My body knew before the news told us.
Late Sunday night, I felt dizzy and listed to the left when I got up to use the bathroom. It happened a second time, a little worse. In the morning, before yoga, when I bent down to dry my hair, I felt really dizzy.
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Okay, here’s yet another post involving aging, what’s mostly on my mind these days…
I’m not sure quite when the discussions with our son about the need for a first-floor bedroom began. We’d bought this 1756 farmhouse twenty-six years ago, overlooking the stairs that were easily as steep as a ladder, lost in a blur of ardent love for this old house.
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Even my fifteen-year-old Saab is in better shape than I seem to be these days. It only needs a visit to the repair shop once a year, when lately I seem to be constantly in need of one.
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When we were in Switzerland having a lovely ski-mountain lunch with our son and his wife right before the pandemic, I overheard one of their friends refer to “Matthew’s elderly parents” who were here for a visit.
I was 76.
Elderly? Me?
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It happened a few weeks ago. Okay, I look the same as I did the last day I was seventy-nine, but I don’t feel the same.
Not at all.
It’s big and sobering moment, the awakening that birthday morning. The seventies were good to me, one of the best decades of my life, actually. I felt fit and energetic, published four books and a number of poems, some of which received awards, and was lucky enough to get many fellowships to residencies that gave me precious time to write and reflect.
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