Dec 2025
I shut the door quiety to his walk-up with a heavy sigh. With resignation, I creep down the stairs in this ancient rickety upper west side apartment building to take a moment to reflect. If this patient of mine would only accept that his situation had changed instead of trying to convince himself it hasn’t, I could be so much more helpful. Without this concession to reality I am locked out; our interactions are dominated by arguments over the meaning of what we both see.
No doubt, he was once an avid daily semi-pro golfer, popular with the ladies, and an insightful amateur historian of America’s Gilded Age. Now, he can’t move around his apartment without wincing in pain, when I visit at 8 am sharp he has already been up four hours because he can’t stay asleep because of pain.
His friends are not in the habit of coming to see him–he always went to their place, or saw them at the course, or in the office. He isn’t forgotten, exactly, but his physical limitations have removed him from the social fabric he formerly weaved himself through with ease and aplomb.
He asserts, with stubborn vigor, that with a little clean living and patience he will be back on the golf course. I can’t construct a narrative he will accept to explain that those days have passed. Sure, he will play golf again, in a cart, and he won’t be on the greens every day. I have a vision of him enjoying golf again, but it won’t be what he describes to me.
It is too soon to resign himself to hanging up golf cleats; his future on the course will be greatly enhanced if he will accept his current situation. The changes he is avoiding, denying, and postponing now are the very changes that will make his future better.
Using a cart, cutting back to two days a week, maybe exploring the pitch-and-putt courses he spent his life silently demeaning, maybe packing it in after nine good holes, et al., won’t bring back what he has lost, but it will open a place to welcome new joys.
He won’t. He wants physical therapy and a new athletic trainer. That has been his answer for setbacks since he was a young man. He is ready to get back on that horse one more time. I wasn’t able to get his insurance carrier to authorize the physical therapy. There’s no need until he gets the total knee replacements he needs.
He tells his friends he has everything he needs, he politely takes rain-checks on their offers to visit, ashamed of his current condition and the apartment around him (which he can poresently only spot-clean when necessary). He will have everyone over when he can mop these floors and take those curtains down to the cleaners to freshen then up.
Right now he can’t get to the gym, much less start training. He wants a chance to “prove all the doubters wrong.” He has turned me and everyone else trying to help him into adversaries, representatives of the demons stalking him.
He is going to stubbornly wait it out, drinking green juice, eating kale and egg whites, gobbling a fist full of supplements from his “research” on YouTube. He has rebounded before, he will do it again.
Unfortunately, his inactivity and isolation is making things worse. The more he sits around the house expecting to absorb his healing from his diet and rest, the worse his situation becomes. He loses even more days to ennui and inactivity. These are indeed the best of the days remaining for him. I am heartbroken that he is spending them waiting for a past that has left the building. I have failed him as a nurse, but you can’t win them all.
There is a demon stalking him, the same one that stalks us all: impermanence.
I have scarcely had a day during which I felt truly well, all systems go, since the twenty-first night of September, as the song goes. My gangrenous toe, my arthritic knees, my novel neuropathic pain, and a bout with one of the worst cold viruses my area has seen in a decade have all contributed to my crossing of a threshold I promised myself I would bravely step across when it became time.
I am an old man–beyond my calendar age. The notion brings a shy smile to my face. This shouldn’t surprise me, I have always identified with an older cohort, going back to kindergarten. Oops.
Perhaps my physical age surpasses my calendar age because of the decades of abuse heaped upon my body by morbid obesity. My knees were crushed under the weight of two people, sometimes three, for more than three decades. That has consequences.
I have been preparing for this physical inevitability for decades. I can face it, even though I really don’t like it. It came far too soon and is advancing far too rapidly. I failed to prepare for the emotional transition.
I don’t handle frustration well. I far prefer to work quietly in the background to work around a problem rather than concede powerlessness. I have no such possibilities here. Father time is undefeated.
During one such episode of frustration recently, the person with me, one of my closest friends, faced me and said “you’re really aren’t any fun when things aren’t going well.”
I had no response. How does one rebut the truth?
The situation at the time was the consequence of a cascade of failings of my memory and the ultimate failure of a zipper to work properly. I was in freezing cold rain, my head still covered in cold-season flop-sweat, and my cap, which I badly wanted, was caught in the zipper of the insulated vest pocket I had previously enclosed it in. I finally had to rip open the only garment protecting me from the cold wind to retrieve the cap. I was angry, frustrated, and cold. I was not fun.
I didn’t have a proper coat because I had forgotten it like an absent-minded old man earlier in the evening. I knew a drastic temperature drop was imminent during the play I planned to attend. I was the forgetful old geezer who isn’t safe being left alone to fend for himself in New York City. I have helped dozens of those old guys over the years, silently cursing their stupidity for over-estimating their own physical endurance and failing to bring along whatever they are likely to need when they leave the house.
Now I am one of them…and being an asshole about it to someone I love more than I can say. I can’t fix the veins in my legs, I can’t restore the cushions in my knees, I can’t put my peripheral nerves back right, but I can fix that. I can choose my response to impermanence.
I can choose to go quietly into that good night. I will not rage against the dying of the light of youth and vigor. I will go in good humor.
Deep breath. This is very hard. There were so many things I wanted to do before this happened. So many places I wanted to see, so many experiences I wanted to have. I will miss them. But I will not miss the opportunity to be present for the life I have now.
I am beginning to appreciate why old men have a reputation for shouting at clouds.
You can’t do anything about clouds.
Fluffy fuckers.