This article was originally published on Medium.com in the publication Crow’s Feet on 3/30/23.
Life choices, made correctly, can liberate and even exhilarate you. Made wrongly, they foster regrets and recriminations. It’s usually the case that those choices made early in life, at a time when you can make them for yourself and make them objectively, let’s say wisely, are thought to be the most consequential. They shape your future years at an age when you have a lot of that future ahead of you. As you get older, the proverbial “they” say that you become averse to change. You have fewer options anyway, so you’d be wiser to just stay the way you are. The life choice to go into retirement, to stop earning, and to relax is one often motivated by bodies and minds that need relief from the 9 to 5. Not just two or four weeks of vacation, but 52 weeks instead. Often you’ll feel that your decision really isn’t yours to make for yourself; it’s forced upon you.
In my case, retirement came and cancer followed. Actually, the cancer came just about a year later. I didn’t have a diagnosis on the day I left work. It was a feeling of something wrong with the plumbing and a sort of 65-ish manageable pain and lack of energy that I confused with too much work at too fast a pace. Those precursors, together with the vigilance of my primary, who could see right away that I was minimizing the problem, led to tests, which led to the actual diagnosis. And so started an adventure into coping with a part of my body running amuck.
I’m not a particularly doom and gloom person, so I wasn’t freaked out, though I did say, “Shit! Some way to start my golden years.” Or something like that. There’s more I could say about insurance issues that came up, which, like a lot of problems people have with health insurance, aggravated the worry about treatment options and could have made the prognosis more dire. But those issues got resolved in my favor after about six months and we started the procedures.
I’m going to skip ahead five years and tell you that everything went well. I made it to 72 and there’s been no recurrence. It was a good feeling at the five-year mark to get a hug from the radiation oncologist, who pronounced me cured. That was his actual word, accompanied by a huge smile.
The point of telling you about the cancer episode is that it represented one of those inflection points that you don’t have much luxury in which direction you choose. You either do the chemo and radiation or you don’t. Maybe you could choose to hope and pray the cancer away as another alternative, but there aren’t many more options.
The real choice you make when you have only a live-or-die option (Your money or your life!) depends on how long you see your future stretching beyond 65 and how many other opportunities you want to have to make additional choices. That’s a gamble, I realize, but you’ll get from your doctors some statistical estimate of how long that future might be.
Once you’ve made it to five years, things are looking good. Straight road ahead, unless something else comes along, like the proverbial truck barreling down on you from out of nowhere. In my case, I saw now, at 72, more years ahead than I had predicted five years earlier. Things were looking good.
But I need to back up to other events that happened in the previous five years to explain the choices that presented themselves to me at 72.
My partner, Dave, had been undergoing, during my treatment years, some unidentified neural disease that was gradually robbing him of his trust in his senses. What he saw or heard and even felt, his brain would misinterpret and leave him uncoordinated, hallucinating, and, closer to the end, paranoid.
Dave passed away two days after my 70th birthday. In his lucid days before the worst of the disease robbed him of his judgment, he had decided to donate his body to the Georgetown University Medical School. They did an autopsy and reported that he had died from Lewy Body Dementia, not Parkinson’s, which he had been ineffectively treated for.
Lewy Body is a condition that’s hard on caregivers physically and emotionally. But surviving it as a caregiver gives you, gave me, a healthy respect for the future. Not so much a yearning, but a commitment to engage it, to explore it, and not to waste it. The alternative would be to live with fear for what lay ahead.
Within those five years, after my cancer treatments ended and before Dave died, I had kept occupied with volunteer work. I got involved with the so-called Villages movement, the intent of which is to support older people who choose to remain active in their own homes and communities. The details of those efforts aren’t important here.
After Dave died, I needed something in addition to volunteering to restore me; To refit myself to living as something other than a caregiver. Something new to me, something out of my orbit. To be honest, something to counteract the grief; not to escape it, but to control it.
The year was 2015, and the country was in the process of figuring out for itself what it wanted to be–Clintonia or Trumpistan. It was a disorienting time for someone who had just come out of a long period of personal turmoil and was in need of calm. I decided, following a two week escapist vacation trip to Newfoundland, that I would prefer to be a Canadian.
I’m going to skip ahead here, again, and say that I made a concerted effort to make that happen, buying a house on a small off-island off the northeast coast of the main island. I contacted a Canadian immigration lawyer, who told me of the very slim chances I had to get permanent resident status. This meant that I would only be able to stay six months of the year in Canada. So I resigned myself to keeping a foot in the States for the other six months.
That arrangement lasted until COVID struck and Canada closed its border with the U.S. in 2020. For two years I wasn’t able to get to my house, but it would have been a risky proposition in any case, since in that year I’d had a heart attack. With that complication, and having no health insurance in Canada, living there for six months would be risky. Long and short, I chose to give up the house and stay a full-time American.
I settled permanently into my home in the woods in West Virginia with a new partner. Without any preamble, I know that it sounds like I plucked him out of the woods. But, actually, we met at a local artists’ auction and had a conventional dating go-round. He even came with me for the last summer I was able to travel to the island.
It’s from this scene of comfortable “senescence” that I made my current last choice in life. I decided I was going to write. What you’re reading now is one product of that decision. The main product, though, is a column that I write for our local newspaper. It’s called the Neighborhood Watch and it deals, in a roundabout way, with getting our readership to understand and appreciate the differences among us, rather than to fear or complain about them.
This memoir piece, and others I intend to write, I do just for sharing’s sake, particularly to leave my family and friends information about me that they are curious about, but never asked about. There’s a lot of those kinds of details that I regret never having asked the elders in my family. So my writing choice is to anticipate those unasked questions and answer them.
I’ll be 80 this year and, realistically, I know at some point I’ll have to rein in a bit. But the history of how I made it so far makes me optimistic that I’ll have options to choose from when another change needs to be made, as it no doubt will.