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How will I let my caregivers know who I am?
We have come to fear frailty more than death. We imagine being "put" in a nursing home, like a jar on a lonely shelf. Will a parade of paid strangers take care of me someday? Such images have become the focal point ofour fear. Frailty coupled with abandonment has become our most dire existential dread.
Not everyone has a partner whose life would pause for an illness and for whom no other priority would compete. An otherwise loving son or daughter may be caught up in the flurry of raising a family and earning a living. Friends may be preoccupied with their own troubles and endeavors. Anyone can end up living at the mercy of strangers, having to count on kindness or ache from its absence.
Ordinary life activities, distracting and hurried as they are, tend to obscure this truth. Beneath our many doings, time and damage accrue, but we avert our eyes. Asking ourselves, Who would take care of me if I got sick? seems to threaten our other aims. We prefer to push such questions aside.
But pushing aside what we fear only adds force to it. Aikido, the Japanese martial art, teaches us to go with the force that threatens us, rather than oppose it. Without resistance, there can be no collision. Instead, there is fluid motion, more like rushing water than the intransigence of stone. Going with the question of our eventual frailty causes a cascade of meanings.
AT THE MERCY OF STRANGERS
Disability obscures individuality like a mask. When a doctor speaks to the person pushing a wheelchair rather than to its occupant, utter negation occurs. "How is she feeling today?" The one who has been negated can always shout, "I am fine, doctor," thereby declaring her continued status as a person, but the harm has already been done. To be overlooked, to be discounted even for a moment, wounds even after apologies have been extracted or hasty recognition has been won. To have to fight to be seen -that is what causes the damage.
The end of my sours dominion will surely arrive on the day that I find myself lined up in a hallway in a row...