A Vignette

Shortness of breath, fatigue, achy joints…why? Maybe it’s because the man in the mirror is old

I HAVE HAD a tightness in my chest that I couldn’t explain. Recent heart tests showed no cause for concern. Maybe, I thought this morning, it is the anxiety meds or just the stress of Connie’s decline and approaching death, of either mind, body or both. I have been told that watching someone you love die a little more each day can do that to you.

Then this morning I looked in the mirror and said “Oh. That’s it.”

I was staring at an old man. Reddish face, wrinkles all capped by a crown of white and thought “that old man looks a lot like me.” It was me. I am old.

It also dawned on me that our daughter has a birthday coming up next weekend – 57. How can that be?

As I looked at the old man in the mirror, head perched on a body gone too much to fat, I remembered my mother.

She once told me she was startled some days to look into the mirror with her still-young girl’s mind and see an old woman staring back at her. She once said she never felt old until she looked into the mirror, or until she realized how old her children had become. She lived to be 93 but I had the feeling, toward her end, that she did not think much of the shell that was wrapped around the “she” that she knew, the “she” that played tennis and rode horses and picked up sticks in the yard after a storm.

I have no desire to reach her 93 years, nor my father’s 90. I have some things I want to do, some people and places I want to see and once done with that I am fine lying down in the darkness of my bedroom and letting the complete dark wrap me up and take me away.

In the meantime, I don’t like looking at the old man who has taken me over. Maybe it is time to grow a beard so I no longer lean into the mirror each day, seeing the spots, the dots and the wrinkles and the tiredness in the eyes.

But, a beard would not help and the mirror would still be there unless I drape it, just as the reality of time is here and now in the face of an old man. 

Rich Heiland is a retired journalist and semi-retired consultant, trainer and public speaker. During his journalism career he was a reporter, editor, publisher, college instructor, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year honoree. He lives in West Chester, PA and can be reached at [email protected].