Here's to the Ladies who Lunch...

Last night I watched a documentary on Elaine Stritch, the indomitable glamourpuss whose voice went so far beyond gravelly that it was an entire glacier moraine. That shining Broadway star said she never used the world “old,” but insisted on “getting older” instead, since that applied to everyone alive in the world.

I'm stealing her description which from now on I'll use for myself, most of my friends, and a sizable segment of the world's population. To many of our counterparts in other countries, those of us getting older in the U.S. seem to have it all. But we're being failed in crucial ways, and we're not taking care of ourselves. We're not doing the research and we're not paying attention.

As the heat ratcheted up in this city, the usual warnings were issued, directed especially toward children and those who were getting older. Drink huge amounts of water and stay cool. Never mentioned in anything I have heard or read cautioned that we should maintain our salt intake.

If I hadn’t lived in Thailand, I would never give a thought to my own. Fish sauce is a staple in every Thai person’s diet, routinely added when cooking and as a condiment for almost everything that goes into that country’s mouth. Then there are things to which fish sauce can’t be added palatably, like orange juice, That drink is salted, heavily enough that my fingers often swelled after a couple of small bottles. And of course, popular antidotes to dehydration like Gatorade contain "electrolytes" which I’m certain are boosted with salt.

So I salt my food and I use fish sauce and I rarely think of why. This is a good thing because my blood pressure medication is a diuretic that flushes my body of minerals as efficiently as it does liquids. So do many of the medications prescribed to people who are getting older, most of whom have heeded the current heat warnings and have probably drunk more water than any aquatic mammal during these past weeks of abnormal sunlight and humidity.

And they probably didn’t use table salt, because they have been trained to be good patients who obey their physicians. Salt=bad is what those of us who are getting older have absorbed from medical wisdom. But not enough can make you close to crazy. Without it, people can become incoherent, weak, in pain from muscle cramps, and no doubt scared to death.

How many of us getting older die from obeying all the rules and ignoring warning signs while trying to be perfect? Maintaining our outer facades is paramount. No weakness or flaw should be permitted to appear. Not only is this a sure path toward extinction, it’s also a gateway to madness.

We all have our corners where we cling to some idea of perfection and as we get older, hiding what we perceive as imperfections can kill us. Secrets are deadly. When we refuse to admit that we are in pain, or suffer bouts of confusion, or teeter at times with the threat of losing our balance, or find it increasingly difficult to hear, or can't come up enough money to eat properly, we take our first steps down a dangerous road toward a miserable life's end.

Elaine Stritch was right. We are all getting older every damned day. And we are all beginning to die, one cell at a time. We are all wearing out. So what’s the big deal here? Do we think if we don’t talk about aging, nobody will notice? Do we think that dying is optional?
Attention. Mindfulness. Truth. Candor. Acceptance. Vigilance. Knowledge. The Buddha was right on all counts and his words need to echo loudest as we grow older. Denial will kill us faster than cigarettes. And since I'm still one of the Ladies who Lunch, (although I usually wait until Happy Hour), I’ll drink to that.