Recently, I unlocked a new fear.
It wasn’t the scene from Euphoria where a character is buried alive with a rattlesnake. Though, to be fair, that remains a towering pillar in my pantheon of anxieties, right alongside Indiana Jones’s phobia of snakes and hatred for fascists.
No, this fear was quieter; more insidious. Because it was inevitable.
I was afraid of getting old.
Like so many of my deeply rooted phobias, this one was delivered through someone else’s misfortune.
The moment Zayde passed away, Dad ceased using his name.
“Zayde is no longer on this earth with us,” he informed me gruffly one day over the phone. “There is only The Body.”
A few weeks later, once the crematorium had completed its administrative duties, The Body was re-categorized.
“I’m picking up The Remains with Bubbie,” Dad called me again to say.
I listened to this linguistic reduction like a Pokémon evolution in reverse. I half-expected the final stage to be a Line-Item Deduction on his tax return.
The Remains were delivered to Bubbie, who marked the end of her sixty-nine-year marriage with a profound gesture of closure: She shoved the plastic bag into the back of her closet behind her winter coats and went out.
“So, Zayde is just… sitting there?” I asked Dad while I was walking through Manhattan.
“The Remains,” he corrected me.
“What does she plan on doing with them?”
“I don’t know, but she needs to do something!” He shouted over his car’s Bluetooth. He was fleeing Pasadena for our beach house in Santa Barbara; a sanctuary that had spent the last few years serving as a literal shield against the relentless, tag-team medical complaints of my grandparents.
My Dad (an insurance lawyer whose brain operates entirely in clauses, liabilities and suing the city of Pasadena over unnecessary parking tickets) had spent the past couple of years obsessively bulletproofing the logistics of Zayde’s demise. For starters, he treated my grandfather’s declining health less like a slow human tragedy and more like a high-stakes corporate merger. He ran interference on healthcare plans, fiercely audited the will and trust, and even drove down to San Diego on a weekly basis just to look his own mortality in the eye and make sure the home-care nurses were clocking their hours. By the time it was over, Dad was profoundly proud of himself. There were absolutely no loose ends.
The only variable he hadn’t accounted for was Bubbie’s sheer, immovable defiance.
For years, Dad had tried to move my grandparents into a luxury assisted-living facility called Carlsbad by the Sea. It was right on the ocean, featured sprawling suites, and boasted a gourmet chef. It was essentially the UC San Diego freshman experience, but with better funding and fewer bongs. The catch was they only had an opening for one person. The plan was to induct Zayde first, which would legally bump Bubbie to the top of the spousal waitlist. In the meantime, she would visit.
“We’re not separating,” Bubbie snapped when Dad first proposed the idea to her.
Zayde, on the other hand, looked quietly devastated to miss out on the resort. He was ninety-four, but under the California sun, he had maintained a thick mane of snow-white hair, piercing blue eyes, and a deep tan. On the outside, he looked like a retired movie mogul; on the inside, he was being held together entirely by surgical tape, cortisone, and prayers. He was utterly exhausted by Bubbie hovering over him, policing his meals and monitoring his daily diabetes injections. He was ready to check into Carlsbad by the Sea, blend a margarita, and flirt aggressively with the local widows.
“He’s going, Mom,” Dad declared.
But before the contract was signed, Bubbie called Dad with the smug satisfaction of a grandmaster delivering checkmate.
“He’s not going, Michael. They won’t even take him.”
“What are you talking about?”
Bubbie had found a regulatory loophole. In the state of California, a residential facility can legally deny admission if its staff isn’t equipped to manage a specific, highly intensive diabetic regimen.
“Only I know how to manage his medicine,” she whispered triumphantly.
“Jesus Christ,” Dad muttered.
Zayde would not be the hot new neighbor on the boardwalk. I could practically hear the geriatric sigh of defeat echoing across all of the Pacific.
Then, Zayde died; and Bubbie entered her golden era.
While Dad paced our living room, losing his mind because Zayde’s earthly components were sitting behind a row of winter coats, Bubbie was having the time of her life. For a decade, the boundary between wife and nursemaid had been entirely erased. She had carried the heavy, dual identity of a romantic partner and a caregiver.
