Richard is fine. Couldn't stop touching him the first day, tangible reassurance he was home. How green the grass looked, how blue the sky, how quickly can it change from vivid to bleak. And back again. I can look at death objectively. I know it is the fate of everything. I don't think, in my fine health and middle age, that I am frightened of it (of pain, yes), but when the shadow looms, however faint, on the horizon for someone close to me, I am not so sanguine. I have not lost someone close to me since Mom. I was 24. Her death was not a surprise. It took me six months before I really grieved. I suppose because I believed then, as I do now, that she had only gone somewhere else it wasn't so difficult to cope. Like she'd moved to another continent without phone or mail or carrier pigeon.
Richard is 65. His span of years is inevitably shorter than it was. We work hard at staving off the effects of old age. We walk 5km almost every day, we eat well. He's stopped smoking. There is no reason why death cannot come at the end of a healthy life rather than as the release from a long debilitating sickness. That is why this heart thing, which seems to only have been a reaction to the anaesthetic, was at first so frightening. I saw the long white corridors of hospitals, those sterile death traps of infinite boredom accented by black doors of fear and pain. And me, unable to effect an escape for my beloved. Against science and doctors and beige machines that beep I would be using a pea shooter. Against the edifice of corporate Medicine I would, with my good thoughts and thoughts are things philosophy, be as effectual as a window trapped blow fly. Yet we have won ourselves home and freedom.
It seems to be the mindset of many that reaching a certain age inevitably entails ill health and pill taking and regular doctor visits so that one can find one's place on the medical treadmill the destination of which is a foregone conclusion. I don't believe this has to be true. I know we are thrown fast balls which come out of left field and then we must choose the safest most beneficial route back to wellness but Medicine is such a lucrative field that it profits them for us to be sick and to be made to believe that sickness if inevitable. For instance, there used to be a commercial on television which advertised a cold/flue product for 'the cold you *will* get this winter'. As if because of a change of season it was inevitable that we catch a cold. Thoughts are things. How dare they air a commercial which asserts, from their unassailable position of medical expertise, that we will be sick.
For all the medical advances, the technology, the specialists, the billions of dollars spent on the health of a nation, are we really healthier than before? We eat badly, don't exercise, rely on pills and powders rather than our own common sense and native mammalian intelligence. Then we crawl to the nearest GP confident of the silver fix it pill. It must be frustrating for the GPs treating people with health issues that are soley related to lifestyle. What else can they do but prescribe tablets and place the patient's feet on that damned treadmill?
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