You think you know what aging will be like: little sticky faces rubbing yours, weekend dinners where someone else does the cooking, sleepovers with the grandkids and breakfasts at the McDonald’s playland, not because you didn’t want to scramble eggs—who can’t scramble eggs?—but because you want them to remember how it was to be here with you, because life is fleeting and memories are your history book and you want to fill it with the good stuff, only the good stuff.
You think aging will mean retirement, which will mean freedom, which will mean days where what you do and what gets done are your choice alone. Maybe you’ll go on field trips, or help in the classroom once a week, pretend that you are there to read or tidy, when you are really there to learn something yourself; where there are squeals when you enter, until the teacher calms the class and asks what you’d like the children to call you and you have to knead your lips together because Mrs. Vasconcelos is a struggle on the tongue and you really want to say “Avó” but you know it’s not right to replace every grandmother even though you would in a second, so you say nothing and turn to the children who are electricity, coils of energy, able to fold their bodies like contortionists.
You think aging will mean bike rides for ice cream, and nature walks along the river where you bring the dog because the grandchildren ask, even though you don’t like dogs or walking for fun because both waste too much time that you could spend showing your grandchildren how to sew small purses like you did with your daughters when they were young, or finally visit the wax museum in Niagara Falls because you were supposed to go on your honeymoon but only found out when you got to its locked doors that it was closed on Mondays. And you feel this pressing need to close this loop, to take photos with blocks of wax that are shaped into people who look real and supple but are just empty, glossy versions of themselves.
But who could predict that just before you retire, ALS will crawl through your cells, slowly halting your ability to walk, to speak for yourself, to urinate alone, while leaving your mind sharp. Who could predict that you would become trapped inside a body that looks just like yours but is not really yours. Who could predict that you will find aging lonely, like you are in a room behind the bars of your own beating heart, with air that smells like broken crayons, and you feel sometimes like a box of broken crayons with brittle bones ready to snap, a tourist attraction, with visits on Mother’s Day, and stopovers at Easter and Christmas because one daughter moved to Vancouver and another to Halifax and they said it was for work, a great opportunity, but your mind is still sharp and clear, even though your body is failing, and you know that there are opportunities here and what they were really looking for was an opportunity to escape.
A nurse rolls you into a room with a fireplace and fresh flowers in a crystal vase that will make for nice photos when your daughters and grandchildren arrive, flashes snapping in your face that’s no longer supple and glossy—your skin is like origami, folded over and in on itself. Smile for the camera. Snap. Snap. Snap. And suddenly you find yourself in a wax museum of your own life and you think this is not the loop you wanted to close, but here you are. You are here for the flashes and the memories in a book that someone else will fill with your stories without your say so, and you want to rip the pages, shield your eyes against the flash, dig your fingers into the wax figures standing around you, pull them apart, set them on fire and melt them all down.
