Tips for the Elderly

1. Cover up. You are old and your body is repulsive now. It may be in fine condition for someone your age, but the people who now make the world go around—the young—find it disgusting. Cover up as much as possible. Nothing sleeveless, no sandals, no shorts, loose fits, always. Your skin is horribly wrinkled and mottled. Scrotal. (You spent, cumulatively, months in the sun. On purpose. Idiot.) On the bright side of this, as grim death nears you are always cold, so covering your skin will help you stay warm. The Complete and Total Loser has been an ugly gimp since his early youth. He knows what of he speaks. The obese are more aesthetically pleasing to look at than you.

2. Don't grunt when you move. Virtually all movement causes you pain. That's understandable; you've been moving for decades, working hard, toiling away at some meaningless job to keep you alive and make the rich richer while raising children in a grossly overpopulated world, consuming as much as possible as you did. You have done what you were told to do. Being old, your mind isn't as sharp as it once was and your ideas are stale. People have to talk a little louder and more slowly than before and, being honest, they'd rather be elsewhere, doing something else. So when you move, don't grunt in pain. It makes you even less pleasant to be with than you already are.

3. Don't listen to your kids when they tell you not to drive anymore. Sure, there's a chance that you'll mistake the gas pedal and the brake, but the odds of you plowing into a group of school children as they wait for the bus are very small. It does happen, but just a few times a year. That's why you hear about it in the news. You're more likely to run into a neighbor's bush or hit something else and the only person hurt will be you. Besides, there are plenty of schoolkids.

4. Make your will specific. Remember that Civil War sword you promised to your middle son when he was seven? He still thinks he's getting that. So do you. But two weeks after your funeral, as your sons and daughter are rifling through your house your eldest son will pick it up and casually announce that he'll take it. This will bloom into conflict that will cause bad blood between him and the middle son, with others taking sides, that will last for years. One sentence in writing and it could've been avoided. One goddamn sentence.

5. Be careful about what you throw out. Those photographs from the '60s may be junky snapshots to you, but to your kids and grandchildren they're historical artifacts. People don't keep bad photographs anymore, they delete them from their camera memory cards without printing them. A shame. The bad pictures—the family portraits with one kid scowling at another, the father looking away from the lens (at what?), the dog's bright, pink erection—these photographs tell more than others. The only studio family portraits of any interest are those of families in which one member has murdered all the others.

6. Avoid falls. At some point, those close to you will want to see you die sooner rather than later and falls hasten the end. However, you are enough of a burden already and with the immobility that comes with a fall you will be even more of one, unless you have the resources to hire someone to help you. You may have wiped your children's asses when they were infants, but your revolting, shriveled anus is a far different matter.

7. Accept that your children don't like you now. You've been of no value to them for years and they look forward to your death, after which they will love you again. You're a diminished old thing but you're still capable of pushing their buttons and they hate you for that and they feel awful about hating you. They wish you had died years ago in a plane crash, asleep after a nice meal, on your way home from a pleasant vacation when the jet slams into a mountain. The only reason they value your continued existence is that it marks their own timeline. ("Mom and Dad both made it 90? Then I will too!") They think that when they're your age they won't be at all like you but will be dignified founts of wisdom and information. Ha!
8. Lie. When someone asks you how you are, don't make some "I'm-so-sick-sound" like "uhhheehhh!" Lie and say, "Fine, how are you?" It makes being around you easier to take.

The Loser, Christmas, 2010

The Complete and Total Loser’s parents are dying. He doesn’t say that, no one does, but it’s true. His mother has been in declining health for what, a decade now? At least. And she’s gotten substantially worse in the past year, going from frail to feeble. Always the type to require center stage, she lets all around her know this. No stoicism for her! She grunts as if in pain with each step, every movement. Minor procedures are detailed at length and someone must attend if she’s at a hospital even for an outpatient appointment.

The Loser gets peevish with this sometimes but overall is fine with it and does his duty. She is getting ready to commit the ultimate verb. If she needs to be attended by one of her sons, the Loser will comply. When he enters the house he drinks a beer as soon as he can. Then, often, another. He wants to take the edge off and there’s little but edge these days.

More disturbing to the Loser these days is his father, who is in better health than his mother but, a decade older than she is ninety now and hardly robust. A suburbanite since 1950, driving more than a few miles tires him now. Recently he has showed strong signs of clinical depression and his appetite has waned. He barely eats. He, a man whose greatest sin has been gluttony, who has disgusted his son for years by moaning with pleasure (“Umm ... Umm.”) when eating salty, greasy food with his fingers.

He, a man always preternaturally cheerful and optimistic, famous for being easygoing and likable, affable even, he himself calls it depression. The Loser sees the mild thrill his father gets from his lack of appetite, such a difference from the norm. His father doesn’t show his enjoyment openly, of course, and attributes it rightly to his worry over his ailing wife.

