10 Hardest Things About Being A 90-Something Woman
1. All your friends are dead. There’s not even anyone left to discuss the most recent passing with, because that person was your last friend. And now they’re dead. And that’s sad.
2. There is only regret. Not even a holiday to look forward to, because you’re so feeble in mind and body that anything upcoming is a chore and each memory falls short of warming your thinning mass. Your heart conserves energy by pumping only blood, leaving the love to pool in your legs, where it is useless.
3. You can’t stay awake during Maury. And that’s all you want to see. The bickering reminds you of when you had a beau. Now you can only reproach yourself for not bickering enough, it may have kept him awake during those final diabetic hours.
4. Imagining sex is impossible. First went the sex. Then the self-pleasuring. Now, when you attempt to envisage copulation, you’re cooch yawns and you begin convulsing in your wheelchair. When you come to, you’re in the hospital, your least favorite son says it was a close one, and he rescinds his dinner offer the second the doc suggests keeping you for observation, because god forbid you stay in his home, where his children sleep, where you might corrupt the home’s youthfulness with your crumbling complexion. You can’t even put you’re make-up on straight. You look like a clown.
5. Nobody looks at you anymore.
6. Your breathing apparatus is trying to kill you. It was late, and you swore that, in the peaks of its artificial, whispered moans, the machine uttered the words die and whore. But that’s crazy, you’ve never feared inanimate objects, so the audible curse must have derived from your own lungs, and formed at your own lips, unless the happening was purely psychosomatic. In which case you’re misremembering, but in either case you’re suicidal. But you’re not that kind of gal, so it must have been the techno-parasite giving you your life, while asking for consent to relinquish it.
7. The grandkids no longer humor your embedded racism. No slack is cut, even though each breath you take should be cherished. You know you’re wrong, but there’s no time to change, when learning something new means forfeiting something remembered. They told you chinaman is inappropriate, and now you forget if you were an orphan.
8. You can’t go to the beach. Because no one is willing to carry you through the sand. Not even Jesus. Jesus take the wheelchair. Jesus come back here. Jesus! You little trickster.
9. Nobody gets you. Because nobody wants to. You’re a reminder of mortality, especially in the way that you sneeze. You’re just that elderly woman who fainted in the Macy’s, who shouldn’t have been shopping on your own. Your sense is called into question, but what were you supposed to do? Not pick out a shirt for your Great Grandson’s 8th birthday, that he would return for a handful of loose legos and a gourmet lollypop? But it was so cute.
10. Your family loves you. And your only remaining ability is to disappoint them.