THE KEEPERS

It’s been a thoughtful week.

My uncle passed away.  He was almost 93 years old and had lived a good, long life.  His health, and therefore his quality of life had been in significant decline in this past year.  There are all kinds of ways people rationalize this set of circumstances: “it’s a blessing”, “it was his time”, “he’s not suffering anymore”.  While all of these are strictly true, the sadness of the last goodbye is every bit as sad.  Maybe a more up-lifting approach is to be thankful that we had him for as long as we did.  It’s still sad, but helps us focus on the times we had together rather than the future we now face without him.

I know that my time this week has been spent reminiscing; revisiting the days of my childhood when he was a solid, every day presence in my life.  A few specific memories stand out of him – moments I keep close to my heart – but these memories are just the starting points for the bigger picture of those times and the people who were there, but are no longer here.

I’m in my mid sixties.  Lord only knows how this could be true, but the calendar keeps telling me the same thing.  The math works out.  Nine people call me grandma.  It’s difficult to come to grips with this when I never really aged past 26 inside my head, but times like this week do force me to confront aging on a more comprehensive level.  We – my siblings and cousins – now find ourselves very close to being the seniors of our family.  You can scoff at the idea of being in our sixties and seventies and still taking comfort that there are people we consider ‘older and wiser’ than us still on this earth, but it’s a true thing.  There is solace and consolation in knowing that we still have our elders to look up to.

In my immediate family we lost Mom and Dad the same year; Mom at Easter and Dad just before Christmas in 2004.  We were all grown and gone from home, it’s not like we were their dependants.  In fact, we all had busy lives of our own with families to care for, jobs to work at, bills to pay.

And yet, there was this unmistakable feeling of being orphaned.  Now who was I going to call to ask how long to cook the Christmas turkey?  Whose memory was I going to call on when I couldn’t quite remember which year Aunt Helen came to visit, or which neighbour it was that married so-and-so and moved out to B.C.?  Who was going to inspire me with new flowers to try in my gardens?  Over and over again during the next few years I would find myself, upon hearing of some neighbourhood news, thinking “I’ll have to call Dad.  He’d like to know that!”  Only to remember in the next instant that he wasn’t there anymore.  They were still the anchors they had always been in our lives, but the physical tie had been broken.  It leaves a person feeling adrift in the world.

It also elevated our feelings toward our aunts and uncles; we held them more dear.  They were our link to the past and each of them represented a portion of the foundation we were built on.  It’s not that they lived close and we saw them all the time, but it was comforting to know they were there.

Mom and Dad were the first of each of their families to go, but over the intervening years we have lost everyone on Mom’s side – each one leaving us a little the poorer for it.  With my Dad’s brother’s passing earlier this month my thoughts of a dwindling connection to family history have re-ignited.  That, and how dangerously close we are to being “The Elders” made even more urgent by the passing of his sister ten days later.  We are down to one uncle and two in-law aunties.  We are precariously close to elderhood.

Maybe it’s time to embrace this inevitable step, though.  What this family position really means is that we are the connecting link between a past we experienced and anyone in the present who might want to hear those stories.  As we gathered in the cemetery – thirty strong and Covid masked – to say our farewells it was reassuring to see traces of faces long gone, to see the kind eyes above the masks and the tall thin bodies, to hear Grandpa’s low voice and slow, measured speech.  Maybe we aren’t so much the elders as we are the keepers.

I kind of like the sounds of that.

 

HARNESSING FITBIT POWER

I got a Fitbit for Christmas, and as Martha Stewart used to say, that’s a good thing.

When these things first hit the market I thought they were nothing but an expensive accessory, a status symbol of sorts.  If I’m anything it’s deadly practical.  There is no way that wearing an overpriced, over glorified piece of technology on your wrist is going to make a person lose weight.  It was just one more battery to go dead.  One more slice of software to need upgrading.  One more charger to forget when you go somewhere.  One more thing that would be obsolete before you got home from the store.

All of these things are still true.  If a person is going to make a commitment to exercise more, that decision comes from their head, not their wrist.  You can’t buy your desired weight no matter how good your credit card is.

I struggle with my weight.  Well, actually, I struggle with my self image ... you know the “self” image projected on to me by movie stars, magazine covers, and fashion models.  I don’t look like them.  I might have briefly in my late teens, but since then I’ve looked like a regular human female; it’s a tough row to hoe.

I would estimate that over the past five decades I have swung from “I have to lose weight!” to “If I’m fit, what does it matter if my waist isn’t ten inches smaller than my chest and hips?” to “What I really need is to be ten inches taller!” to “I can live on 1000 calories a day.” To “This is me, just accept it!”

This past while though, as I still feel the need to be unsatisfied with my body, my focus has been more about keeping active – the old “use it or you’ll lose it” advice.  When you’re in your sixties this adage hits a lot closer to home.  Believe me, when your grand daughter wants you to make snow angels with her and your first thought is ‘if I get down there, will I be able to get back up?’ you know that the old body might need a little work.

My feelings toward Fitbits didn’t change overnight.  I guess you could say that I went from thinking them frivolous, to not having much of an opinion at all.  I’m just not the person who is going to notice if someone is wearing one, let alone be able to tell a new one from an old one – the desire for the latest fashion is lost on me.  It was a luncheon conversation with three women whose judgement I value highly that started me rethinking my stance on electronic fitness monitors.  Two of my friends already owned Fitbits and the third was preparing to buy one.  As we awaited our lunch she asked advice on what she was looking for. 

Instead of the high pressure sales pitch and the ‘can’t live without it’ propaganda, here were people whose opinions I respected talking about what they liked about their watch/fitness monitor.  Practical things like getting a buzz for texts or calls even when their phone was on mute (I didn’t even know they did that), having an accurate count of activity, being able to see charts and graphs of activity over time, and even monitoring sleep patterns.  I have to admit, I was intrigued.

Not so intrigued that I went out and bought one, though.  My cheapness still won out over my fading scepticism, but when my husband was stuck on what to get me for Christmas it was on my list.

I have to confess I really do like my new toy.  I spent Christmas morning feeding it my information so that it knew my stride length, and general unfitness level.  I even shared with it my goal weight and to its credit, it didn’t laugh.  I solemnly presided over the wi-fi marriage ceremony between my phone and watch and we have all marched forward toward 10,000 steps per day.

I say these things with self deprecation, after all it does seem like I’ve bought into this ‘owning a Fitbit will solve all your problems’ business, but it’s not working like that. 

It is working, though.  One of the goals is to do at least 250 steps per hour for nine hours of the day.  This is totally doable; easy peasy even.  And if I haven’t accomplished this at ten minutes to the hour it buzzes my wrist and tells me I have like 87 steps left.  A tiny but effective challenge to move.  It counts how many flights of stairs I do a day – again, I am challenged to see how many I can do.  And 10,000 steps amounts to only my regular day plus a two mile walk – provided the weather stays nice that isn’t even a hardship.

I stand by my mockery of an accessory being able to fix anyone’s life, that’s not what is happening here.  The decision comes from me, of course.  That’s the only way any self improvement plan can succeed.  The role of my Fitbit is making what I’m doing measurable.  I can actually see the kms I’ve walked, the stairs I’ve climbed, the minutes of cardio I’ve put in.  And, I can compare them to last week’s performance.  I am the most uncompetitive person on the planet when it comes to putting myself up against others, but me doing one better than the day before is my rendition of a win.  My progress, should I make any, will be just be between me and my Fitbit.

Maybe, by next winter I won’t have such serious reservations about snow angel activity.  I did make it up again without help – even have a picture to prove it