Bare Ruin'd Guarantees

My very close friend, Kimi, once told me that we are not born with any guarantees. I’ve decided that when it comes to good things happening in our lives, that is just so. But since those margarita days of college, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are guarantees after all.

Some things we already know will happen as we grow older—or at least we think we do. We know that older people lose some degree of hearing. This is nothing new. Back in 1588, people used wooden hearing aids made in the shape of animal ears (mule deer perhaps?); a hundred years later, people were using ear trumpets. With the noise and chatter of our world, even more of us are probably in trouble. One UK study suggested that 50% of us will require some kind of hearing aid. We also know that a good percentage of older folk lose some of their sense of smell, and with it the loss of taste (pass the pepper, please). Time takes its toll on eyesight: by forty most people need some form of refraction to see up close (I have little sympathy as I’ve worn glasses since I was 16) and extra lubrication for contact lenses. It also has a role in losing bone, which requires ever more elaborate schemes to save our teeth and keep our hips together.

These things we know, these things we can hope to avoid to some extent by taking the pharmacy of pills and procedures advertised on television, these things we can smugly put off worrying about until approaching the witching hour of 60, and these things we can joke about while in the midst of dealing with them. The devil is in the details, though, meaning that many things we don’t even know about are lurking out there with the almost certain assurance that we will meet with them at some point in our lives.

Take a colonoscopy, for example. This delightful procedure begins for most people at 50. In my case it started in my forties because I am high risk through family history and now repeats every few years. With each passing colonosocopy, the chances of finding something are climbing skyward. It’s the law of averages. Cataracts are another example. While people in their forties and fifties can get them, it’s after 60 that—as one study delicately puts it—cataracts start robbing vision. What the studies don’t say is that just as the intrusion on vision goes up, the possibility of side effects for older people goes up as well. They don’t tell you that. Then there are the things we all take pills for—the indigestion as stomach acid slips back past loosening muscles, the cholesterol levels that hint at the possibilities of stroke, and the thyroid replacement for the inevitable decline of the thyroid gland.

Some other, exciting things are sex-specific. As women age, they must deal with the decline of hormones. For a while, it seemed that hormone replacement was the fountain of youth but it turned out to cause more problems than it solved. Once through menopause, all sorts of fun little things happen including the run on the bathroom after a sneeze. Men have their own challenges with enlarging prostates that are guaranteed to happen after a certain age and with abdominal aortic aneurisms that are predictable between the ages of 60 and 80.

It’s not a comforting picture to understand that the beauty and health we all had as young people slips away in predictable stages. It makes the argument for us to enjoy every day in every way before we become, as Shakespeare puts it, “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” It also makes the case for the ability to laugh and a strong sense of the ridiculous.

Yes, Kimi, we are born with guarantees. Just not what we would like to have.