I often joke about how I feel old. My knees and back frequently remind me that I am no longer in my twenties. Staying up late will be punished by exhaustion and lack of focus the next day. Easy words and well-known names avoid the tip of my tongue in the most frustrating way at the most embarrassing times.
So, along with so many of my fellow aging millennials, I quip, “I’m too old for this shit” when confronted with anything taxing.
(I do this while simultaneously lamenting the struggles of “adulting”—home repairs, laundry, keeping gas in a car, and every other thing that our parents somehow did invisibly that feels daunting as it piles up.)
But this last week, for the first time in a long time, I said the words, “I’m too young for this.”
Last week, my boyfriend had a heart attack.
He’s older than me by around eight years. It’s enough of an age gap in middle age that I don’t really notice it, except when we listen to music or reminisce about our favorite shows growing up.
I joked that he’s “junior varsity old.” He isn’t on the “old team” yet, but he’s showing promise, dressing out with them, and things are looking good for the future.
That future hit him, sweating and aching, on Thanksgiving night.
I like a generous, fancy Thanksgiving table. I want my guests to know that they are treasured. I go full-blown Martha Stewart. Growing up, holidays were crowded, kids running all over, Chinet paper plates loaded down on laps, and loud conversations catching up with distant family.
But my grandma held my mom’s side together, and she’s gone on. The cousins all have families of their own—new in-laws host. My life has traded kids underfoot for the privilege of using breakable glassware and table linens.
So, Thanksgiving dinner was surrounded by me, Mom, my boyfriend, and a friend who’s adopted as “holiday family.” We invited others, but it was the four of us gracing the table. I worked for three days to clean my house, decorate my table, and cook for my family, so by the time I sat down to eat, my knees were screaming at me that, “You’re too old for this shit.”
We went around the table, saying what we were grateful for.
I toasted my gratitude for my family and beloved over a cranberry and champagne cocktail.
That night, he sat up in bed, and he didn’t feel well. Though I asked him several times, he wouldn’t go to the hospital, and I lay beside him, and I cried because I was so scared for him. “I’m too young for this,” whispered the most fearful part of my mind, and I shushed it.
I shushed it out of the superstitious feeling that if I dwelled on it too long, it might make it real.
Sunday, when he finally went to the emergency room, they confirmed a heart attack.
He was in the cardiac ICU or cardiac stepdown until Friday. I slept in his room until Wednesday, when I finally let myself go sleep in his apartment to try to get better rest than the nursing rounds, beeping machines, and pullout chair allowed.
He was discharged on Friday, pale, tired, and hopeful.
I still marvel to touch him.
His heart is a bit of a mess. It’s too big. It leaks. It has sustained some damage. It’s still got some blockages… This feels antithetical for a man who has the finest heart I have known, like finding out the Tin Woodsman’s pocket watch of a heart has cracked.
But his attitude remains as positive, placid, and upbeat as I have always known him to be. He’s gentle in spite of my fussing, and pleasant despite my protectiveness.
I love that my fears don’t touch him, even as his calm maddens me.
As I write this, the sun is coming up over his Kansas City apartment. It will be my second week in KC with him. After a rather excruciating cold snap while he was in the hospital, the weather is unseasonable for December again—in the forties and even fifties during the daytime. It has melted the snow that settled between Thanksgiving and the day his heart attack was diagnosed.
While he was hospitalized, I put a Christmas tree up in his apartment.
It gets dark early now, as early as five-thirty. The light grows long and dim so early it feels like bedtime by six or seven. So, I put up a Christmas tree while it was bitterly cold and lit it against the darkness. It felt like hope, like a promise to myself that he was coming home. He would see this tree, and he would smile. He would know that I had thought of him and believed in him and the capacity for healing.
I put up the Christmas tree with all the hope I could muster in that moment.
I’m too young for this, I thought, hanging the red, shiny ornaments. Red like the ornaments in the cardiac units. Red like the endless blood draws of the week. Red like love.
I held hope in my hands, and kept hanging it on tiny, fake fir branches, in anticipation of a tired smile.
Now, I glance out the window, and the sky is a clear, pale December blue. He’s up and stirring in the apartment, from yet another nap—winding the watch, allowing his heart the time and space to heal.
And I feel the sense of over-protectiveness waking up again. I want more than anything for him to be too young for this. I want to take back every joke about him being almost old. I want to hold him and cradle and protect his good and tender heart. I want to object to the way life is propelling time.
But I realize that life moves along at its own rhythms. I am not suddenly older when my knees ache nor younger when my heart does.
So, I look at the Christmas tree instead. I call his name. I sip coffee. And I love this moment, recognizing that it’s the only one I have right now, and I’m so grateful to have it.
