Life on the Edge

I grew up with the specter of the Great Depression spread over mefrom my parents' generation, from their childhood stories. Both my mother and father had essentially been orphans. The hardscrabble life they had to lead: forgoing high school to help support their siblings; changing habitats to avoid rent; living in squalor while working in upscale environments; going without food for days at a time. Not knowing what the future held - not quite knowing if there would be a future.Although we now live in a weak approximation of a welfare state, many of us are living on that edge.Case in point: an 84-year-old woman has a small, shrinking bank account and a monthly social security check of $2,000. But her rent for an apartment she has occupied since she was 14 is $3,500. She is therefore drawing the difference from her dwindling savings. With no relationships to buffer her financial plight she will eventually be forced to move, a huge personal, emotional loss. She is actually wishing for death to intervene. She is not suicidal, just feeling her feet at the edge of a cliff.Conservatives are pushing to require employment for people on welfare, under the misguided and frankly contemptuous view of the poor as lazy or cheaters or both. This view is most pointedly and poignantly portrayed in a New York Times front page article by Édouard Louis, “Why My Father Voted for Le Pen” and in his new book, “Who Killed My Father?”Living on the edge comes to anyone suffering from a chronic illness, including diabetes, arthritis, emphysema, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, autism, ADHD, heart disease, and, of course, cancer.The health 'edge' places people in the variably responsive and responsible hands of health services, and the ever-more bleak and Kafkaesque health insurance beneficence. Older citizens both create increased demands for medical care and for health insurance benefits. Yet the incipient problems of aging push seniors to an ever-closer edge of terror..

"We might regard life as dull and, indeed, lifeless without its edges"

Death haunts us all, though rarely openly manifest. Death hides behind the backdrop of our daily lives. But sometimes, unexpectedly and at strange untimely moments, it cuts through, its edge sharp, mortal - leaving us, the survivors -- pained and scarred.I knew a young poet whose life had been punctuated by bouts of alcoholism and occasional brief lapses into heroin and cocaine addiction. He was famous for charging into friends' medicine cabinets and downing the contents of pill bottles, always with no serious consequences. Then one evening, while visiting a girlfriend's apartment and writing what would be his last poem, he poured her day's methadone dose into a belly already filled with beer. The two went to sleep, he saying how happy he felt. In the morning his girlfriend awoke next to the corpse of the poet. He had died, being physiologically naive to the lethal effects of a methadone overdose.We must all have had such sudden, ripping, unexpected tragedies even in our youth. Who can forget the smart, very pretty high school senior driving with a friend down a sunlit highway when her tire blew out? She stepped out of the driver's side only to be immediately smashed and killed by a passing car.Or the brilliant young dancer who took flight on an LSD trip, hurling himself out a tenth story window, eager to soar.These deaths leave our memories riddled with healed-over pain, like the scars of bullet holes.There is always the possibility of personal pain —physical or mental—that sometimes edges too close and sometimes keeps cutting and cutting. Sometimes the pain is debilitating and disabling. Sometimes it is tinged with darker intimations. Sometimes it is brief but lacerating. Sometimes it is chronic and either tolerable or insupportable, or both off-again-on-again.We might regard life as dull and, indeed, lifeless without its edges. Our literature and films touch on edges of every kind, tweaking our own memories and tickling our fantasies. The arts survive by portraying and epitomizing—hypostazing—all the edges life may deal out.In effect, 'edge' is the essence of drama. Dreams scrape at the edges of our memories. We live drifting on a calm sea that can turn turbulent and stormy and dash us against rocks, pull us down a long undertow, or wash us onto a warm beach.We never quite know what will hit us. Or when.

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How [Not] to Grow Old