On Aging

the Game is Changing

I woke up with one foot in my dream, one foot in my bed.

I was challenging her there–my childhood best friend, Kellen.

Challenging her to not walk away from taking care of an old, sick, dying woman in our community. An old woman whose stuff needed cleaning with watered-down urine for whatever dream logic was in place. Two feet away from us, her adulthood best friend was doing just that.

We were outside, on a concrete surface, somewhere that when approached looked like the view from my Grandma Poni’s driveway overlooking Lanikai, but when standing upon it functioned more like a piazza.

In my dream-space I recalled her there the day before. She’d been there with the community, circled around where the cooler-like apparatuses now being cleaned to prepare for the elderly’s arrival were. We’d been playing a game where, one at a time, someone in the circle would take the focus and play with a rolling car toy, using it in a manner that potentially riffed off of patterns started by others. One of the patterns suggested by the gametime’s guide was to do it all without words.

I had watched her from elsewhere in the circle, resisting the play. This whole taking care of the dying happening in the same place now was too much for the earnest internal she’d been going through yesterday. Not wanting her to storm away, I had caught her mid-stride. She fought back. I yelled.

“This is what happens!”

I woke up with one foot in my dream, one foot in my bed.

Halfway through realizing that Kellen is somewhere out there in the world now, alive and well, watching her parents (who took care of me so often while we grew up) get old.

I bet that’s hard, to watch your parents get old slowly over many decades.

Most people have some decades to go with that ahead of them.

I realize losing mine relatively young saved me from this particular grief.

And also, I think my mother would have been lovely old–the old that comes before the more difficult years of aging despair. I think she would have been sharper–more direct. And I think my father would have been goofier. They would have loved being grandparents, and been so silly and wise.

It’s strange to me how careless I find most young and middle-aged adults are about their aging parents. How unwittingly most go about neglecting their relationships or chance for redemption or chance to forgive. The chance to make memories. The chance to get to know themselves all the more through the purity that is parental love and the unabashed prickliness that is parental wisdom.

There is nothing so pure as parental love and so prickly as parental wisdom.

I have two Moms and two Dads, but only two parents.

Parents are different than bloodlines. They know you through and through, even if they are confused by you. They know you through the faith of family and the faith of their own alliance to you. They love you enough to school you and have faith in mutual forgiveness and understanding. Not everyone has parents, even if they have a Mom and a Dad. Not everyone is lucky enough to be loved and educated and stood by with such ferocity.

I am forever grateful that I did.

I wonder, how much my dream was about Kellen as a representation of my peers, or about me as a representation of a different part of me that isn’t accepting my own aging. Surely, the latter carries more to learn from. Since being a young adult, I’ve been all well and good at accepting it in those older than me–taking care of the elders in my life when I am able to. But am I taking care of myself as I age?

Am I adjusting my habits to do what I need to do to age well? Because I am. I certainly can feel it–at 34. It feels very different indeed than 30, 31, 32. You’re always warned about these things, but assume somehow you’ll rise above it with ease when it comes.

Alas, it is not so easy to adjust so quickly. It’s a bit like puberty, really. You think you have life down and understand how to do it as a kid, and then bam–you’re a teen. You think you have your habits and self-care and goals and ways of fulfilling joy down, that know yourself so well when you’re 32, and then bam–things change.

This is what happens.

I write this all down this morning, at 6 AM, to remind myself to hold myself accountable–to take care of myself as I enter middle age. To not let my fear of this new unknown catapult me into storming away and avoiding the reality, but rather to guide myself back to myself. To see the patterns and play the games and wash the damn coolers with urine if that’s what they need.

I found this in my Mom’s things when she passed away after 20+ years of living with Alzheimer’s. Written in her handwriting, treasured and consulted for what appears to be many years before she became too sick to do things like write, which was about 15 years ago. I’ll share the other side another time; it is similar in theme, though a bit more uplifting in tone. Anyway…here are some words we can all hold dear on this topic of aging. “The weather will not change.” The existence of this ephemera is pretty heart-wrenching and also so cool, eh? What a woman.

A hui ho,

Julia