I’ve hung it on my wall, and for now, it’s my goal. I guess we’ll see what happens.
Wow, really!? I have zero fears of aging. I’m really looking forward to it, actually! Probably because I’ve grown quite sick of age discrimination…and because I plan on growing up to be Lucille Bluth…
I’ll be the one to put it out there, though: I am deeply afraid of losing my mental faculties. I’ve seen two out of four grandparents become senile, and Alzheimer’s is the one disease I wouldn’t be able to cope with.
I’ve never feared the process of getting old, but what I have feared is getting old without loved ones around to share in my life.
It sounds cheesy, but my biggest fear is dying alone. No husband, no siblings, no children, no extended family, no friends, and nobody to lament my passing or celebrate my life. Selfish? Probably so. It’s my fear though, so I’m OK with being a bit selfish about it.
I fear diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s more for what they do to your loved ones, than for what they do to the person suffering.
It’s not that I fear growing up; it’s just that I can’t believe it’s happening. I know I shouldn’t feel old at only 21, but I do. When I can say that high school was eight years ago, college stared four years ago, and my friends are graduating in May — it’s scary. I always wanted to get older…but it’s like I never really figured I would. I do, however, have high hopes. The best years of my life, I firmly believe, are ahead of me…so bring it on!
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by kathyschmidt: Wish I could write this well: “Are You Afraid of Getting Old?” http://bit.ly/74x1u3...
When I saw the title of this post, I found myself screaming silently “Yes, I am SO scared of getting old.” I have so much to say about this, perhaps I’ll even write a post in response. Keep up the good work!
I would say I'm not afraid of getting old, but I am afraid of dying. It sounds cliche but I like getting older because with each year I feel so much more confident in who I am andmore aware of where I am going.