by Susan Moon
We took off her neck brace—there was a red sore underneath where it had been rubbing against her collarbone. We sang “Dona Nobis Pacem” and “Row Row Row Your Boat.” I recited a Buddhist chant for the dying, and the ancient sounds we didn’t understand held us together: nen nen fu ri shin. My sisters and I took her clothes out of a plastic bag, the clothes she’d been wearing in the accident. It seemed strange, though it was a relief, that there was no blood on them. Together we took off the hospital nightgown and pulled her faded black denim pants up over her dead hips, we put her arms through the sleeves of her blue smock shirt, and we left her bare feet bare. Her face looked suddenly thin, the skin drawn by gravity down toward the pillow. We tried to close her open mouth, but it didn’t stay. The same with her open eye. We folded her hands on her chest, and I spread the half-finished shawl with the zigzag blue and green stripes over her legs.
Old Bones
I TOOK MY ALMOST-THREE granddaughter to the play-ground, and she climbed up the slide on her hands and knees.
“Now you do it, Grandma Sue,” she said.
“I can’t do it,” I told her. “My old knees can’t go up the slide.”
“Just try! You can just try, Grandma!”
But I didn’t try. “I’m sorry, Paloma, but my knees are too old.”
The next day I was taking Paloma upstairs to have a bath. “Carry me, OK, Grandma?” she requested.
I was tired. “You can walk,” I said. “I’ll hold your hand.”
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I have old legs!”
As I get older my bones are getting older, too. I have osteoporosis in my lower back. It runs in my family. My mother lost five inches of height from it, and I’ve lost an inch and a half, but it doesn’t hurt and I wouldn’t even know I had it except for the bone scan.
The arthritis in my knees and thumbs is more annoying. At the minor-detail end of the scale, I can’t open jars very well any more because of the arthritis in my thumbs, and this can be bothersome when I’m alone with a vacuum-sealed jar of homemade plum jam. A friend gave me a wonderful gizmo, like a potholder, with rubber webbing on one side, which is remarkably effective for opening jars, but if it doesn’t do the job and there’s no other pair of hands in the house, I have to get through the morning without jam. As for my knees, they don’t like going up and down steep hills, they object to the warrior pose in yoga, and I can’t squat at all anymore, which makes it hard to pee in the woods. Hopscotch is out of the question.
In a way, it adds interest to life to have these small problems to work on. Taking care of oneself becomes a more intricate project and sharpens one’s problem-solving skills. My knees talk to me, and I have to respond. The old bones provide a kind of companionship. It’s not really me who needs things like handrails and hiking poles, it’s my knees; I make these arrangements for them, because we’re family.
Without spending my whole life reading about it on the Internet, I try to learn how to take care of my bones. For years I took a drug prescribed for promoting bone density. Over a year ago I decided to stop, because of the slight risk of serious side effects, and I promised myself I would care for my bones as best I could by taking calcium and vitamin D and doing daily, or almost daily, weight-bearing exercise—in my case walking and working out at the Y. After a year on my new program, I asked for another bone scan. I was proud of myself when the test showed that the osteoporosis had not gotten any worse. I’m my own research project.
I used to take my bones for granted, but now that I’m paying attention to them, I see that they are a great invention. When young people’s bones are growing, for example, cells get added to the outside of the lengthening bone at the same time that cells are subtracted from the inside, in order to enlarge the hollow part where the marrow lives, in a complex engineering project. When I was about twelve, my leg bones were growing so fast that I got terrible leg aches. My mother called them “growing pains.” Both of my sons also had leg pains during their adolescent growth spurts.
Now I’m shrinking. Under the soft flesh, the bones are shorter, lighter, more porous than they used to be, with spurs here and there that were not part of the original design. But they are still good bones—hinges and sockets, ball bearings and cables. I love their names: humerus, tibia, scapula, fibula.
