042/2012 On Aging Gracefully

Word Count:  586

Elbows and bones grow sharper. Arms hang like water-wings drying on the rails of a sunny summer deck. This is age. This is comfort in one’s own skin at long last. Not taut like a diver’s suit, but like a soft cashmere shawl, loose, light and free.

She read the words again. Mumbled, “Shit.” Knew it for what it was: another feel-good string of pretty words that tried to change the reality. Dreamed up by the same “everybody’s beautiful” generation when they looked at each other one day and realized that that wasn’t true.

She tried creams and lotions. Exercise, diet. Found it all useless as she knew it would be. Age was the enemy and she had to seek a way to out-strategize.

A loofa in the shower was her first bright idea. Scrub off the tired peeling paint and let the new youthful skin shine its way through. Like furniture-stripping without the harsh chemicals. It seemed to help but too slowly, so she tried 00 fine steel wool. Moved from there through the grades of sandpaper, idly rubbing away as she watched her favorite shows on TV. Vacuuming the dead skin flakes off the couch and carpet each morning. After six months of sanding, she decided it was not quite working as well as she’d hoped.

She bought a 100-pack package of single-edge razor blades. Sliced herself like an onion each day. But the scabs that formed were itchy and just added weight. It was inside, she decided, inside the skin that was flabby and not aging well. So she drew a straight line underneath each arm, the backs of her thighs, six concentric circles around her belly and waist. Followed the lines with the light touch of a No. 11 Exacto and scooped out as much yellow fat as she could. Then she trimmed an inch off each side of the open slash of skin, pulled it tight, and neatly sewed it back up again.

She was much pleased with the results–once the wounds had healed and the thread was safely pulled out. Encouraged, she began to work on her face and neck. Snipping away excess skin from her eyelids. Removing soft globs of fat from her jowls. Stretching the skin after trimming away the excess no longer needed to hold it all in. Ah, the pleasure of that taut, tight, restricting youth!

Her doctor was not happy with her at all but said nothing. He’d discovered a benign tumor the size of a baseball tucked within the coils of her colon that had to come out. The operation was terribly expensive, she found, and her insurance only covered so much.

She asked for the x-ray, bought a copy of the ever-dependable Gray’s Anatomy, ordered a Ginsu knife from a catalog and a week later, took care of the tumor herself, extracting as well twelve feet of what she felt was excess small intestine and trimming the large down to two. It went well.

When they found her one day, dead in her bed, she looked beautiful, peacefully asleep, the essence of youth gone too quickly. They found white towels, Gray’s Anatomy, and the Ginsu knife on her bedstand but were puzzled for there were no traces of murder or blood. The medical examiner was let go shortly after he declared her dead of a heart attack at age a hundred and two. They told him he was getting too old and probably senile.