Aging: An Opinion | Psychology Today

I’m 62 years old. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m this old as I look back and wonder where all the time has gone. I’ve entered the decade in which my mother passed away — she died at 67 of pancreatic cancer. But as numerous people have pointed out to me, she smoked four packs of Lark cigarettes a day and worked seven days a week; I believe these were the coping mechanisms she used to deal with the severity of my mental illness. She was overweight most of the time, except when she stepped up her bulimia, and then she lost an excessive amount of weight in a short time. But she always gained it back. I can’t recall her ever going to a doctor. She must have been in a tremendous amount of pain when she sought medical help for what were the signs of the cancer.

My father passed away at 81 from sepsis. He didn’t take care of himself either, eschewing the doctor and the dentist. I remember his teeth were rotting out of his mouth and by the time we got him to the hospital — by the time he was willing to go because he was feeling so badly — so much was wrong that he never made it back home.

I, on the other hand, have been diagnosed with numerous medical conditions, including a stroke I had in 2018, asthma, migraines, coronary artery spasms, and undifferentiated connective tissue disease. Not to mention the severe mental illnesses I have dealt with for most of my life and have since recovered…