Two musings in a row. That’s not something that happens too often these days. I guess I’m having to do some decompression or cleansing of the system or jetting out of the drains or whatever metaphor strikes your fancy and, as it’s my page and my writing, you all get to travel along with me if you so choose. Or you can scroll on by. Free will is still a thing. At least until the current administration shuts it down for being unpatriotic. I kid – they aren’t really going to come after anyone for their thoughts. But they seem to be dead serious about making sure we all understand that expressing our thoughts in certain ways is a good way to bring the full power of the US government down on individuals in sometimes a spectacularly cruel fashion – to demonstrate the consequences of not adhering to the party line in terms of history, science, culture, politics, economics, health, and dozens of other things where truth and fact are now regarded as so many political commodities and easily replaced.
Today I have been thinking about death. I last directed a musical in 2012 – 42nd Street for the Gardendale Arts Council – the budget was low but I was able to cajole a number of talented people into performing and on the artistic staff so the end result was actually pretty good. I had a number of high school and college age kids in the ensemble tapping up a storm. Two of them, Brandon and Angelicca, both died this week in their late 20s/early 30s. I can still see them as young people, grinning after a successful performance, not knowing or suspecting that their lives would be cut short not that many years later. This of course has got me thinking about other friends who died young – in traffic accidents, of suicide, murdered, of particulary nasty cancers. Because of theater, I tend to hang out with and have a lot of younger friends who should be outliving me and whenever one goes, I mourn the loss of the talent, and the light they brought to the world. Their creativity. Their humor.
I’m of an age now when my peer group are now all grandparents and starting to leave through the usual natural causes of aging organs or the cumulative effect of bad life choices. I’m well aware I’ll board the train myself one of these days. I’m not planning on it happening for a while but I am preparing for it. In my profession I’ve seen the thousand and one disasters that happen when there has been no preparation so I urge you, if you’re an aging adult, get that will updated, prepare an advance directive. Look around your living space and think about what needs to happen if you don’t have the ability to easily navigate stairs. Or if your memory isn’t quite what it once was. Or if you lose your ability to drive safely. I’ve thought through all of these possibilities for my life and have plans in place but most of us don’t because the inevitability of aging, debility and death remain the ultimate taboo in our society.
The first baby boomers turn 80 in just over four months. I refer to the 80s with my patients as the uncertain 80s. Most people – if they have had good fortune, good genes, good health care, and good choices, make it into their 80s relatively independent and unscathed. However, most people do not make it into their 90s in the same shape. The 80s is when most of our bodies and minds will fail. The policies being put into place by this administration are gutting health services for the aging. The current model of long term care/nursing home is going to become economically unsustainable very rapidly. As people on the lower 4/5 of the socioeconomic ladder age, given current trends, they’re likely to start plunging into poverty and ultimately homelessness which will lead to death. Their bodies won’t be able to hold up to those kinds of stresses.
But this seems to be ultimate goal of the current administration, a supplantation of our current reverence for life with a sort of necro-state designed to rapidly lower the population (other than those in the very top tier who don’t have to worry about a doubling of grocery or energy prices or a raising of rents out of reach of the younger generation). HHS is in the process of introducing rules to prevent the FDA from regulating the claims (and likely the ingredients) of patent medicines taking us back to the good old days of the 1890s when the American public poisoned itself at enormous rates. An inability to afford basic necessities will push more and more people onto the street where new laws against vagrancy will sweep them up into camps rife with disease (you didn’t really think all of these new camps would be reserved strictly for immigrants did you? They will be kept full with as many classes of undesirables as necessary to keep the contract money flowing). The federalization of law enforcement and the steps toward militarizing the national guard against the population of Democratic leaning cities does not bode well for anyone. We aren’t in a shooting civil war yet but the chess pieces are being moved into place. And then there’s Covid – with a recent pandemic that’s being erased from public consciousness for political reasons. It’s a virus that we still don’t completely understand and which likely will have significant long term effects on the population. But we’re highly unlikely to be allowed to study what they are as that would contradict the official narrative.
Put this all together and I see a couple of things coming. First, life expectancy in this country, already significantly lower than most other developed nations, is going to start moving down. The Boom and Generation X, who have aged seeing parent figures age successfully into their 80s and 90s are going to have difficulties matching this and are going to be livid that the quasi-immortality they have been promising themselves for decades will not be theirs for the taking. More and more young people, already being hammered by economic changes, student loans, and other such things that prevent them from maturing into such usual milestones as homeownership and parenthood, are going to be asked to help take care of aging family as there won’t be other options, adding further economic strains to family units.
While at times it’s lonely being responsible solely for myself in my aging state, I am thankful that I know enough about how all this works to prevent myself from being a significant burden as I complete my life cycle. But I’m not planning on closing that circle for a few years yet. I’ve got a few more things to do. Like finish all of Dickens’ novels – Read Little Dorrit last month. Four more to go.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 