JULY 23, TUESDAY

OLD AGE AND CHOICES

For the next ten days or so I have been caught in thinking about a huge choice for me, selling my house because it is too big for me and then deciding how to dispose of everything that is in the house so that when I die my children won’t have to decide what to do with my stuff. So for the next few days I will wonder about the implications of being old in America.

First of all, old age and particularly the death of a spouse is something that I, and I am guessing most people, simply don’t or won’t think about. You marry, go to work, have kids, raise the kids, the kids leave home, you retire, you are suddenly free to do things you have dreamed about doing. It is a little like happily ever after, which promises eternal unspecific bliss, not the hard work of jobs and parenting. But finally I got to the point of letting go and enjoying my time as husband and wife, entwined together, dreaming of our golden future. Until Kathe died. I wasn’t ready for that. One moment you are sitting in the living room together watching TV and the next you are all by yourself and afraid of the dark.

I certainly was not prepared for the death of Kathe, I wasn’t prepared for a memorial service and then the emptiness afterward. I had refused to even consider the possibility of her dying.

But then I discovered that there are all kinds of choices you suddenly have to make in old age. How do you spend your time, how do you deal with advancing health threats, how do you handle having your children suggest what is best for you to do, how do you keep the car keys from being taken away from you.

In my case I handled being alone by constantly traveling and having adventures and when I was at home I was very, very lucky to have my two children living nearby.

I knew that sometime I would have to decide about the house that Kathe and I lived so happily in and what to do with the things that we enjoyed collecting.

For three years I traveled and when I was home I lived in one corner of the house at the dining table, slept in another corner on a recliner and used one of two toilets and heated simple meals in the kitchen. I didn’t touch the rest of the house. If Kathe had suddenly walked in the door she would have seen no sign that she had ever left, everything was the same as on the day she died.

But after three years, with some prodding from my children, I could see that the house was too big for me and filled with stuff that I never looked at or used. It was time to do something.