Thank God for Denial

As I contemplate aging, and I can have no doubt that it is happening to me since I am to endure my another birthday in another week, I have been thrust into reflections on aging. Let me be candid: My favorite posture in the face of the clock’s tortuous inevitable measure of the unseen yardstick of allotted time is denial, that is, it’s not happening to me. It (aging) might be happening to others, even persons I thought were relatively immune, but it’s not happening to me, and well, if it is, it’s only temporary, and reversible. The gray hair here or there or the wrinkle that deepens its etch, the periods of fatigue or lack of buoyant energy, are merely the correlates of that god awful scourge of this otherwise, in-control exemplar of yupdom, STRESS.

STRESS does it, it ages, and stress, so they say, is controllable. So when stressed which is about 75 percent of the time, I do the right things: I drink a glass of wine, rent a video, and eat comfort food.

Comfort food for me is usually anything high fat on a cracker. Cheddar cheese or preferably peanut butter are my favorites, but I draw the line and no longer imbibe my former delights, English Cheshire and Stilton. The thought of dying of Mad Cow Disease when I am already at clear risk for Alzheimer’s is sobering even in the face of STRESS.

At times I have wondered if life, itself, is just stress, and the moments of no stress are just those moments when, for whatever reason, you have some reprieve, for example, when you sleep.

As aging affronts me –not that I am aging– my posture of denial is slowly giving way to reflective appraisal of statistical inequity –what some folks might construe as reality, although I deny that too. According to my-medium-to-the-universe The New York Times, American men have an expected life span of 73 years and American women, 79 years. Frankly, I’d never felt much about that until now, but as I do some basic math and subtract my age from the average age of death for males, I calculate 15 years, and when I do the same for average age of death for females, I get 21 years. My finding is that the average male’s life span at my age, is 70% the average female’s. And it gets worse, in just 7 years when the average male is age 65, his life span is 55% of the average female’s, and in another 5 years, only a third of her life span. Even more graphically at 70 years old, the average female lives 300% more than the average male. No wonder the women are smiling.

However, I am told that aging is a moving target, and as men actually survive to get older, the gap closes, so perhaps there’s a reason why men might smile too.

When I was born, I thought 15 years was a long time. Now as I have grown somewhat more mature in judgment, 15 years seems the usual length of time I took to obsess about my then current identity, and retrospectively, I find I only changed preoccupation because the world had changed, and the conditions of life or social values had shifted in spite of myself. Fifteen years has been barely the length of time to notice that fifteen years elapsed.

Even though I know aging is something that happens to others, I cannot but help in spite of myself to identify myself with those damned statistics. I almost found myself using the first person when discussing the average life expectancy of the average male. How easily our defenses fade, and our fears wrest hold of us, unless we are ever vigilant.