With the cloud lifted, she reverted entirely to herself. She slept in. She made her own breakfast. She drove into town, befriended the local baristas, and spent three hours at a café called The French Door reading novels and accepting free cookies from charmed twenty-somethings on their day-shifts.
“Oh, Jacqueline, you would love it,” she cheered over the phone when I called to check-in on her. “I’ll take you when come out to visit!”
I loved this for her. As a single woman in New York, I fiercely guarded my autonomy like a rabid Doberman. Sure, every now and then I think it would be nice to wander the American Wing of the Met with a romantic interest or share a beer over Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater. But over a decade of singlehood has taught me that I actually prefer my own schedule. I like going to restaurants alone. I like sitting in cafes reading a book, marching entirely to the beat of my own drum. Bubbie had caught a whiff of that exact same freedom, and she was ready to live her life again.
Dad, naturally, viewed this lifestyle shift as an act of administrative negligence. Zayde was, as he noted with increasing agitation, was just sitting there in the dark, while Bubbie was out somewhere eating quiche in the sunshine. He found it undignified.
Flush me down the toilet for all I care, Zayde had grumbled toward the end, a comment Dad might’ve took entirely too literally.
“What if I just go over there and flush him?” Dad called me randomly out of the blue with this idea. “The guy didn’t care. Besides, it’d be kinda funny.”
“Dad, you are so not flushing Zayde down the toilet. That is INSANE.”
Talk about undignified, right?
If this isn’t evidence enough that our parent’s generation 100% should go to therapy, then I don’t know what is.
Eventually, between the coastal drives and hitting her 10,000 daily steps, Bubbie settled on a plan for The Remains.
When I was a kid, my grandparents would take me to The Flower Fields in Carlsbad. It’s a world-famous fifty-five-acre working farm where stripes of vibrant Giant Tecolote Ranunculus run directly into the ocean. My grandparents had volunteered there during their early retirement, and toward the end, Zayde had grown to prefer plants to human beings anyway. It felt right that the flowers should have him now.
The fields are heavily protected, and scattering human ashes there is strictly illegal. However, Bubbie knew the director. And in an act of small-town administrative corruption, she agreed to open the gates an hour early in April and look the other way while the family did the deed.
I couldn’t fly out from New York, but Mom, Dad, my Aunt Kim, my Uncle Rick, and my cousins assembled on a gray, rain-slicked April morning.
I was in the middle of a yoga class at Equinox when my phone buzzed against the hardwood floor. It was Mom. I offered a sheepish, whispered apology to Johan, my French yoga instructor, and tiptoed out to the lobby.
“Hey honey. Are you busy?”
“Uh, kinda. I’m in the middle of yoga right now.” I answered. “What’s up?”
“Oh, well, you should go back and finish up your yoga class. You can call me back afterwards.”
“Mama, it’s fine. I can chat.”
“You sure?”
“Yes mom, Johan will just make me hold a plank for two minutes or something,” I joked.
“Okay,” she said. “Well… Bubbie is in the hospital right now.”
“WHAT?”
Mom possesses a philosophy, inherited from her years as a competitive cross-country runner, that physical exercise takes precedence over almost anything, including catastrophic news. I once took a week off from going to the gym and Mom looked at me the way a radiologist looks at a dark spot on a chest X-ray. Her response to me was, You sure, that’s a good idea honey? A week away from the gym is such a long time.
I was raised Jewish, so I never got to experience true Catholic guilt, but my Catholic mother makes up for it by instilling severe non-working-out guilt that it borders on the theological.
“But I can tell you more about it when you’re done with your workout,” Mom said nonchalantly.
“No, Mom!” I said. “What happened to Bubbie? Is she okay?”
As it turned out, the April rains had turned the pristine Flower Fields into a treacherous, low-viscosity marsh. Bubbie had marched through the gates, clutching Zayde’s ashes to her chest, entirely oblivious to the terrain. Seconds into walking through the gates of The Flower Fields, she slipped, collapsed into a patch of ranunculus, and broke her hip.
