Chapter 12 - Part Two.
"Stuff happens," Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of State said after he and other members of President George W. Bush's government had launched the disastrous invasion of Iraq. You can say the same thing about the human body as it ages: Stuff happens.
As you move into your late 60's, diseases stalk you. A short painful heart attack can end your days on earth really quickly. A massive stroke can shut off blood to your brain and you die. Ever active cancer cells eat away at your bones, your glands like your prostate or your breasts or your colon. At last weakened by the struggle to fend off cancer, your body gives up and you're gone.
Often long before life's end, diseases of old age ravage your body. Have you ever heard of shingles or 'herpes zoster' as biologists call it? This viral disease often attacks aging people who've had chicken pox when they were young. One man who was hit by this disease said after he got it, "I can only sleep for an hour-and-a-half at a time. My chest and back are inflamed and the pain is something else." He died a few years later.
Another man who's in his 70's, can barely speak. He's got Parkinson's disease,a disease that causes his muscles to freeze up and gives off tremours that shake his body from time to time. He can't speak too well and often slurs his speech when he talks. Linda Ronstadt has given up singing," someone told me recently. "She's got Parkinson's." Then there's other diseases like Alzheimers etcetra etcetra. The list of diseases in old age is endless.In a few years I will be gone, but probably not after passing through a painful exit to death.
As my father used to say quoting from the Bible, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." You can see death as the final injustice because you can't avoid it. Or you can see it as the great equalizer because everyone, rich middle class and the poor will all die.
Yet as I reflect on my coming death I look back and realize I've been incredibly lucky. I now believe that luck above all is the key to good fortune. Conside the following. If the British Air Force hadn't repelled the Nazi Air Force in the summer of 1940, my parents would both have died as German troops would have landed in Britain and conquered it. I would never have been born. "Never in the field of human history," intoned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, "have so many owed so much to so few." The Allies won World War Two. If they'd have lost it, I would have been gassed in a German concentration camp.
Though my parents overspent foolishly from their marriage in 1938 to 1950, my early relatively affluent childhood gave me a head start and even a lead on many of my contemporaries. My mother and father were in many ways responsible parents. Donald Winnicott the British psychiatrist said that the good mother was the greatest gift that civilization had. And my mother was a good mother. She sacrificed herself to her family. Also I spent my youth before the rise of heroin, cocaine and amphetemines. My youth was lived free of drugs.
At the same time so-called 'miracle drugs' like streptomycin, the polio vaccine and penicillin, that came onstream in my childhood and youth, spared from the scourges of many diseases like polio and tubercolosis.
Meanwhile during the 1950's to the 1990's, governments all across Canada created many social programs that saved my life. Private companies invested heavily and the Gross National Product often grew massively at a rate of 3 to 4 per cent a year. Jobs were plentiful. To-day the Canadian G.N.P. limps along at barely one per cent annually.
I now realize that adjusted for inflation I have probably cost the Canadian taxpayers over $900,000. "Anatomy is destiny," Sigmund Freud said. Yet this isn't true. "Geography is destiny. If I'd have been born and lived in any of the poor countries around the world, I'd have passed away years ago.
My life will soon end. The first part of my life was dogged by poverty, deaths and disability. The second half of my life, that is the last 37 years, have on the whole been very good. So ends the story of my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment