OLD AGE AS A RISK FACTOR [M, 1-8-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—OLD AGE AS A RISK FACTOR [M, 1-8-24]

 

A friend my age recently had to go on insulin. Her diabetes is beyond the control of diet and exercise and even Metformin, the oral med for diabetics.

I’m diabetic, too, although my doc says it is “…well controlled by medicine and exercise.” She thinks the control is primarily through medicine. I think it’s because I walk two miles a day.

I was first diagnosed as diabetic twenty years ago. I think my doc then just liked to diagnose people with one disease or another so that he could prescribe medicine. He had a PhD in biochemistry as well as an MD degree. He never met a medicine he didn’t like. So he said I was diabetic and prescribed Actos and made me stick myself each day to test the level of my blood sugar.

At first, I enjoyed being diabetic. It gave me an identity to replace cancer survivor.

Cancer survivor had been my identity for twenty years. I went to cancer support groups. I spoke at cancer conferences. I wrote books and articles about being a cancer survivor. You can be a cancer survivor forever, but you can’t talk about it forever, so I needed a new identity.

So, I liked having my little blood monitor and all that stuff. I got to learn a new vocabulary and go to a new support group. It helped to center my day. I got to make jokes about eating nothing but cardboard and saw dust.

But the doc at my next town said I wasn’t really diabetic. That was Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Shivering is even better exercise than walking. He took me off Actos. He was a hockey player and so thought people should suffer without meds or complaints. That worked for several years. Not the “without complaint” part. It was also good, since they found out that Actos causes bladder cancer.

So when my current doc, ten years later, said I needed to go on Metformin, since I was no longer shivering at the Iron Mountain rate, I said, “I don’t need to, because I can control anything with diet and exercise.” No, she said, because you are old. No amount of shivering or walking or laying off cookies will work now, because old age is itself a risk factor.

When did that happen? I mean, diseases are the result of bad diets and no exercise and anxiety and genetics and stuff, aren’t they? Old age? Just in itself? That’s not fair!

Well, it’s not all bad. Because of the old age risk factor, we oldies are first in line for vaccines. And first in line at potlucks. People will even bring a plate of stuff to you if you look pathetic enough.

Then I started thinking about life beyond the control of diet and exercise and attitude. What are the spiritual risk factors that come to us just because we are old?

There are probably several, but the one that comes to my mind first is losing hope. I don’t mean a halt to wishing, like losing “hope” for a particular type of afterlife, where we get to see our friends or dogs of times gone. I mean losing hope in God, losing the assurance of God’s presence, and God’s care. There is so much evidence for the absence of God, for the simple unreality of God, at least of a God of love. And we no longer have youthful energy to face the abyss. We don’t have diet and exercise to spend on this kind of risk factor. Nor do we have a cornucopia of days for starting over on hope. We may forget that we are a soul that has a body instead of a body that has a soul.

Is there a medicine for the spiritual risks of old age? I think so… Prayer, yes. But more than that, people. Other souls.

My hearing is as good as ever, but I have noticed that people mumble so much more than they used to. Some people, like my doctor, think the mumbling will stop if I get hearing aids. I told her I would not get hearing aids, because they are too much bother. She looked me straight in the eye, which is amazing since she is a foot shorter, and said, “I’m used to your resistance to anything I think will help you. You don’t want medicines. You don’t want tests. But you’ve got to promise me that if you get to the point that you can’t understand people, you’ll get hearing aids, because you can’t live without people.”

I said, “Huh?”

John Robert McFarland