What I Dread About Growing Older

I am afraid of getting old.

Not dying, that will come and does not scare me

as much as what arrives before it,

my body failing while I still need it,

forgetting names of people I have loved,

becoming someone I would not have chosen.

*

Already I can see it starting.

My knees complain on stairs.

I read a page and cannot tell you

what I read. Sometimes a word

I've known since childhood hides from me

and will not come when called.

*

This is not metaphor. I mean

my actual knees, my actual memory.

I mean I am watching myself decline

in small ways now that promise

larger failures later on.

*

What frightens me is not

some abstract loss of youth or vigor,

I never had much vigor anyway,

but concrete things, not driving anymore,

needing help to bathe, to dress,

asking my children questions

I have asked before, today,

an hour ago, and seeing

pity in their faces.

*

Or worse, seeing nothing

because I have forgotten who they are.

*

My father died still knowing me.

I held his shoulder while he went.

But I have watched others go differently,

confusion first, and then that blankness

where recognition used to live.

*

I do not want to be that person.

I want to die with my mind whole.

I want to know where I am,

who sits beside me, why I'm dying.

I want agency until I don't have it anymore,

and then I want it over quickly.

*

But wanting doesn't matter much.

Age comes whether you consent or not,

and brings exactly what it brings.

You do not get to choose your exit

any more than you chose how you arrived.

*

So I am afraid. Specifically afraid.

Of weakness, of forgetting, of depending

on strangers for my basic needs.

Of living past my usefulness.

Of being kept alive by medicine

when I would rather not be.

*

This fear is reasonable. It is not

morbid or excessive. It is looking

straight at what will probably occur

and saying, I don't want that.

*

But I will get it anyway,

or something equally unwelcome,

or if I'm lucky nothing,

a sudden stopping while everything

still works well enough.

*

That's all I'm hoping for now.

Not immortality. Not even

many more good years.

Just, let me keep my mind.

Let me know myself until I can't.

Then let me go.