When you are young, everything looks rosy. Your confidence brims to overflowing. There is nothing that you can’t do. And nothing, it seems, can get or stop you: Serious illness, nor death poses any fears. You are indestructible. But, taking a minute to think, you might just begin to appreciate that the period in which you now so rejoice is just an interregnum. That interval between the close shaves of infancy - the “mewl” and “puke” stage - according to The Bard himself- on the one hand and, on the other, the inevitable decline.
Anyway, eventually, one gets to a landmark age. Difficult to determine when that is, but it is definitely well beyond mewling and puking a road map that Shakespeare lays out for us, unpicking life’s progress, stage by stage.
The stage I’m concerned about here is the “round-bellied” one, which, one hopes, does not, prematurely, terminate in disaster, but will seamlessly evolve into the “lean and slippered pantaloon” phase, followed gradually by the weakening of the voice (kind of back to a youthful treble, as he put it) before finally, slipping to the stage of toothlessness and the associated loss of other attributes.
Shakespeare’s assessment constitutes a brilliant reprise of developmental endocrinology centuries before scientists began to unravel the basic processes in human hormone physiology. However that may be, one might, with some luck, manage to navigate life to its closing act without too much fuss while in the meantime observing some of one’s friends dropping off, one by one, some dramatically, others with less fanfare. Luckily, most do make their exit with their faculties relatively intact.
The reason I am writing this is because I recently discovered that a friend of longstanding has become considerably less mentally nimble than he used to be, now having to depend on his adult daughter for all his decisions. And then, even worse, personally, at the supermarket the other day, after piling up a mass of groceries, I was unable, at the check-out, to recall the PIN of my credit card. Total blank, however hard I tried, absolutely no recall.
Alarmed, I had to find out what the hell was going on. According to the WHO, and research conducted by the Alzheimer Disease Institute, the approximate number of people currently living with dementia worldwide, is about an astonishing 35.6 million, a number which, even more alarmingly, is set to nearly double every 20 years, reaching 65.7 million in 2030 and 115.4 million by 2050. Although I may not be around in 2050, there is the possibility that I too, may contribute to these alarming figures long before then. And it seems that, at present, there is not much being done about what has become the new public health emergency…
You might be wondering what happened to my grocery shopping. I had to resort to cash.
Cash is still king.
Tell Fren Tru
When you are young, everything looks rosy. Your confidence brims to overflowing. There is nothing that you can’t do. And nothing, it seems, can get or stop you: Serious illness, nor death poses any fears. You are indestructible. But, taking a minute to think, you might just begin to appreciate that the period in which you now so rejoice is just an interregnum. That interval between the close shaves of infancy - the “mewl” and “puke” stage - according to The Bard himself- on the one hand and, on the other, the inevitable decline.
No comments:
Post a Comment