Attrition

At what age do we stop growing and start dying?

My wife turned 49 two weeks ago. This evening, just an hour hence, she collapsed on a treadmill. Something in her knee popped. I drove out to the gym and helped her hop to the car and carried her, against her protests, up the steps of our house and set her down on the couch and plied her with blankets, pillows, ice packs, and pills, and am now listening to her groan as she confronts her pain, her poor judgement, and the prospect of missing out on the costly vacation she had planned for next week. Our seven-year-old is barely aware that anything has happened and is in her bunk bed right now reading Archie comics under a clip-on lamp.

I don’t know if this sounds unsympathetic, but though I’m dutifully executing my responsibilities as a spouse, I’m not doing it with the kind of love and care I might have before she asked for a trial separation. The problem with a trial separation when you live in a place like the San Francisco Bay Area is that moving out isn’t really an option, so the separation part really just takes the form of me no longer having license to casually manhandle her. I can only do that now when she injures herself.

For years she’s been pushing herself too hard at running. In her 20s and 30s, she regularly ran in marathons, and I think having so much experience hightailing around on her feet has tricked her into believing that practice is adequate fortification against the vagaries of aging. I have no such confidence in the regular execution of any activity that involves funneling the impact of your full weight into the cartilage of your lower extremities.

The last time I ran on a treadmill - admittedly after years of dormancy - I developed what clinicians call hematuria. In other words, running jostled my internal organs so horribly that I peed blood for two days. Running seems like a scam. I’ve never profited by it. And often, it’s just been a source of humiliation, starting with my dismal scores in middle school PE and ending with my failed attempts to catch up with departing buses.

We aren’t built to last. I see this statistic from time to time - perhaps you have, too - that cave people were lucky to survive much past 25 years of age. I was haunted after first encountering that figure by a nightmare vision of neanderthals spontaneously collapsing in what seemed to me not even the prime of life but mere late adolescence. I didn’t understand then that such a statistic is peppered with outliers - senescent cave-dwellers who functioned as a living archive of a tribe’s past - and that the figure was further compromised by an unbelievably high infant mortality rate.

Well, the tables have turned. Almost no babies die anymore, but far fewer are being born. My ex-wife - that is, the wife I burned through before the wife I’m burning through now - is pregnant right now in her mid 40s. It seems like madness almost to be having children so late in life, but more and more people are waiting that long, with the further complication that by your 40s a sizable share of your cohort has already died. One’s 40s are the cancer years, after all.

I don’t know if there’s a solution to this problem, the one where people like me in their 40s are trying to live like late adolescents - or at least live like late adolescence is more or less sustainable throughout a lifetime of 80 or 90 years. It’s almost as terrifying as living that long to begin with.