In an early, half awake morning hour today, maybe it was yesterday, another reason occurred to the Loser. His parents are playing an end game. Not a game in the sense of a competition. More of a matching game, like kids trying to see how many times they can throw a Frisbee back and forth without letting it hit the ground. The Loser’s father senses his wife’s coming death and is trying to go at the same time. Suicide by failure to thrive. The notion scares the Loser, but seems apt. (How many times has he had the romantic notion of them dying together, tragically, in a plane crash, asleep, on the way home after a delightful vacation?) It’s a selfish idea, the Loser knows. The abrupt end, no lingering death for either, no obligation to figure out the proper etiquette as they decline, no craziness from them. Just sympathy from others. Casseroles from neighbors while he lived in the house for a few months, settling things.

The Loser wants his father to be happy and is surprised how upset he is by his current state. He’d always thought that an overall happy existence would cancel out any brief time of misery at the end as much as it would had it been in midlife or another time. Now, he’s not so sure of this. His mother has always been like the Loser; a bit of a downer, never fully secure and joyous, with happiness a temporary, aberrational state. His father, though, that sweet, smart, kind man, he wants his father to die happy.

The Loser is a Selfish Prick

Every week, The Complete and Total Loser takes a commuter train from the city to the suburbs. The ride is half an hour long. From the station, it takes the Loser ten minutes to walk to his parents' house, where he has dinner with them.

Dinning room table.

They are both elderly and their physical and mental decline is beginning to accelerate. Tonight, the Loser asked his father what year terrorist felled the Twin Towers. "Ninety-two?" his father, never good at dates, guessed.

His mother, once a good cook, tires easily now. Dinners are frequently store-bought rotisserie chicken or easily prepared stews. Sometimes, they even get take-out Chinese.

Family friends hear of the Loser's visits and tell him he is just so kind to do that. The Loser quickly changes the subject which, to them, appears to be a show of modesty.

It's guilt.

As trying as it is to see his parents, who he loves despite their mistakes (would he have done better?), slip away, the Loser makes himself go so he'll be able to recognize his own fate when it nears and take appropriate steps. Those steps will be to go for a long walk in the woods with a pocket full of sleeping pills and a bottle of good scotch and disappear forever.

Sundays, Bloody Sundays

The 5:50 out of the city is always on time Sunday evenings. On it with the Complete and Total Loser are tourists with tired feet who have ventured into town to see a concert, a lecture, an art exhibit; college students connecting from Amtrak or the airport, heading back to the half dozen private colleges in walking distance of a train station after a weekend home.

Philadelphia's 30th Street Station at night.

The Loser is on his way to have dinner with his elderly parents, a weekly event. One of three offspring, he's the one who never married and has no family of his own. Over the past decade his parents have gotten increasingly frail. He knows the meal will be something previously prepared. A rotisserie chicken with stuffing from a box, vegetables steamed for many minutes. His mother, once robust and an enthusiastic cook, had a nerve cut during an operation nine years ago and swallowing and eating is a challenge now. She has lost dozens of pounds, her balance is bad, she aspirates food often and contracts pneumonia. She loved to sing. Now, her voice is an ugly rasp.
It's not the quality of the food that bothers the Loser. It's the fact neither parent can glide about the kitchen easily as they once did. Immediately on entering the house through the kitchen door he goes to the refrigerator and gets a beer, which he downs fast. It helps mask his parents' great age and their approaching feebleness and deaths. Halfway through his second beer his mind is level with theirs. It is the only time during the week that he drinks.
Dinner is in the dining room and there are cloth napkins, candles, silverware. The Loser asks about his siblings and their children. They discuss the topics of the day. His mother, always highly defensive and easily slighted, has dropped any pretense of manners and anything his father says in opposition to her is met with cruel scorn and mimicking far out of proportion to the imagined offense.
At the end of the evening, the Loser's father drives him the short distance to the train station. Here they talk. The father tells stories from long ago. His parents, what they and he did during the Depression, the war, early jobs, his ad agency work in the 1950s, his parents. The Loser prods him as he has countless times before to write this down, at least the bare bones, who was born when and where, what they did and when they died. His father brushes this off, saying all the information is in the large collection of papers in the attic and that if he were to write it down it would take forever.
Both know the real reason which is that if he did he fears he would die on dotting the last sentence with a period.
A glow down the tracks means the train is coming. The Loser tells his father to have a good week, leaves the car and boards the 8:45. The train back is a negative image of the previous one. The majority of those on it are older, poor, uneducated, black. They are the ones who work in the kitchens and clean the halls of the colleges or the area's nursing homes and supermarkets. They are headed to the city where they live in badly kept rowhouses in decaying neighborhoods. They don't take out laptops or books but generic MP3 players and cell phones. Some fall asleep as the train sways on the tracks. Others stare into space.
The trains pulls into the station. The Loser disembarks, goes to the bike rack and is back in his rowhouse apartment in minutes. He has no work the next day so he has a cup of coffee. He turns on the TV, reads the paper, checks his email. Before he knows it it's late, after one. He showers and gets into bed where he reads for a bit then falls asleep.