Aging: A blessing or a burden

“She/he has been blessed with a long life,” are words that are often used on old people. But nobody wants to get into the details of what the old people endure to attain the blessing.

Nobody wants to talk about their diabetes, high blood pressure, amnesia or arthritis that ensures they do not get to go beyond the confines of their homes without assistance.

Nobody talks about the loneliness, because by the time someone hits eighty years of age, they are done with going out, and visiting. It is not like they have a lot of people to visit as most of their peers are dead anyway. Their children have their own lives, so do their grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren are too young and energetic to be left with an old person.

During one of my regular visits to my eighty-six year old mother, I bumped into an old photo album. At first, I was excited, and it was a reminisce moment of how they would be left in the sitting room to entertain visitors as they waited to be fed. Photo albums were the televisions of back then. I had a sad moment of mourning for their disuse, because those precious albums were replaced by phones and cloud storage which you cannot just scroll through; gadgets are private, and you cannot just go through them.

I even made a cup of tea to get in the mood of flipping through the photos, but the first page dipped my mood when I realized the album had a collection of dad’s burial photos, all 27-seven years ago. I did not even realise he has been gone that long.

The first photo had ten people standing around the casket, looking dutifully sad. All of them were close friends of dad, and there was mom. Out of the ten, only two are still alive.

I kept flipping and it did not get better. Majority of the people in the whole collection are dead. So much can happen in 27 years.

It was also at that moment I questioned the point of burial photos. Why would we want to ‘hold dear’, to freeze in time, something that makes us sad? Life is full of sad moments, and it should be our deliberate effort to ignore the bad memories as much as possible.

When I mentioned my observation to mom, she did not react with ‘surprise’ like I did. According to her, she spends most of her time thinking about death. Her own eventual death, and that of others. She counted for me a group of men who used to be in an investment chama with dad – only one is still alive. Their wives are also dead, except mom and one other woman. “Almost everyone is gone, including my friends.” In the last five or so years, my mom has lost all her closest friends. She hates it. 

Death can strike at any age, but 70 years upwards for a human is a ripe harvesting season for the grim reaper. It should not have got me all sad because life as we know it is a tragedy, never ends well.

I am, however, human, and we may not be good at many things, but we have perfected the art of ignoring death, until it is thrust on us.

Being blessed with old age is a sort of an oxymoron. A curse disguised as a blessing. I mean, there is absolutely no fun in having to bury all your friends, outliving your children, spending time and money in hospitals managing conditions that come with age.

There is no fun at feeling like a burden to your children who have to pause their lives to look after you. It does not happen in all cases, but often enough to be a concern.

The wish for our parents to live for long is solely for the benefit of the generations under them. Nobody wants to lose a parent, because it is like losing a part of you, and we want to be whole. I guess it really is a blessing, but not to the aged.

The grimmest is not necessarily the reaper, but life itself gives as good.

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