Remember O Most Gracious Virgin Mary

Old age is sad.  Actually, it’s devastating.  Perhaps, not as devastating to experience as to witness.  Witnessing it is horrifying to me.  I think it horrifies me so because it’s visual proof that life is going to end….

Seeing an old man, chained to his respirator, shuffling into a restaurant with his aged wife, is to me a davastating, but wonderful site. 
Devastating, because I SEE this old crumpled man, but he, HE doesn’t see this old man.  He’s still living in his 20’s.  The age he met the woman he’s with. 
Wonderful, because he’s with his wife.  Proof that there are men who seek that one girl.  Wonderful because he still can make her laugh. 

It frightens me because the body decays but the spirit only grows.  The spirit, stops never. 

nursing homes. Don’t do em. Nope. Did them once for my gma. Never again…  I see these old creatures, shuffling, some delirious, some staring not moving.  I see them, their memories.  The days they took for granted.  Those boring days.  Those nothing days.  They’ll tell you about them.  If you sit, these old people whom you could never believe to have once been handsome or pretty, will talk to you and tell them any and every memory that struggles to mind. 
Why does this make me so very sad?

I don’t know what upsets me, why, how…no idea.  
But even now, movies. Movies that centralize old people’s character upset me as much or even more than your typical ‘tear-jerker’ movie.  There’s something about an old person who has lived their life, struggled, loved, succeeded, failed, lost, that hits me more than most other things. 
Maybe perhaps it’s a fear that I will end up alone and unhappy…as some old people seem.  Or perhaps it is that my body is going to decay and i’m going to be stuck with it when it doesn’t work any more, but my mind, as vivid as ever (or that may go too, you never know).   I don’t want to be put in a ‘home’.   I want to die young.  It’s a very selfish thought, yes.  That is very selfish.  But, I bet everyone thinks this way or has had this thought….no one wants to be old and lonely.  No one wants to see every one of thier loved ones go before them. No one does.

 

But i’ll tell you what, when people reach a certain age, say 65-70? I dunno, 75?  They SHOULD be made to retake the driver’s license test.  Cause old people and cars…..do NOT mix at all.  The end.