I Am Not Going Gently

I’m dying, I’m pretty sure.

Like turning the corner and falling down a flight of stairs you didn’t know existed, I have suddenly found myself bellyflopping into middle age. I’m forty-four. Yes, I know. I don’t know how it happened, either.

Here is a list of things I suddenly — suddenly! — can’t do:

• Fully extend my left knee.
• Read by the dim glow of my child’s nightlight.
• Enjoy animation that is edited too fast.

I joined a gym recently; exercise is the miracle cure, they say. But I had to leave a class halfway through because of my sudden ass pain. It turns out I aggravated my piriformis (I’m the one who’s aggravated, piriformis, you little drama queen) because it was overcompensating for my lack of core strength. So then I started doing at-home core exercises, the kind I learned in grad school (I have the type of career where one goes to grad school to learn about how you’re overutilizing Aristotle and underutilizing your transverse abdominis — theatre school, in other words), but it turns out that I’ve been overly relying on my sternocleidomastoids — me! — so I can’t do those core exercises correctly and must downshift yet again to pre-exercise exercises, so now I spend every morning lying on my back trying to lift my arms over my head gently — gently! — without triggering my upper trapezius.

But friends: my upper trapezius is triggered.

I am afraid of death. There, I said it. And lately I have felt the icy fingers of mortality grip me by the neck. I am doomed. I have maybe another fifty years, max.

I can already feel, through the computer screen, the growing irritation of my really old friends. Some of my really, really old friends — some of whom are forty-six or forty-seven — want to howl at me: “You think you’re old? Look at me! I can’t sit down without my special pillow! My elbow makes a clicking noise! I’ll never get that tooth back! You, Megan, have the skin of a thirty-eight year old, but me! I look like I’ve been left in the bath too long, which is hilarious, since I can’t take baths anymore because of my blood pressure and also the risk of slipping is too high! You don’t know my pain!”

It’s true. I don’t. But I will! That’s my point! And frankly, it’s worse for me than it is for you, because it’s me. I live in this body, this is my home. Other people’s bodies are an intellectual exercise, but my own body! It is all too real. And devastating.

My mother, who is seventy-nine and also afraid of death — she can do a three-minute headstand in her yoga class, she wants you to know — updates her will every ten days or so, just in case. I started to draw up a will five years ago with my now-ex-husband, but stalled out when I burst into tears at the lawyer’s office over the fate of my plays. My children have a long line of people waiting to care for them, but who will care about my plays? Who will protect my creative legacy? Sure, my plays range from “terrible” to “not bad,” but that’s my point! Only I care about them! They don’t make near enough money to justify any kind of trust. I can barely rate a Megan Gogerty Memorial Festival. If I’m lucky, a few of my talented actor friends will read out passages at my funeral. “Not bad,” the mourners will say. Please, let them edit me well.

I’m trying hard not to let my anxiety over the future steal my present joy. I’m trying to savor food, and tickle my children (gently, mama can’t bend that way), and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh while it still clings to my desiccated bones. I’m trying to have a sense of humor about it all.

My boyfriend — can an old lady have a boyfriend? Shouldn’t he be a lover or a companion? Are there no dignified choices? — is fifty, which is a number I didn’t know existed. He seems fine. He’s a theatre designer, so he builds things out of wood and uses tools, and sometimes his muscles twinge, but that goes with the territory. He thinks I’m quite young. He would. He’s robbing the cradle.

I want to age gracefully. I want to do everything gracefully: eat soup, and cross parking lots, and navigate tricky conversations where I’m not super sure of the other person’s name. I want to be like Helen Mirren, which is obviously impossible since I’m not British. (I bet her transverse abdominis is fire.) I want to understand my students’ cultural references and be one of those ladies who wear hats and hike in the woods. I want to be a crone, pulsing with life force and wisdom, who happens to have firm, high glutes.

My glutes are not firm. They’re overcompensating. As am I.