Most seniors suffer from multiple medical diagnoses. I am currently endowed with at least three different diagnoses, each with a different physician specialist. I am not alone in this “co-morbid” state. According to NCOA research, 94.9% percent of adults age 60 and older have at least one condition, while 78.7% have two or more.1
Each new disease diagnosis complicates the care of the diseases already diagnosed and the life of the individual experiencing them. Juggling appointments, record-keeping and transportation stretches my organizational systems. Although I try to avoid more than 2 medical appointments in a week, there are times when I have two in one day. I feel like I’m spending my days playing the kid’s game, Whak-a-Mole.
The best-selling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, by Suleika Jaouad, describes life on the fault line between the kingdoms of health and illness. After years of hospitalization and destructive treatment for acute myeloid leukemia, this young author is suddenly pronounced “well.” During all of that time in the kingdom of illness, she has forgotten how to live in the healthy kingdom. As she puts it, “I began to think about how porous the border is between the sick and the well… As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between. These are the terms of our existence. The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach. To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.”
Long ago, I let go of any thoughts of perfect wellness. Aging, with its co-morbidities and games of whak-a-mole, is often life in the realm of the sick, with good days and bad days interspersed with the gradual loss of cognitive ability and mobility. As Jaouad says, acceptance of whatever body and mind we have is essential to avoid the dissatisfaction and anger that aging can cause in those pursuing “forever young.”
However, acceptance alone can lead to passivity and despair: anticipating the next diagnosis, declining to make plans because your body may suddenly find a new way of disrupting your life. We can begin to lose joy, living only to anticipate or survive pain and illness.
The absolutely wonderful thing about being old is that we’ve been here before. Somewhere in the past of all seniors there was a breakup, a betrayal, the death of a beloved friend which led to despair, grief and loneliness. Our experiences have taught us that life goes on. We will keep going, one step in front of the other, one day at a time, ultimately achieving some acceptance of the new situation. Over time, we have found new joys: a new hobby, new friends, new challenges. Over and over, we have accepted a changed situation and then adapted to it. I recall a conversation between two elderly residents in our senior community. The younger of the two believed that everyone needed a stated purpose and asked about the life purpose of her 100-year old companion. The response was a confident “I get up every morning and look forward to the singing birds, and to playing my music. Those are my joys.”
For those of us with a relatively short remaining lifespan, combining acceptance with adaptability provides a roadmap for the future. Of course we cannot expect our sources of joy to be the same as they once were: by the time we are 80, we have let go of much of what brought us joy 40 years ago. Identifying and cultivating new, accessible joys is a purpose worth living for, and manifests the acceptance of our existence in the “Kingdom of the sick” where many of us reside so much of the time.
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So true. Thanks, Betty.
As someone who often has two medical appointments a day, I agree with you that, at our ages, we’ve learned how to cope with hardships and now we’re learning how to find joy in small things.