SV GIRI, MD, Aging and awards

Seeing President Biden drop out of the presidential race was positive and negative for me. Yes he was dramatically neurocognitively declining over the last years and it was difficulty to hear this explained as studdering.  Bruce Willis has declined to.  So did Joni Mitchel but she’s made a come back.  I’m of an age when so many of my cohort are retiring, declining or even dying. I’ve lost too many family and close friends in the last few years. It’s cause for grief and for anxiety for my self. I’m a great one for denial of death having worked in the midst of death and being as prone to the next for magical thinking.  

My father was an engineer and in charge of the Matthew Conveyor installation at the Winnipeg Airport and Winnipeg Post Office. It was the reason my family moved to Winnipeg. Dad had 150 men working under him in those years.  Yet post retirement, downsized front house to apartment with Mom, having survived an MI and near death experience after prostate surgery, he was no longer robust and the powerful as the man I’d known him.  There was a coffee room and activity room where he stayed.  A man my father had fired for drunkenness and theft on the job was given an apartment in the same building my father was in. Mom and he had paid significantly for him to be there and always paid more than their share.  I never knew either to not work. Yet now this former street person was harassing my father whenever he went to the cafe.  My father stopped going to the cafe and my mother told me of this.  What he was most upset with she said, “He keeps calling him a liar and says he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t work on the PO or Airport.  He bullies your  dad and calls him names and your father just returns to the apartment”  

I made a trip to the cafe and spoke to the dozen or so elderly people there and confronted this man telling them all what a great father my dad had been, how he was an engineer and was in charge of the installation of the conveyor systems for the Airport and Post office , how I’d worked for him as a Millwright’s helper and how I was a doctor and specialists and taught at the university thanks to what a great father I’ d had.  I also said my parents raised me to tell the truth and I’d never heard either of them lie.”  I concluded by saying that I’d heard my father’s good name and reputation had been questioned and my father is a humble man who doesn’t care to be in the company of liars and near do wells.  

My mom told me after that this man who’d been the charm of the old ladies was thereafter ostracized and dad eventually returned to having their morning coffee there visiting with their friends. The old sociopath and liar apparently more often than not left when my father came but never again disparaged my father or called him a liar. 

I felt I did the right things, restoring order and protecting my father in his old age God knows he protected me endless times when I was young and indeed more often than not my worst enemy.  That he didn’t kill me when I was a teen ager was the coin that no doubt contributed to his going straight to heaven when he died.  There was no doubt that Mom was headed there but Dad, having been an Air Force Veteran through WWii expressed doubts about his own final destination.

Now I’m selling my sail boat. It was my life and identity for many years, learning all the navigation skills, sailing skills and boat maintenance and engine repairs, communication involved in off shore blue water sailing, my passion after and parallel to my medical training and speciality and sub speciality training.  I am selling the sailboat now.  Soon I’ll be without it and like my friend who lost his license after a stroke so can’t drive his truck, I’m feeling the future closing in on me.  

Younger I’ve heard people who are couch coaches and athletes and dr. Google specialists tell me “I don’t know anything”.  It’s that kind of world today.  People are being given awards and titles without having earned them. Indeed the new DEI , diversity, equity and inclusion designativions are being called ‘Did not earn it’.  Working with the military I had to address the growing issue of ‘stolen glory’, men and women claiming they had served and were wounded in wars that took place far from their couches and little minds.  The professors I know are having increasing problems with fraud.  I imagine Joe Biden telling people in the nursing home that he was once the President of the United States of America and no one believing that.

It’s ego dropping away.  My back aches and I’m no longer a gymnast and dancer and though I hiked to tops of mountains and carried 60 lb packs on week long hike I could sneeze today and be contorted by a spasm,  So yes it’s challenging.

I mostly fear being told by a liar the likes of our lying near do well Prime minister and so many of the political and media sorts and the paid lying Goebels sort that I wasn’t a sailor and wasn’t a doctor and wasn’t who I was.   I imagine being ny father walking away from a favourite cafe where I’d once been accepte and laughed with friends because a bullies and criminal and thief moved in and I just didn’t want to leave my room. Indeed it’s sometimes hard to get out of my bed.  And who’s going to be there to say I was a good man who lived life and loved and served.  Service is not a part of communism the religion of aetheism.  The godless are only interested in what they can get for themself and project their greed onto all those others who believe in something more.  

I had a nightmare of being stripped of my degrees and accomplishment and body and memories and was standing alone and being accused of being a liar and I had no evidence to prove my past. None of the babies I’d delivered. None of those I’d helped get off drugs and alcohol, none of those I’d brought back to life rescuing them from disease and death for another day were there. I was there in that empty room disembodied and naked being a cussed .  Ex wife and old enemies.  There were the murderers I refused to sign out of jail and the pedophiles I put in jail and the malingers and liars I’d exposed.  All of these were accusing me of the voices like those who said I never did n’t do enough. Like the lovers who were never satisfied and the patients who felt I wasb’t perfect and yet I’d done all I could. And the storms at sea which I’d tried to avoid and the storms I’d past through only barely surviving and thinking how poor a sailor I was with broken equipment and exhaustion and the thought that someone from the Navy or Coast Guard would know better or an old offshore fisherman. I’ve never felt I knew enough or was enough and seemed constantly facing challenges at the limit of ny learning.  

I supposed that Jesus or a friend night be in that room I was an advocate for my father.  I suppose and hope and even pray that there is an advocate on that day of reckoning to save me from despair and sorrow.  It’s hard to let go of my sailboat and hard to see my friends retiring and muddling on barely.  

Thank you God for what I had, Thank you God for what I lost, Thank you God for what I have left