One time when my son Sandy was a teenager, he and I were hiking along some abandoned railroad tracks in the country and we noticed lots of dry bones—the scattered vertebrae of some large animal, probably a deer—lying on the ties between the rails. We collected them all in our pockets and took them back to the cabin where we were staying for the weekend. We spread them out on the table like the pieces of a puzzle. The hollow round bones had little feet and outspread wings and they fit together neatly, like stacking chairs. We were impressed by the elegance of the design and we could distinguish different sections of the spine by the size of the wings, and whether they had dorsal fins. A few were missing. We found string and scissors and made the bones into a mobile, balancing pendant chains of vertebrae against a rusty railroad spike. We hung it up in our friend’s cabin, happy with the way the old bones swung in the sun.
None of the vertebrae are missing on the human skeleton that hangs from a hook in the yoga studio I go to. It looks so perfect, like it was made from a kit as a visual aid for a yoga class, that it’s easy to forget it used to walk around inside a particular person. I wonder who.
When you check “donor” on your driver’s license, it doesn’t mean you’re donating your bones to a yoga studio. You would really be naked in public, then. Still, nobody would know it was you, unless there was a little brass plaque on the pelvis with your name. Nobody would recognize your skeleton, not even your best friend, not even someone who had made love to you for years.
It’s odd that skeletons and skulls represent death, since, if you’re a living human being, you have your very own living skeleton inside you, and it holds you up your whole life long. You’d be a puddle on the floor without it. I guess a skeleton means death because you can’t see a skeleton until the person is dead and the flesh has fallen away.
At the celebration of the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, I saw skeletons dancing, skeletons working at their sewing machines and typewriters, skeletons cutting the hair of other skeletons in the barber shop. I brought home a little scene of a doctor skeleton delivering a baby skeleton from a mother skeleton while a nurse skeleton stands ready to assist.
You know you’re going to die, and you don’t know what’s going to happen to you after that. You also don’t know what’s going to happen to you before that, as a result of age, and you can’t control it. A young friend of mine in medical school was told that the age of sixty is a kind of watershed, and that the average human body crosses a line about that time and begins to deteriorate in earnest. Of course doctors don’t tell their patients this, and of course the age varies from one individual to another, but on the average, there is significant change at sixty.
For a sixtieth birthday present, my two sons promised to take me backpacking in the Sierra. I had taken them camping and backpacking often when they were children, and this time they would be my outfitters and guides. The promise alone was one of the best presents I ever received, and then there would be the trip itself on top of the promise. For a couple of months before the trip I worked out extra hard at the gym. I had several sessions with a personal trainer, who mercilessly made me climb stairs that fell away beneath my feet and step up and down on purple plastic boxes to strengthen my quads for hiking.
My sons plotted the route, got the permits, rented the tent, planned the menus, and bought the food. On the appointed day, Sandy and I drove together from the Bay Area and Noah drove from Los Angeles to our meeting point in the town of Bishop, on the east side of the Sierra. I was excited when we pulled into the parking lot of the ranger station and saw Noah’s blue Toyota, shimmering in the August heat. We found Noah inside the ranger station, where he’d arrived just fifteen minutes
before, looking at flower books. We got our fire permit and rented the required bear-proof cylinder for our food, and at the last minute, before we set off for the trailhead, I followed Sandy’s suggestion and bought myself a pair of hiking poles. I also bought, on a sudden impulse, a tiny booklet on the U.S. Constitution that was placed prominently next to the cash register. This was during George W. Bush’s presidency, when the Constitution was under siege, and I thought it might come in handy somewhere down the line, if not in the High Sierra.
My legs felt strong as we set forth. We hiked up high and moved camp each day. I took small steps and made my own little switchbacks when the trail was steep, and sometimes my muscles felt wobbly after a long climb, but I managed just fine. My two strapping sons carried the heavier packs and kindly kept to a gentle pace, claiming it was what they wanted, too. We swam in little lakes along the way, and admired the flowers, and watched the clouds scud over the mountains. We hardly saw any other hikers; most of the time the three of us had the trail to ourselves. And not just the trail. We had the universe, as far as we could see, and that was far indeed, and there was no one else I would rather have been with.
