Life

According to the dictionary life is the animate existence or period of animate existence of an individual.  Put that way -- once you are no longer animate you are not alive -- seems scary and enlightening at the same time.  I am older but alive.

Age is encroaching -- something one never thinks will happen.  I am getting those wrinkles on my chest I used to see on older women.  My face looks older, but when I imagine myself I remember the way I looked when I was younger.  One's children get older, move away, go away, -- one way or another they are...away.  My oldest son, whom my world revolved around, is somewhat estranged from me.  No he is estranged, but he is nineteen -- does that count?  I think about death more now.  My death the deaths of my loved ones.  I fear dying alone, again something I never thought about before.  Perhaps being an Rn has focused much of my attention on the latter encroachment-of-age issue.  I see so many many older people discarded in the hospital and alone.  They have children because the tell me they do -- but they never visit.  I would rather be quartered and hung, no, fall from a plane, than to be in the hospital in my old age...alone.  I never thought about these things before, but my skin is changing.  My sleep habits are changing.  Age is encroaching, but I am still alive.

I look at anti-age creams now.  A year ago I did not.  I even think about extreme anti-aging measures like face lifts like which one is best and is 44 to early?  And of course botox or maybe dermabrasion.  Can I get botox injections into those permanent wrinkles in my chest?  At the end of the day, once gravity has finally kicked in, the wrinkles on my chest disappear but only because the weight of the aging skin below the chest pulls everything above taut.  I also have gray hair.  At first it was one or two but now there are so many new recruits.  I used to tweeze them out but then they came back kind of wiry.  Now I cut them off at the base but there are just too many.  I guess I should find solace in the fact I am still animate.  Alive.  And I do, I just wish I were the younger looking version of me without the more animated features of chest wrinkles, gray hair, spongy dry skin (yes, there is such a thing).  It is so hard to see oneself grow older.  Even harder to see your parents grow older.  It is the circle of life.  That's life.  The facts of life.  Life is what we make it.  Life is a canvas.  Life is full of ups and downs.  Yes, life, a very animated life with wrinkles is the much preferred alternative to the inanimate with or without wrinkles.  Although I prefer without wrinkles.