Not a Pretty Picture

The Huffington Post last week ran one of its pieces ... "The 14 Most Common Health

Concerns for Seniors."

It listed: 

            Heart Disease, Arthritis, Respiratory Diseases, Alzheimer’s Disease, Osteoporosis, Diabetes, 

            Influenza and Pneumonia, Falls and Other Injuries, Substance Abuse, Obesity, Depression, 

            Oral Health and Poverty.

Not a pretty picture to think of a demented, coughing and wheezing, fat old person with a dull look on their face being wheeled toward the exit door of a Nursing Home by someone paid $10 an hour with preciously little training in Geriatrics on their way out for their tri-weekly excursion to some McDonald's of Dialysis Centers. 

I actually prefer that image that I mentioned in a previous posting when I suggested that little kids making snow angels on their backs are doing their best to channel Grandpa ... the Grandpa who spent his last hours convulsing on his back in the snow, clutching his snow-shovel, just after having his last and final Heart Attack!

I called this Blog "Playing in the Last Quarter" with the intention of highlighting the paradox of being roughly 60-80 years old .... namely that, perhaps -- just perhaps ... older folk can still PLAY in spite of the recognition that the CLOCK IS TICKING. Many of these postings have dealt with my sense that there are two major emotions: SADNESS and GLEE ... and that both can live side by side and almost in support of each other in the WELL-LIVED LIFE.

Among those 14 apocalyptic horsemen that chase us in the Last Quarter, some are programmed in by genetics. I wear the ties of my brother-in-law who died about thirteen years ago from sudden cardiac arrest. I wear the ties to remember a very talented and nice person. He exercized and was trim. He painted in the Primitive American Art-style, though he earned his living otherwise. He died at 63, as did his brother, father and one uncle, as I recall. 

We have no control over either our genetics or our biology. Some things, apparently, are "Written in the Stars." 

And, still, I have no reasonable druthers but to believe that a goodly percentage of the variability in how we Older Folk live out our years (in Statistics, they measure such %'s and call them r-squared)is dependent on how seriously we play and how seriously we accept our role as stewards to our bodies.

Me? I'd prefer not to end up in that fat old demented wheezer in the wheel-chair blaming my partners (biology and genetics) for doing me in! Maybe readers to this Blog -- while drinking their Green Juice -- can petition the Huff Post to write about "The 14 Most Pleasurable Ways to Play in the Last Quarter, while Working towards a Grand Old Overtime."