My renovated quadriceps took me and my backpack up and over Paiute Pass, twelve thousand feet above sea level. On the third day we found our own miniature alpine meadow, sheltered from the wind by granite boulders, beside Lower Desolation Lake. After the tent was up, Noah and Sandy went to explore Upper Desolation Lake and I lay on my back in the grass, surrounded by yellow arnica flowers, letting the afternoon sun soak into my sore knees. The strange trill of a marmot bounced off the rocky slope above me. My bones had been working against gravity all day, and now they laid themselves out on the mountain; the long vertical bones became horizontal, and gravity took them and held them. I took a nap.
The next day we headed back over Paiute Pass. We paused to look back at the lake, steel gray under a threatening sky, and I managed to balance my camera on a rock and take a picture of the three of us, grinning and holding onto each other, dizzy in all that space. Before we started down, I looked hard at the wide bowl the mountains made, taking a picture of it with my mind, the kind of picture you can’t take with a camera, one that has the smell of the wind in it and the relief your shoulders feel when you give them a break from the weight of the pack. I knew I might never see such a view again.
I was grateful for my hiking poles—my knees needed all the help they could get now that we were going down. Noah and Sandy took from my pack the little bit of common gear I was still carrying, along with my camera, sunscreen, and extra flashlight batteries. Each of their packs was probably twice as heavy as mine.
In the late afternoon, as we were descending a steep and rocky slope above tree line, it began to snow. There was no level place to camp, and so we had to keep going down, while the wet snow kept on coming and the sky grew darker. We hurried slowly—my steps got smaller as my knees got sorer, and the trail was slippery. I was slowing them down, but they didn’t make me feel bad about it; they were patient, asking from time to time how I was doing. Other than that we hardly spoke, focusing our attention numbly on the trail. We were eager to get the tent up before dark.
Just at dusk, we came to a rocky field, and with frozen fingers we pitched the tent on a level spot of ground that didn’t have too many bumps to poke into our backs. By the time the tent was up we were wet and cold and hungry, and it was almost dark and still snowing. We took our packs inside the tent and put on some dry clothes, but then we felt the sloshing of water beneath us. It turned out there was no drainage where we’d pitched the tent, and it was already sitting in its own private lake of melted snow. We all crawled out again, and while Noah dug a drainage ditch around the tent with the plastic trowel we’d brought for our bathroom needs, Sandy went into the mostly imaginary shelter of a nearby grove of bristlecone pines to heat water on our stove for our freeze-dried dinner of macaroni and cheese. I held the flashlight.
I wondered: What if the storm blew our tent down in the middle of the night and we died of hypothermia? Or what if it snowed so much that we couldn’t hike out for days? Or what if we just couldn’t find the trail under the snow and got lost? But I didn’t speak my thoughts aloud.
“Dinner is ready,” said Sandy. “I have a reservation for a party of three.”
I can’t say we enjoyed our dinner, but we stood together there in the trees and eagerly spooned the hot soup out of our Sierra cups—the very Sierra cups that still had our Yahi Indian names engraved on them from a school camping trip with Noah’s fifth-grade class twenty-five years before. I had gone as a parent helper—with knees that could scramble over boulders with the kids—and Sandy had gone as a little brother. As it said on the cups, we were Tetna, Siwini, Wakara: Bear, Pine, and Full Moon.
Then there was nothing to do but crawl into the tent, and into our sleeping bags, and try to stay warm. It was eight o’clock at night in the middle of August, and morning was a long way away. We wished we had brought a pack of cards, but we hadn’t anticipated our predicament. All we had for indoor entertainment was the U.S. Constitution, so while more snow fell and drifted up against the sides of our tent, we quizzed each other on the Bill of Rights.
By the time we got back down to the car the next day, my right knee was protesting with every step, and both feet were aching with what turned out to be heel spurs. I was also completely happy.