An ambulance was called. Half the family chased the ambulance to the hospital. Dad, left standing alone in the mud with a plastic bag of Zayde’s ashes and a ticking clock before the public gates actually opened, did the only logical thing an insurance lawyer could do.
He panic-dumped Zayde’s remains into a random, unnamed corner of the foliage and ran for the parking lot.
See ya later, Zayde! Wish we could stay, but Marcia went down, so we gotta scram!
Years ago, Zayde had issued a haunting ultimatum to Dad.
If anything happens to Marcia, I swear I will haunt you for the rest of your life!
To have her hip demolished by the topography before he could even be properly distributed felt like an act of deliberate, supernatural malice.
It wasn’t exactly the elegant goodbye we had envisioned. It felt less like a solemn memorial and more like a Curb Your Enthusiasm plotline.
Bubbie survived the surgery, but the prognosis was grim.
She would walk again, but the carefree days of wandering down to The French Door for a solo cookie and chatting with the baristas were over. She had lost her independence in the blink of an eye to gravity.
The terror hit me like an ice bath. I realized I was looking at a mirror of my own future.
One day, I will be eighty-eight!
One day, my muscle mass will evaporate!
I won’t be able to run through Central Park or complete a 10K!
That was when my own psychological spiral began.
Last summer, I got plantar fasciitis from failing to stretch after a light jog (a fact that I recognize reflects poorly on my character) and spent three months wearing a compression sock, hobbling up the stairs of my Upper East Side apartment like a highly dramatic pirate with gout. And even though that alone was a minor tendon issue, I felt old, broken, and profoundly discarded by the universe.
Mom already had two total hip replacements before the age of sixty-five from a lifetime of pounding the pavement. You can run all the marathons you want, but you cannot outrun Father Time. And clearly, that old bat was coming for my joints next!
A few weeks ago, I was crossing the street to Dumbo Market when an incredibly frail old man with a cane shuffled up next to me. In New York, you see these elderly gladiators everywhere; slowed down, sure, but still aggressively participating in the city’s chaos. They were the original grind.
He leaned in, his voice shaking. “Would you mind helping me cross the street?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I took his hand, and we performed the slowest, most deliberate crossing in the history of the borough. We were walking slow enough that I notice that both of his shoelaces were completely untied. When we reached the sidewalk, he squeezed my fingers and kissed the back of my hand.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Don’t get old like me.”
“Dude,” I said, entirely deadpan. “I’m trying.”
He laughed, I bent down to retie his shoelaces, and he shuffled away. But the interaction hung over me like a shroud. Was that going to be me one day? Braving the scary looking youths and hoping they’ll take pity on my brittle frame to help me cross the street?
I began to spiral again. I looked at the twenty-something girls in SoHo with their perfect, unlined skin and tiny waists, wondering when I stopped feeling like a shiny new object. I scrutinized my reflection in the mirror, searching for the moment my face would turn into the melting wax candle from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I panic-texted my friend Matt demanding he teach me how to use the Smith Machine at Equionx. I checked my Strava stats like a day-trader monitoring a crashing market.
In one of the episodes that I watched recently on The Pitt, (where I just watch predominately for Dr. Robby and imagine that he’s taking care of me and feeding me Jello from a hospital bed) there was a scene where a young doctor was patronizing an elderly patient, and the patient cut her off saying: “You know, every old person knows what it is to be young. But no young person can know what it is to be old.”
It’s the grand asymmetry of the human experience. Older people possess the memory of being young, allowing them to look back and naturally empathize with youth. Whereas the younger people are blind to the weight of physical decline until we are handed the bill.
When I finally started outdoor running in New York, it became a massive geographical awakening. My running friends Sophie and Juliana dragged me through the boroughs, showing me how Williamsburg bled into Greenpoint, and how massive Central Park actually was when you conquer Harlem Hill.
My running coaches, TomJohn and Natasha, taught me the kinetic tapestry of Manhattan; how Tribeca sits around the corner from Wall Street, how the East Village dissolves into Chinatown via Canal Street, and that Houston Street is the literal divide between NoHo and SoHo. Running made me feel like an authentic New Yorker. I no longer needed Google Maps to find a CVS; I remembered it because my lungs had burned past it on a Saturday morning between 6th and Spring Street.
