The Me Generation and Body Breakdown

Leah McLaren points out in a recent Globe & Mail piece that: “boomers have a tendency to act like they were the first generation to experience life on Earth”.  As a consequence we are both amazed and in denial at how badly our bodies are holding up. Every generation before assumed infirmity, indeed was grateful to live long enough to get it. In contrast we don’t, and aren’t.

I can’t quite recall when I was first appalled to discover I might be a ‘senior’! 
Not when turning 60 for sure, since about that time I had a hip resurfacing. That took me back from a guy for whom jaywalking was truly perilous to one again searching out trail markers for hikes through rough bush. Perhaps it was at around age 65 when I missed out on a wonderful snowy winter by moping at home until I could get an appointment to have a stiff knee flushed out and pumped full of hylan.

So it was wonderful yesterday to have a visiting natural gas technician opine that “you don’t look to be in your Sixties”, so ensuring he’s got my business for as long as I know what gas is. The body wastage that comes with enough time has fortuitously returned me to a facsimile of my lanky youthful self. That, and my related ability to clothes shop at H&M, probably had him fooled. I’m not fooled though, as I have a mirror to look in each morning. I know I’m falling apart...and I hate it. I hate the tray of pills that must be taken with every breakfast. I hate the dead-of-night visits to the can and the every-morning stiffness that makes sprinting out of bed into a fine day a thing of fading memory.

I sometimes have a vague feeling that I should be more accepting, and at the same time wonder why.