The early stages of aging are almost invisible. Over time, the incremental changes in my memory, appetite and motor skills grew in intensity, and finally, I felt the jolting impact of growing old. Two strange things happened to me recently that gave me a deeper understanding of aging
One year ago, after my 83rd birthday, I was discussing impactful Black women with my eldest daughter, Narissa. During the conversation I was shocked I could not recall the names of Stacey Abrams or bell hooks.* Both women are well known—Stacey in politics and bell hooks* in academia and literature. Not being able to access the right words had happened to me before, but never with such well-known figures. I am grateful to Google as an accommodation for temporary memory loss. I have become an expert at googling descriptions of people to identify their names or places I have visited. It was easy to locate Stacey Abrams’ name by googling “Who was the Black woman who ran for governor of Georgia?” To find the name of bell hooks, I googled “Who was the Black feminist writer at Berea College?” Thank goodness I knew more about these women than their names.
The second occurrence was a couple of months later. I woke up from an unplanned nap sitting on my sofa when I saw a strange man resting in a chair. I did not know where I was and did not recognize the man. I kept staring at the side of his face. My mind was playing tricks on me. I thought for a moment the stranger was my son.
I cried out, “JAY!!!.”
The television volume was too loud for the man to hear me. I wondered how he had gotten into my condo. As I observed the side of the man’s face, I realized he was not my son. The man’s skin was slack at the jawline. He was too old to be Jay.
Panicked, I screamed as loud as I could, “NARISSA!!!”
I must have frightened my daughter because she burst through the door from her bedroom with dread in her voice. “What’s wrong?”
The moment I saw Narissa standing in the doorway, my surroundings became familiar, and I recognized the strange man as my 93-year-old first cousin, Sam, who was visiting me for the day. He could not hear well and was unaffected by the commotion.
I have been coping with the impact of aging for nearly 20 years. The first sign of deterioration in my joints occurred when I was sixty-five and experienced severe shoulder pain. I was returning from a trip to Washington, D.C. As I was placing my small carry-on luggage in the overhead storage on the American Airlines flight, my right shoulder locked, and as I tried to move it over my head, excruciating pain traveled down my arm. I became embarrassed because I nearly dropped the luggage. A nice-looking man in the row behind me saw my distress and rushed to place my bag in the overhead compartment.
I thought about this unexpected pain on the flight back to Champaign, Illinois, where I served as President of Parkland College. My contract included an executive physical each year. I had chosen the Mayo Clinic’s Executive Health Program in Rochester, Minnesota. During my next scheduled visit to Mayo Clinic I requested an examination of my shoulders. The results indicated the early stages of arthritis in both shoulders. I dealt with this news as I have with every problem I’ve faced in my life—How do I fix it? I began physical therapy to reduce the pain with moderate success.
After I retired from Parkland one year later, in 2006, the intensity of the pain in my shoulders increased exponentially. I could no longer hit a golf ball, a sport I had begun to learn and love a few years earlier. In some way, it reminded me of being a small child on our family farm. I thought golf would be a good retirement sport. I was disappointed that my shoulder pain prevented me from playing. I had even attended a golf clinic and hired a patient coach. I had not had time to play during the week or on weekends because of my work schedule. Golf takes up a lot of valuable time. I thought I would have time when I retired. Now I had to let that vision go. I knew I would have to make a new plan.
For me, and how I have lived my life, I knew my retirement would require planning, because retirement can be treacherous. One man, a personal friend, hung himself after retirement. Another woman, who had retired and attempted to go back to her previous position at the same college, drove into a semi-truck in what some of us who knew her suspected to be a suicide. We can never know all the reasons that go into making this horrific choice. We cannot know if retirement, or even if work played a part.
I only knew that after having an exciting and fulfilling career in educational leadership positions for nearly 40 years - 10 years as an administrator and nearly 30 as a Community College President and Chancellor, working a minimum of 14 hour days and most weekends, and handling challenges large and small, I would need something to fill the void.
Part 2 will be continued on Tuesday, February 27.
*bell hooks did not capitalize her name. Google it.