Meds Are "Body Edits"

Now I Feel Better.

A brief distraction….

Recently my primary care doctor, Asaf Cohen of Weill Cornell, recommended that I start taking a small daily dose of a statin to accommodate what has been a gradual increase in my annual cholesterol count.

Really? Me? I have gotten this far with what were deemed acceptable levels of cholesterol.

I pondered how best to absorb this latest indication that my being – body and mind – needed something other than what it could provide for itself.

And then I hit upon the answer. Medications are prescribed to be “body edits.” I have spent most of my adult life editing copy, my own and other people’s. The goal is to make the copy better. So, medications can be considered for what they are meant to be -- improvements. Take what is recommended and be sure you need it (I got a second opinion on statins). Too many medications or too much of them, like excessive editing, can make things worse rather than better.

I have added body edits to my small lexicon of words that signify the adding of years or decades to your life story in a way that deflates rather than explains the circumstances.

I have made the case before to rename retirement and children (over the age of majority) and to provide alternatives to old. Briefly, here again are my suggestions:

Mandatory retirement at the traditional age of sixty-five no longer makes sense. If you reach that marker and are essentially healthy and lucky, your expectation of longevity can be twenty years or even longer, or about one-third of your adulthood.

So call it repositioning – moving from a career or a job, but not necessarily your profession, to another stage, taking advantage of what has come before. Work life should be an ascent to the extent possible and then a gradual lessening of responsibility.
Expertise is an asset when properly deployed.

Repositioning can provide useful income, or it may be the way to stay engaged in a meaningful way with the world around you.

Retirement is a marketing concept for communities and such, where others in the cohort can spend time until, as with those Survival television shows, one by one they disappear.

Now children. When a civil fraud case in New York was filed against Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump, former attorney general William Barr denounced going after the former president’s children, evoking a mental image of Lego, Barbie, soccer practice, and good-night kisses.

That’s when I started using offspring for those we have parented who are now either parents themselves or past the age where they can get a drink in all fifty states without a phony ID.

Yes, they will always be your children and you will always be their mother or father. But calling Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric “children” is absurd.

And then there is old, defined in various ways as battered, decrepit, antique, and almost never meant as a compliment. Lately, I have noticed that the people who used to be called “Baby Boomers” are now simply “Boomers,” as ten thousand a day reach what has been the traditional retirement age.

Old will always have its place, but seniors is a legitimate term for people eligible for cheaper fares and already widely in use; seasoned can be applied to artifacts like furniture and jewelry and as a designation of respect. I wrote recently that President Biden’s ambition is being questioned because he has aged, and he is eighty.

What really matters are not the years accrued but capacity, endurance, and judgment, and that can be measured in a number of ways – especially if you are the president of the United States and have announced your intention to run again. Old is, can we agree, dismissive.

Most everyone takes some form of meds – a daily multi-vitamin, something for blood pressure, mood, or a cold. We continue to edit and curate our lives until we reach The End.