Words Fail
Perception is reality, they say, and most of us hold a perception of ourselves in our minds that is timeless. Aging starts out slow, its first signs internally the “aches and pains” we notice that simply weren’t a part of our lives before but now sometimes define them. For many, it’s their hair. Falling out. Receding. Turning gray.
Both of those crept up on me to signal middle age, along with shifts in the surface of my skin. Ever so subtle. Veins becoming obvious on the backs of my hands, the tops of my feet. Lines deepening on my face. Little dots that appear as if bug bites but never go away. A tremor in my hands that surfaces when I’m stressed, sometimes to the point of being unable to sign my name without holding my right hand down with my left. Having to ask hubby to repeat himself when what I hear is just a voice, not the content.
Beyond obvious systemic changes requiring doctor’s care, issues with my immune system giving me no choice but to pay outrageous amounts for medications to hold the wolves at bay, it’s these more subtle signs that have sunk in. They whisper, “you’re growing old.”
Which beats the alternative.
When I was a teenager, I wrote a horror story and shopped it around to the fiction magazines of that era. They didn’t bite. Occasionally I come across a copy of it I’d transcribed from typewritten to computer in the misty past. The gist of it had to do with being locked inside your own head and unable to communicate with the people around you. Your mind is fine, but you have absolutely no way of signaling it. They see a person in a coma and debate pulling the plug, within earshot. For those of you my age and older, I wrote this around the time of the debate over Karen Anne Quinlan.
Nearly fifty years after writing it, I faced that horror, from the outside looking in. Mom was dying. The doctors she trusted failed her. Had we but known before it was too late: cancer is insidious when unchecked. In hospice, she lapsed into unconsciousness. And then with a Herculean effort, family and friends crowded into the room, she opened her eyes and pleaded:
“I don’t have words!”
She had few after that. She wanted to express so much but her body was shutting down and wouldn’t let her. The very fear I expressed as a teen in the story I’d written had come to life.
Next year will mark a decade since Mom died. It’s hard to believe how time slipstreams past so quickly now. And as I age, I find myself grasping for words more often. As a lifelong wordsmith, a woman who feels vitally alive reading and writing, these occurrences terrify me. Everyone’s familiar with not having the right word on the tip of their tongue. But when that’s the role you defined for yourself, the wordsmith, it feels like failure. Intellectually, I know it’s just another signal of aging, mind and body not so adroit in connecting the dots.
But it doesn’t take away the underlying chill I feel when words fail me.
