“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”(T.S.Elliot). It is also the month of birthdays. My wife, two sons and two friends all have April birthdays. There is something about celebrating the day you are born. I still want to celebrate with all my loved ones, but there is something about my own that has lost much appeal. I remember as a child not being able to sleep because I was so excited about the gifts I was going to get. As I have gotten older my own birthday doesn’t mean as much. In fact I would like to forget this annual reminder of how old I am. There was recently a news story that 60 was the new 40. No it’s not, or at least there is a lot of deterioration between 60 and 70. Aging is highly over rated. Strange things begin to happen. Bodies and reflexes are not the same. It takes longer to recover. Memories come and go. All of a sudden a word, a picture, a fragment of a song brings back events of long ago.
I was talking to someone last week and all of a sudden I remembered a patient who came into our office building and lay down in front of the stairs to the second floor. She began weeping and calling my name. I had to be called out of my office to come and deal with her. I don’t remember much else about her except she was a difficult patient. In the same building we had just finished a group with some problematic adolescents. My colleague and I were called out into the hallway because they had started wheelchair races down the stairs. Another time a different group pushed a wheel chair with a smaller kid into the middle of an ice covered pond outside our building. Another time someone started a fire. I do not ever want to work with teen-agers again. I no longer have the patience.
This thing about memory is so strange. I can’t remember what I had for dinner, but events from years ago come flashing back. When my wife went into labor with our first son I was doing a staffing at the hospital. She called and said it was starting. I came home. We went to the hospital and they sent us home. We did this two more times before they admitted her. She had an emergency C-section. I remember hugging this rather distant female OB when she came out and told me that our son was born. It is so strange to think that he is now 38. Our second son was also a C-section. He was a scheduled delivery. When my wife was admitted to her room, the first phone call she received was from some guy trying to find out what birth control we used. He apparently was some type of deviate who had gotten the number for all the OB rooms. Thank God she hung up quickly. At that time there was a big effort to get fathers more involved in the birthing process. Since I was not allowed in surgery at that time for C-sections, the child was brought out and was to be given his first bath by me. The hospital hadn’t quite gotten this down so they brought out a trashcan filled it with water and gave me my second son. I put him in the water and he began screaming. I think he hated baths until he was 11 all because of that. He is now 34. How did both of them get so old so quick?
Memories of my own childhood come and go. I’m still surprised at some things my own cousins say and then it comes back to me. My father had his first heart attack in his 30s. Now we are not sure if it even was a heart attack and not something else connected with his poor health habits. He was a great guy but he was a chain smoker and drank too much. He really could never stop either one. I think a lot of guys from his generation grew up going to taverns and saloons. They were the social centers of the neighborhood. The smoking was what everyone did. His generation got really hooked while in service. My generation smoked because it was “cool” and almost expected. Everybody smoked. I stopped when my oldest son was in first grade. He asked me to stop because he learned in first grade it wasn’t healthy. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.
As I said memories keep flashing back. I know that even a smell can bring back memory of an event positive or negative. I have heard a lot of people have positive memories of cookies or bread baking. They talk about childhood and family events associated with those smells. I remember a patient who always had trouble in the summer during road construction season. The smell of asphalt reminded him of Vietnam and fuel for Helicopters. He would be fine all year until that season and then would begin showing up again with troubling dreams and increased anxiety attacks.
Music can do it too. Every generation has their own music. My Dad loved the big bands, especially Glen Miller. I think he always wanted to be a singer. “Stardust” was his favorite song. I have had patients tell me of breaking into tears hearing an old song and the memories it invoked. We had the Beatles, Stones, etc. In high school it was the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys. There really were two groups-the “Greasers” and the “Dupers”. I still think of “Help Me Rhonda” as one of my favorite songs. When we were dating there was a Rod Stewart song that played a lot -“Maggie May” -and we always thought of that as one of “our” songs. Whenever I hear it on one of the oldie stations it brings back memories of when we met—on a camping trip with a large group of our friends.
I think of all the stories I’ve heard over the last 40-60 years. I’m sure my family and friends get tired of hearing them, but as I have said , sometimes they just emerge. I don’t know when this is going to happen or what is going to come out. It’s like I have this huge hard drive inside my head just waiting to remind me of the past. I always heard about how for many seniors the past was more present than the actual present. Thankfully that’s not quite true for me yet, but I know all those stories are just lying in wait. This is still an unknown journey for me. I just hope my family can put up with me while I am going thru it. I think of the line from a Steely Dan song “She thinks I’m crazy, I’m just growing old”.