My first race was a local 5K Turkey Trot, which I crushed in under thirty minutes purely motivated by the prospect of baked macaroni and cheese. But my first official 10K in Central Park earlier this month was a different kind of beast.
Training for this 10K taught me two things. The first, that I am shockingly fast in short, violent bursts. Second, my soul leaves my body the exact moment I cross the three-mile mark.
Sure enough, during the race, right at mile three, a sharp stitch pierced my side and I started slowing down. But as I jogged through the pain, I suddenly remembered something that Sophie had told me after our first outdoor run together.
"You don’t have to run,” she said to me. “You get to run.”
Ever since Bubbie’s accident, I’ve thought about those words all the time.
Because if Bubbie had my body right now, I bet she would be doing cartwheels on the pavement.
Sir Isaac Newton once posited that a body in motion stays in motion, while a body at rest stays at rest. I was the body in motion. Zayde was scattered in a random patch of commercial fertilizer, and Bubbie was alive, but at rest in a hospital bed. I would be her one day. But not today.
I finished the 10K in one hour and six minutes.
I called Bubbie right after I had concluded my race.
“You ran six miles!” Bubbie gasped over the phone from her rehab facility.
“Six point two to be exact.”
“Was it hard?”
“It was definitely hot that day,” I said. “Ninety degrees with some humidity.”
“Oh dear. I hope you drank a lot of water.”
“Don’t worry, I did,” I said. “Bubbie?”
“Yes?”
“If you were my age again, what would you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what would you do if your joints didn’t hurt, you hadn’t broken anything major and you were thirty-three again?”
“Well, I was already well into my thirties when I had your father. I was already raising three kids and teaching,” she said.
“Okay,” I asked. “But like, would you ever want to run a marathon?”
“Why would I run a marathon? Why would I do that to myself?” She asked incredulously.
“I don’t know. Don’t you ever miss the act of running?”
“I was never a runner to begin with, Jacqueline.” Then a pause. “Sweetie, you have to understand something. We didn’t really care for marathons or high performance gyms back in my day. Sure, we had gym classes and sometimes we would workout at The Y, but no cared that you ran a marathon. That’s not what was important. What was important was that you lived a good life.”
“And did you?” The question just kinda came out of me. “With Zayde?”
She sighed. “Zayde and I were married for sixty-nine years. But we really had sixty-four wonderful years together. Well, actually… maybe it was thirty-four.”
“Huh?”
“Look, think of it like this. Marriage is a workout in it of itself,” she said. “You asked me what I would do if I was thirty-three years old again? I would continue to be a good wife and mother to my husband and children.”
“And anything else?”
“No,” she said. “Except maybe visit New York City more often. But I do that when I look at your photos on social media. I’m just living vicariously through you.”
When she was a child in the 1950s, Bubbie’s mother (my Great-Grandma Faye) would take her on an eight-hour train ride from Rochester into the city. They would check into the Hotel Astor, buy custom school dresses from the twelve-story white marble Best & Co. flagship store on Fifth Avenue, and drink Frozen Hot Chocolates under the stained-glass Tiffany lamps at Serendipity. Even her honeymoon with Zayde had been a whirlwind of five Broadway shows, including The Music Man. She spent her whole life looking back at Manhattan as the place where she was young, beautiful, and unburdened.
Now, she was eighty-eight, bedridden, and watching me live her fantasy through Instagram.
So I supposed the question remains, when Father Time finally corners me at eighty-eight, and I’m looking back on my life with a titanium hip, and I’m old and crazy, what will I miss the most? It will be the simple, uncomplicated freedom of independent movement. Moving at my own pace, on my own schedule.
We aren’t going to look or feel like this forever. You can run until your sneakers melt, but the clock always wins. That thought isn’t supposed to depress you, though; it’s supposed to empower you. We are here now. Our bodies are currently functional, capable, and resilient. We should probably use them to do cool things; to hike, to lift, to run, to sprint, to have great sex before the joints dry up.
At the end of the day, true wealth isn’t material; it’s just living a long, healthy life in a vessel that obeys your commands.
Money can’t buy that.
Though a gym membership is definitely a great place to start.
