Member-only story
Savor Being a Person
It’s Temporary
The strangest thing has happened to me and I thought I should clue you in that it’s going to happen to you, too. In fact, it’s happening right now. Sure, you think you’re a person. And for now, yes, you are a person. After all, you go through your days being seen and treated as a person, but that’s not going to last.
To be clear, I still feel like a person.
Or at least I do most of the time. But then I get yanked back into reality and here’s the stark, hard, irrefutable reality. I’m no longer a person. I’m seeing it more and more in how people around me have changed the ways they treat me, the ways they react to me.
I am an old person.
That’s not the same as simply being a person who by dint of not having died yet is older. When I was 55 I was older. Now I’m just old. And this means that, among other things, my point of view is no longer particularly valid. Of course, being a woman means that it never was. Not really. But still, a woman is more or less understood to be a person. A 67 year old woman? Not so much.
Recently a new gynecologist was running down the list of questions asked of a new patient. She was looking at her clipboard and when she asked “Sexually active?” she immediately began to answer her own question. Before that “no” was more than a barely pronounced “n…”, I said yes. She glanced up quickly but suppressed any surprise even more quickly. A true pro but one who isn’t my doctor anymore.
As an old person I’m not expected to still be doing it. And the thought of us old people having at it can be unsettling for many a person.
Back when I was still a person, one of my earliest jobs out of high school was in housekeeping at a nursing home. Lonnie and Lacie lived on the sixth floor. They were married but had hospital beds at opposite ends of their shared room. It was the stuff of suppressed giggles and stern words from the charge nurse on that floor when Lonnie would have to be escorted out of Lacie’s bed. Again. Those stern words were for Lonnie, not the giggling nurse aides.
There is a long list of things old people are not expected to do anymore.
