Aging

I had my transplant followup this week. My surgeon is an oriental woman who is about 5 feet tall and weighs perhaps 95 pounds. I am an obese white man, just over 6 foot tall and 265 pounds. It is quite literally possible that my one leg weighs more than my entire surgeon. She was gentler with me this time than the last time I saw her. Then she was primly critical of my weight. This time she was at least resignedly acquiescent.  Both of us have aged, albeit differently. She shows gray in her hair (?how much dye I wonder), and has loss of skin turgor in her hands and muscle definition in her frame. I have gained weight and gone gray-white, but with nary a wrinkle or loss of muscle mass.

I have long said we only age three ways. We wither, bloat or fade. We can all think of stars who have aged in each way. Robert Redford, that human raisin, has withered. Paul Newman faded to almost paper white. John Travolta has bloated. Shelley Winters bloated, Jessica Tandy withered. There is an obvious activity association to how we age. Outdoor activites and smoking tend to produce withering. There is equally plainly a genetic component as well. Fair haired people fade so much more than the dark skinned and dark haired.

Society tends to reward the faders most, since their aging can be most easily corrected by cosmetics, dye and plastic surgery, while being most critical of bloaters. No one said Paul Newman aged badly, but Travolta is routinely on the list of stars who have aged horribly. We tend to ignore withering, even when obviously self-inflicted, sometimes saying they are ‘rugged’, or other euphemisms. Allowing for genetics, however, bloating is also a self-inflicted wound, aging by mouth as it were. It is really only fading that is given a pass.

I am horribly ashamed of my weight and appearance. I look like a barrel now, an analogy my mother used for her own aging, and whose family my body type most resembles. I have buzzed off my thinning hair because I thought it looked ridiculous. I am more comfortable with being ugly than foolish. I am shamed by my wife’s willingness to love me as I am, to paraphrase the Elephant Man, a character with whom I have always sympathized. My failures in weight loss are multiple and all the more embarrassing because I know exactly what to do and don’t do it. It is a failure of will, of temperament. I have succeeded at every task to which I have ever set myself. My weight is not simply a measure of aging but an indictment of character.

I am utterly astonished by the many people who tell me I am not obese (my BMI is 36), and the smaller number who think I am attractive, sexy or aging well. One patient, withered at 52 by her smoking, told me I would understand aging when I reached 50. I told her I was 57 years old. There was a pause, and then she said ‘that’s not fair’. I appreciate the implied compliment, but she doesn’t have to look in the mirror after a shower. I do.

There are compensations and other perspectives, however. My character weakness has also been experienced as much pleasure- good food, happy moments. I can’t help but believe I laugh and play much more than my slender, slowly withering surgeon. And I am alive to receive her condescension, alive to bake on Saturday mornings, to see my children, to ride my bicycle, play drums.

As Keynes observed, in the long run we are all dead. I have always run hot, emotionally and physically. I rage, laugh, cry, eat, and love too much and too often. To paraphrase Colline in La Boheme, each of us has our way. This is mine. If there is a judgment, a final reckoning of some sort, I have little doubt I will be condemned for my sins, but I will own every one of them, and will not deny anything I have done. After all, I wear so many of them.

Ted