Growing Old, Part 2

Growing older I have become more forgetful. This concerns me ... sometimes more deeply than other times. The specter of Alzheimer's disease clouds time's horizon.

When I forgot my appointment to get my last Lupron shot in my battle against Prostate cancer, I became depressed. Afterward it became a seemingly simple matter of calling the urology clinic and rescheduling. That is, intellectually it seemed simple. Emotionally it is impossible.

While I can think about doing it. I cannot bring myself to make the call. When I start to make the call, there is an emotional reaction that I think of as similar to trying to get two magnets of the same polarity to touch. There's a lot of resistance there. I feel the same depression that I first felt when I realized I had missed the appointment. As time goes by the reaction gets stronger, not weaker, whenever I think I should actually try to resolve it. I cannot go there.

I have resorted to tentatively talking around the issue with anyone I can get to listen to me. Kind of using it as an example of what my representative sample of a Senior Citizen (a singular sample) is thinking about. Even now I sense that if I directly asked for help, my personality would collapse into a puddle of mush. I can feel the heat of the emotion in having typed that sentence, revealing something that I have been taught is a weakness. I should not have to ask for help.

Even if it means I might die without it.

I am trapped in a mental prison, a maze, constructed in my childhood from which I am still struggling to escape. What is even worse, is that I am not aware of all its walls, not even the ones closest to me.

I know it is worth the effort to be free of it, rather than resign myself to its restrictions in order to be safe. I have escaped parts of my prison.

In the meantime I grow old.