Tim Barrus: The New York Times: Growing Old in America
Poverty is a cycle. It comes. It goes. It eats its young. It decimates its old. It is not unlike the people who inhabit it.
Tara Parker-Pope’s statement in the New York Times: Getting older is inevitable (and certainly better than the alternative) stuns me.
We are afraid of death. It’s coming. Facial exercises (The NYT’s insists they’re real) are simply a way of kidding yourself. Facelifts seem to create monsters.
The New York Times will never publish this because it will maintain that I am not following the status quo, and am, in fact, uncivil. All the usual.
Because I embrace death.
I will be in charge. Not old age.
Even in a culture of greed, death comes for everyone. Even the rich. Death does not discriminate.
You can temporarily hold it back, but why.
I am old, diseased, and decrepit. I am poor. I own nothing but the clothes on my back. No stocks. No bonds. No investments. No vacation homes. No Rolls Royce. It’s a cycle of sleeping rough in front of storefronts, and eating out of dumpsters. Forget health insurance. I have no address. I am typing this in a library. Without an address, forget Social Security. There is no hope for any social security. It is a pipe dream. Medicare wants an address as well.
Shoplifting food is my Social Security. I have never been arrested.
I go to emergency rooms because the frostbite on my feet is growing worse.
Hospitals have food.
The pain and toxicity I live in would kill most people. I can’t seem to die quickly enough. I keep facing the end. But life hangs on tight even to those of us who want to die. Wanting to die is a crime. It is not mainstream. It scares the comfortable.
I watch the comfortable, but they cannot see me.
I am invisible.