Five years have gone by since then, and it seems that it was, indeed, the last such adventure of my life. Cortisone shots took care of the heel spurs, but the arthritis in my knees has gradually gotten worse. That’s what arthritis tends to do. And why wouldn’t it? It’s hard work for those joints to carry a body up and down mountains, up and down stairs, year after year. At least I ended my backpacking days on a high note, and I’m still capable of ascending into the mountains by mule or funicular.
It’s a constant process, letting go of what you can no longer do, and stretching yourself to do what you can. When I was sixty-three, I went to a series of hip-hop dance classes at the YMCA, for beginners. There were a couple of other graying students in the class, though I think I was the grayest. It was challenging for me, both physically and cognitively, and I could almost feel new neural pathways being laid down in my brain as we went from the stomp to the spin-and-turn.
One day the teacher had us scooting across the room in a grapevine step. I thought I was safe in the back row, but when he told us turn around and go the other way, I was suddenly in the front row. I scurried like mad but I couldn’t keep up—I was in the way, holding up the line. The teacher escorted me to a different spot in the room and had me trade places with a supple young man.
“I think you’ll be better off here,” the teacher told me. Then, in front of the whole class, he said, “You looked like this!” and he imitated me stumbling across the room.
I could have said, “Hey! You’re talking to the person who won the javelin throw in the fourth grade!” But oddly, I didn’t really mind his teasing. For a moment I seemed to float up out of my stiff body and drift beside the high windows of the room. I looked down with affection at my sixty-three-year-old self, struggling to learn hip-hop dancing, and I could see that there was something humorous in my efforts to get my feet to crisscross fast enough. I gave myself credit for trying, but I didn’t go back to hip hop after that. Time to let that one go.
I’m still using my own old knees and feeling loyal to them, but I might get a couple of new knees down the line, and I’m grateful the possibility exists. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll be able to keep on with my yoga class for a good while to come, and I and my hiking poles still walk with pleasure in the Berkeley hills.
Paloma recently imitated me, too, though she wasn’t teasing like the hip-hop teacher; she was, by her tone of voice, just making a friendly observation. We were taking a walk around the block to look for ladybugs, and she said, “Look Grandma, I’m walking like you.” She adopted a stiff-legged gait, not bending her knees at all,
like those Appalachian wooden dolls who walk down an incline board. I was taken aback. Was my stiff old walk really that obvious? But as far as Paloma was concerned there was nothing wrong with it; it was just my way of walking.
All Fall Down
A fall is an unintentional loss of balance causing one to make unexpected contact with the ground or floor.
—Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Vol. 39
THE LAST TIME I FELL DOWN, I was at a Zen meditation retreat. About twenty meditators had gathered in a silent circle on a raised deck in the redwoods for our daily work meeting, and I remember thinking as I walked down the path to join the gathering that my shoes were too big. A few steps short of the deck, in full view of the silent watchers, I slipped on the uneven path. I felt my ankle twisting as I went down. It’s amazing how much you can think about in the split second between tripping and hitting the ground. On my way down I was already worrying that someone would have to leave the retreat and drive me to Sebastopol to get my ankle x-rayed, but that thought was interrupted when my face slammed into the edge of the deck. A collective wail went up from my audience. It didn’t hurt, not exactly—it was too much of a shock. My attention moved from my ankle to my face in a groping attempt to understand what had happened. It was something to do with my mouth. Teeth—Did I still have my teeth? My hand came away from my lips bloody, but my teeth all seemed to be still attached to my gums.
I uncurled from the ground and looked up into a crowd of faces leaning over the deck railing. “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m really all right.” How could this be me in a heap on the ground? I’m a tree-climber, a jump-roper, a gravity-defier. “I feel like such an idiot!” I added. (It’s this inability to admit that one is getting old that makes it so hard to get around to installing handrails and buying non-skid rubber bath mats.)
Hands reached out and pulled me up. One fellow meditator, a nurse, led me to wash up. She couldn’t find any ice, but she found a cucumber in the fridge and sliced it in half for me to hold against my bloody lip. Soothed by her ministrations, I returned to the group for my work assignment, and that afternoon I performed my duty as a tea server in the meditation hall. A swollen lip doesn’t stop a person from pouring tea.