It wasn’t the scene from Euphoria where a character is buried alive with a rattlesnake. Though, to be fair, that remains a towering pillar in my pantheon of anxieties, right alongside Indiana Jones’s phobia of snakes and hatred for fascists.
No, this fear was quieter; more insidious. Because it was inevitable.
I was afraid of getting old.
Like so many of my deeply rooted phobias, this one was delivered through someone else’s misfortune.
The moment Zayde passed away, Dad ceased using his name.
“Zayde is no longer on this earth with us,” he informed me gruffly one day over the phone. “There is only The Body.”
A few weeks later, once the crematorium had completed its administrative duties, The Body was re-categorized.
“I’m picking up The Remains with Bubbie,” Dad called me again to say.
I listened to this linguistic reduction like a Pokémon evolution in reverse. I half-expected the final stage to be a Line-Item Deduction on his tax return.
The Remains were delivered to Bubbie, who marked the end of her sixty-nine-year marriage with a profound gesture of closure: She shoved the plastic bag into the back of her closet behind her winter coats and went out.
“So, Zayde is just… sitting there?” I asked Dad while I was walking through Manhattan.
“The Remains,” he corrected me.
“What does she plan on doing with them?”
“I don’t know, but she needs to do something!” He shouted over his car’s Bluetooth. He was fleeing Pasadena for our beach house in Santa Barbara; a sanctuary that had spent the last few years serving as a literal shield against the relentless, tag-team medical complaints of my grandparents.
My Dad (an insurance lawyer whose brain operates entirely in clauses, liabilities and suing the city of Pasadena over unnecessary parking tickets) had spent the past couple of years obsessively bulletproofing the logistics of Zayde’s demise. For starters, he treated my grandfather’s declining health less like a slow human tragedy and more like a high-stakes corporate merger. He ran interference on healthcare plans, fiercely audited the will and trust, and even drove down to San Diego on a weekly basis just to look his own mortality in the eye and make sure the home-care nurses were clocking their hours. By the time it was over, Dad was profoundly proud of himself. There were absolutely no loose ends.
The only variable he hadn’t accounted for was Bubbie’s sheer, immovable defiance.
For years, Dad had tried to move my grandparents into a luxury assisted-living facility called Carlsbad by the Sea. It was right on the ocean, featured sprawling suites, and boasted a gourmet chef. It was essentially the UC San Diego freshman experience, but with better funding and fewer bongs. The catch was they only had an opening for one person. The plan was to induct Zayde first, which would legally bump Bubbie to the top of the spousal waitlist. In the meantime, she would visit.
“We’re not separating,” Bubbie snapped when Dad first proposed the idea to her.
Zayde, on the other hand, looked quietly devastated to miss out on the resort. He was ninety-four, but under the California sun, he had maintained a thick mane of snow-white hair, piercing blue eyes, and a deep tan. On the outside, he looked like a retired movie mogul; on the inside, he was being held together entirely by surgical tape, cortisone, and prayers. He was utterly exhausted by Bubbie hovering over him, policing his meals and monitoring his daily diabetes injections. He was ready to check into Carlsbad by the Sea, blend a margarita, and flirt aggressively with the local widows.
“He’s going, Mom,” Dad declared.
But before the contract was signed, Bubbie called Dad with the smug satisfaction of a grandmaster delivering checkmate.
“He’s not going, Michael. They won’t even take him.”
“What are you talking about?”
Bubbie had found a regulatory loophole. In the state of California, a residential facility can legally deny admission if its staff isn’t equipped to manage a specific, highly intensive diabetic regimen.
“Only I know how to manage his medicine,” she whispered triumphantly.
“Jesus Christ,” Dad muttered.
Zayde would not be the hot new neighbor on the boardwalk. I could practically hear the geriatric sigh of defeat echoing across all of the Pacific.
Then, Zayde died; and Bubbie entered her golden era.
While Dad paced our living room, losing his mind because Zayde’s earthly components were sitting behind a row of winter coats, Bubbie was having the time of her life. For a decade, the boundary between wife and nursemaid had been entirely erased. She had carried the heavy, dual identity of a romantic partner and a caregiver.
