Bearers of A Better Age

I finally slipped it on the proper finger, and of course it fit perfectly.-- Michael Grant

By the time we reach a certain age, stories of our mortal arcs become routine: you read one book about a wife watching the husband she lost to cancer lose his hair to chemotherapy, and the only difference a surgeon like Atu Gawande interjects, aside from sub-continent extraction, is the reminder that physicians are just as fallible as the patients they're killing. In this sense, Bill Lyon's arc of decline is something a half century of hearing it may buck. Alzheimer's is not Joanne Woodward's made for television movie. It is my mother's father yelling at me "You have to drive the van!" translating into you have to get ready for Paratransit.

But my grandfather was basically dead that evening. His son, Louis, my godfather, would have been better off shooting his dad in the backyard the day after the holiday. I emailed Mr. Lyon about this yesterday, telling him I couldn't comfort him and hoped it went easier on him than my grandfather. We can take his clinical shrinking and superimpose it into the loss of what being a newspaper man means. It means you searched for Lyon's columns, it means that he represented the working class voice of Philadelphia to a fine standard of excellence, and his example represents what I also reasonably hoped for.

What would you say? That I should have recognized I couldn't handle the severity of my emotional pain, much like my former clients, without committing myself to a lifelong psychiatric battle? I need not remind you, even when I was Jerry's student, being denied her father figure copulation, I had university counselors trying to ease my morbidity by telling me it was "an existential funk". I was younger, more resilient, still able to repress the humiliation which had not yet reached the toxicity of North Philadelphia. The disability center, as it exists today, doesn't know which voice mail to transfer me to, and the fact that Erik's day guy makes me feel unsafe isn't a joke. I have no where else to go, the more functional seniors at Riverside never wanted me here. I never wanted to live here in the first place. Just because Chris isn't going to kill me, I should not be subjected to his belligerent, hostile behavior.

Ideology, too, goes flatline at this point.