Mad as Hell

I am mad. I am fucking mad. Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad. I am 65 years old, I have maybe 6 more good years before I’m too beat up by life to do anything. All I have to look forward to is arthritis, a weak bladder, less hair, failing eyesight. I have a friend who tells me that we are 10 years away from diapers. I am fucking mad. I have barely done anything and it’s almost over. For the last 10 years I’ve been watching my friends bury their parents, dealing with dementia, strokes, diabetes, dialysis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, and all I can think of is that this is me in a few years. This is fucking scary. I have made it to 65 and found nothing. Nothing. Except that at 20 I was pretty naïve about this thing we call life. More accurately, pretty and naïve. Now, at 65, I have to learn how to live without hope because my present is the future because there is no future at 65. There’s only diapers and disease. And Medicare if I’m lucky and Congress, controlled by a bunch of lunatics, doesn’t cut it. Unless I am Rupert Murdoch, of course. The man who defies nature. I just heard he is planning to remarry at 92 and spend the second part of his life, as he puts it, with a religious QAnon freak he fell for. He launched Faux News when he was my age for crying out loud. * 

I can’t even hope to get a great job, let alone start a business that makes billions by promoting lies, rage, and victimhood. I can’t hope to find a beautiful, new love because all I have to offer is federal health insurance, a modest pension, and saggy boobs. No yachts, mansions, private jets, and millions to throw on jewelry and lunches with famous people. I can’t even hope to go to parties with friends because most of them have moved away, found someone more interesting than me to hang out with, or simply become too annoying to keep in touch with. Some have even died already. And trying to make new friends at 65 is fucking pathetic. I have to walk an incredibly fine line not to appear too needy, too enthusiastic, too . . . friendly!

I write gratitude lists for whatever good I see around me. For surviving this ephemeral planetary tour without losing a limb or my mind. Fucking lucky me. My washing machine still works after 20 years. My toilet is not clogged. And my car starts in the morning. Yeahheee. 

I bought a house when I was 62. I will be paying my mortgage from beyond the grave. Thirty-year fixed. Genius me. Retirement experts say that people should finish paying off their mortgage by their 50s. Baby boomers like me. I don’t know people in their 50s who have paid off their mortgage. The 50-year-olds that I know live in rentals and share spaces with friends so they can have a roof over their heads. Show me someone who doesn’t have a law degree or wasn’t born to the right parents who has paid off their mortgage by 50!

And what about work? At 65 I am pretty much being forced to retire whether I am ready to or not. Biden can announce a second run for the presidency at fucking 80, but I have to retire because I am taking up a spot that can go to a younger person with one-tenth the experience for half the pay. And how old is that turtle man who wanted to be Senate majority leader and ended up falling on his head instead? Will he retire, just because he fell on his head at the tender age of 81?

After completing 20 years working for the federal government, I have learned to endure daily humiliations and tolerate idiot supervisors from countries most Americans can’t find on the map. These male supervisors have never heard about the various advances women have made around here since the 1960s. One of them told a colleague that she was too emotional when she asked for time off to attend the funeral of a relative. He addressed me as Mrs. without asking. Under what rock has he been hiding? I have to swallow what little pride I have accumulated during these years for becoming an expert in something, because expertise at 65 is not appreciated or required. I have to shut my mouth and thank my luck that my ass is allowed to remain in the chair it has been sitting in for the past few years. No matter how many degrees I have, how much knowledge I have, how many years of active participation I still have in me, it’s over at 65. 

And what about family and love? At my age it happens only in the movies. There is no more hope. I have lived in the single woman ghetto for 20 years, already marked as too independent, too opinionated, too whatever. No one gets out of the ghetto after 20 years. At this stage of life, the only way to get out is in the back of an ambulance. People my age retire and prepare to die or go to Arizona or Florida to spend their last years doing whatever old people do before they die. But I don’t know how to do these things. I don’t hang out with golf-cart-riding old people. I don’t have grandchildren to look after. I don’t belong to a book club—yet—and I don’t plan to volunteer at a hospital delivering food to sick people. It’s depressing. 

This whole life journey was a fucking waste of time. It takes forever to learn how to live—what’s important, what isn’t—and then it’s over for eternity. And in this country, if you are not considered a success story, whatever that means, you are nothing. You have no happy endings, no shortcuts to brag about, no divine providence to thank; only struggle and more struggle and worries and survival. I am so fucking sick of it. 

Those who are pushing me into oblivion don’t realize that they too are going to get there sooner than they imagine, they just don’t want to think about it. It’s an awful thought we all push to the back of our heads hoping it will never bother us, but it does. My time is running out and what am I supposed to do? Move to Mexico? To Costa Rica?  

I have already started over so many times. I have changed continents, countries, cities, jobs, life partners, hobbies, apartments, even the languages that I speak. So many new beginnings that dissolve into nothingness. These days I am volunteering for my small city’s planning commission as some kind of a community activist, which I am not. I only do it because I want to convince the city council to build a green cemetery so I can be buried in a shroud under a tree without polluting the environment. This is the only thing I see in my future.

* Murdock ended up calling off the engagement, but it doesn’t make me feel better at all.