With the cloud lifted, she reverted entirely to herself. She slept in. She made her own breakfast. She drove into town, befriended the local baristas, and spent three hours at a café called The French Door reading novels and accepting free cookies from charmed twenty-somethings on their day-shifts.
“Oh, Jacqueline, you would love it,” she cheered over the phone when I called to check-in on her. “I’ll take you when come out to visit!”
I loved this for her. As a single woman in New York, I fiercely guarded my autonomy like a rabid Doberman. Sure, every now and then I think it would be nice to wander the American Wing of the Met with a romantic interest or share a beer over Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater. But over a decade of singlehood has taught me that I actually prefer my own schedule. I like going to restaurants alone. I like sitting in cafes reading a book, marching entirely to the beat of my own drum. Bubbie had caught a whiff of that exact same freedom, and she was ready to live her life again.
Dad, naturally, viewed this lifestyle shift as an act of administrative negligence. Zayde was, as he noted with increasing agitation, was just sitting there in the dark, while Bubbie was out somewhere eating quiche in the sunshine. He found it undignified.
Flush me down the toilet for all I care, Zayde had grumbled toward the end, a comment Dad might’ve took entirely too literally.
“What if I just go over there and flush him?” Dad called me randomly out of the blue with this idea. “The guy didn’t care. Besides, it’d be kinda funny.”
“Dad, you are so not flushing Zayde down the toilet. That is INSANE.”
Talk about undignified, right?
If this isn’t evidence enough that our parent’s generation 100% should go to therapy, then I don’t know what is.
Eventually, between the coastal drives and hitting her 10,000 daily steps, Bubbie settled on a plan for The Remains.
When I was a kid, my grandparents would take me to The Flower Fields in Carlsbad. It’s a world-famous fifty-five-acre working farm where stripes of vibrant Giant Tecolote Ranunculus run directly into the ocean. My grandparents had volunteered there during their early retirement, and toward the end, Zayde had grown to prefer plants to human beings anyway. It felt right that the flowers should have him now.
The fields are heavily protected, and scattering human ashes there is strictly illegal. However, Bubbie knew the director. And in an act of small-town administrative corruption, she agreed to open the gates an hour early in April and look the other way while the family did the deed.
I couldn’t fly out from New York, but Mom, Dad, my Aunt Kim, my Uncle Rick, and my cousins assembled on a gray, rain-slicked April morning.
I was in the middle of a yoga class at Equinox when my phone buzzed against the hardwood floor. It was Mom. I offered a sheepish, whispered apology to Johan, my French yoga instructor, and tiptoed out to the lobby.
“Hey honey. Are you busy?”
“Uh, kinda. I’m in the middle of yoga right now.” I answered. “What’s up?”
“Oh, well, you should go back and finish up your yoga class. You can call me back afterwards.”
“Mama, it’s fine. I can chat.”
“You sure?”
“Yes mom, Johan will just make me hold a plank for two minutes or something,” I joked.
“Okay,” she said. “Well… Bubbie is in the hospital right now.”
“WHAT?”
Mom possesses a philosophy, inherited from her years as a competitive cross-country runner, that physical exercise takes precedence over almost anything, including catastrophic news. I once took a week off from going to the gym and Mom looked at me the way a radiologist looks at a dark spot on a chest X-ray. Her response to me was, You sure, that’s a good idea honey? A week away from the gym is such a long time.
I was raised Jewish, so I never got to experience true Catholic guilt, but my Catholic mother makes up for it by instilling severe non-working-out guilt that it borders on the theological.
“But I can tell you more about it when you’re done with your workout,” Mom said nonchalantly.
“No, Mom!” I said. “What happened to Bubbie? Is she okay?”
As it turned out, the April rains had turned the pristine Flower Fields into a treacherous, low-viscosity marsh. Bubbie had marched through the gates, clutching Zayde’s ashes to her chest, entirely oblivious to the terrain. Seconds into walking through the gates of The Flower Fields, she slipped, collapsed into a patch of ranunculus, and broke her hip.
An ambulance was called. Half the family chased the ambulance to the hospital. Dad, left standing alone in the mud with a plastic bag of Zayde’s ashes and a ticking clock before the public gates actually opened, did the only logical thing an insurance lawyer could do.
He panic-dumped Zayde’s remains into a random, unnamed corner of the foliage and ran for the parking lot.
See ya later, Zayde! Wish we could stay, but Marcia went down, so we gotta scram!
Years ago, Zayde had issued a haunting ultimatum to Dad.
If anything happens to Marcia, I swear I will haunt you for the rest of your life!
To have her hip demolished by the topography before he could even be properly distributed felt like an act of deliberate, supernatural malice.
It wasn’t exactly the elegant goodbye we had envisioned. It felt less like a solemn memorial and more like a Curb Your Enthusiasm plotline.
Bubbie survived the surgery, but the prognosis was grim.
She would walk again, but the carefree days of wandering down to The French Door for a solo cookie and chatting with the baristas were over. She had lost her independence in the blink of an eye to gravity.
The terror hit me like an ice bath. I realized I was looking at a mirror of my own future.
One day, I will be eighty-eight!
One day, my muscle mass will evaporate!
I won’t be able to run through Central Park or complete a 10K!
That was when my own psychological spiral began.
Last summer, I got plantar fasciitis from failing to stretch after a light jog (a fact that I recognize reflects poorly on my character) and spent three months wearing a compression sock, hobbling up the stairs of my Upper East Side apartment like a highly dramatic pirate with gout. And even though that alone was a minor tendon issue, I felt old, broken, and profoundly discarded by the universe.
Mom already had two total hip replacements before the age of sixty-five from a lifetime of pounding the pavement. You can run all the marathons you want, but you cannot outrun Father Time. And clearly, that old bat was coming for my joints next!
A few weeks ago, I was crossing the street to Dumbo Market when an incredibly frail old man with a cane shuffled up next to me. In New York, you see these elderly gladiators everywhere; slowed down, sure, but still aggressively participating in the city’s chaos. They were the original grind.
He leaned in, his voice shaking. “Would you mind helping me cross the street?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I took his hand, and we performed the slowest, most deliberate crossing in the history of the borough. We were walking slow enough that I notice that both of his shoelaces were completely untied. When we reached the sidewalk, he squeezed my fingers and kissed the back of my hand.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Don’t get old like me.”
“Dude,” I said, entirely deadpan. “I’m trying.”
He laughed, I bent down to retie his shoelaces, and he shuffled away. But the interaction hung over me like a shroud. Was that going to be me one day? Braving the scary looking youths and hoping they’ll take pity on my brittle frame to help me cross the street?
I began to spiral again. I looked at the twenty-something girls in SoHo with their perfect, unlined skin and tiny waists, wondering when I stopped feeling like a shiny new object. I scrutinized my reflection in the mirror, searching for the moment my face would turn into the melting wax candle from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I panic-texted my friend Matt demanding he teach me how to use the Smith Machine at Equionx. I checked my Strava stats like a day-trader monitoring a crashing market.
In one of the episodes that I watched recently on The Pitt, (where I just watch predominately for Dr. Robby and imagine that he’s taking care of me and feeding me Jello from a hospital bed) there was a scene where a young doctor was patronizing an elderly patient, and the patient cut her off saying: “You know, every old person knows what it is to be young. But no young person can know what it is to be old.”
It’s the grand asymmetry of the human experience. Older people possess the memory of being young, allowing them to look back and naturally empathize with youth. Whereas the younger people are blind to the weight of physical decline until we are handed the bill.
When I finally started outdoor running in New York, it became a massive geographical awakening. My running friends Sophie and Juliana dragged me through the boroughs, showing me how Williamsburg bled into Greenpoint, and how massive Central Park actually was when you conquer Harlem Hill.
My running coaches, TomJohn and Natasha, taught me the kinetic tapestry of Manhattan; how Tribeca sits around the corner from Wall Street, how the East Village dissolves into Chinatown via Canal Street, and that Houston Street is the literal divide between NoHo and SoHo. Running made me feel like an authentic New Yorker. I no longer needed Google Maps to find a CVS; I remembered it because my lungs had burned past it on a Saturday morning between 6th and Spring Street.
My first race was a local 5K Turkey Trot, which I crushed in under thirty minutes purely motivated by the prospect of baked macaroni and cheese. But my first official 10K in Central Park earlier this month was a different kind of beast.
Training for this 10K taught me two things. The first, that I am shockingly fast in short, violent bursts. Second, my soul leaves my body the exact moment I cross the three-mile mark.
Sure enough, during the race, right at mile three, a sharp stitch pierced my side and I started slowing down. But as I jogged through the pain, I suddenly remembered something that Sophie had told me after our first outdoor run together.
"You don’t have to run,” she said to me. “You get to run.”
Ever since Bubbie’s accident, I’ve thought about those words all the time.
Because if Bubbie had my body right now, I bet she would be doing cartwheels on the pavement.
Sir Isaac Newton once posited that a body in motion stays in motion, while a body at rest stays at rest. I was the body in motion. Zayde was scattered in a random patch of commercial fertilizer, and Bubbie was alive, but at rest in a hospital bed. I would be her one day. But not today.
I finished the 10K in one hour and six minutes.
I called Bubbie right after I had concluded my race.
“You ran six miles!” Bubbie gasped over the phone from her rehab facility.
“Six point two to be exact.”
“Was it hard?”
“It was definitely hot that day,” I said. “Ninety degrees with some humidity.”
“Oh dear. I hope you drank a lot of water.”
“Don’t worry, I did,” I said. “Bubbie?”
“Yes?”
“If you were my age again, what would you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what would you do if your joints didn’t hurt, you hadn’t broken anything major and you were thirty-three again?”
“Well, I was already well into my thirties when I had your father. I was already raising three kids and teaching,” she said.
“Okay,” I asked. “But like, would you ever want to run a marathon?”
“Why would I run a marathon? Why would I do that to myself?” She asked incredulously.
“I don’t know. Don’t you ever miss the act of running?”
“I was never a runner to begin with, Jacqueline.” Then a pause. “Sweetie, you have to understand something. We didn’t really care for marathons or high performance gyms back in my day. Sure, we had gym classes and sometimes we would workout at The Y, but no cared that you ran a marathon. That’s not what was important. What was important was that you lived a good life.”
“And did you?” The question just kinda came out of me. “With Zayde?”
She sighed. “Zayde and I were married for sixty-nine years. But we really had sixty-four wonderful years together. Well, actually… maybe it was thirty-four.”
“Huh?”
“Look, think of it like this. Marriage is a workout in it of itself,” she said. “You asked me what I would do if I was thirty-three years old again? I would continue to be a good wife and mother to my husband and children.”
“And anything else?”
“No,” she said. “Except maybe visit New York City more often. But I do that when I look at your photos on social media. I’m just living vicariously through you.”
When she was a child in the 1950s, Bubbie’s mother (my Great-Grandma Faye) would take her on an eight-hour train ride from Rochester into the city. They would check into the Hotel Astor, buy custom school dresses from the twelve-story white marble Best & Co. flagship store on Fifth Avenue, and drink Frozen Hot Chocolates under the stained-glass Tiffany lamps at Serendipity. Even her honeymoon with Zayde had been a whirlwind of five Broadway shows, including The Music Man. She spent her whole life looking back at Manhattan as the place where she was young, beautiful, and unburdened.
Now, she was eighty-eight, bedridden, and watching me live her fantasy through Instagram.
So I supposed the question remains, when Father Time finally corners me at eighty-eight, and I’m looking back on my life with a titanium hip, and I’m old and crazy, what will I miss the most? It will be the simple, uncomplicated freedom of independent movement. Moving at my own pace, on my own schedule.
We aren’t going to look or feel like this forever. You can run until your sneakers melt, but the clock always wins. That thought isn’t supposed to depress you, though; it’s supposed to empower you. We are here now. Our bodies are currently functional, capable, and resilient. We should probably use them to do cool things; to hike, to lift, to run, to sprint, to have great sex before the joints dry up.
At the end of the day, true wealth isn’t material; it’s just living a long, healthy life in a vessel that obeys your commands.
Money can’t buy that.
Though a gym membership is definitely a great place to start.
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