INTIMATIONS OF USELESSNESS

Would you indulge me in this opportunity to wallow? I just received my Medicare card and first Social Security check. Maybe you’d wallow, too.

My mind for an eternal moment is lingering over the most irrational thoughts. So, please don’t tell me how much I still have to give to my family and friends and community. I know. Please don’t tell me how many productive years still lie ahead of me, if I would just exercise more often. I know. Please don’t tell me that, with deference to the poetry of Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra, “the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made.” I know.

You see, I have read the word as “disabled,” but through the dyslexia of depression, I have perceived the word as “useless.”

“Useless.” In my most lachrymose times, I look at the card and check, and feelings of uselessness overwhelm me. No, I have not been able to find gainful employment for seven years. “Experts” have calculated that I had more to gain by being declared “disabled” – too bipolar to hold down a real job among real people working for a real boss meeting real deadlines.

Were I 60 and retired, people would think me lucky to have days to commune with my keyboard, the dog, and what we’ll make for dinner. How many working stiffs would doubtlessly tell me they’d love to trade places, collect their check, chuck their boss?

But I am 60 and “disabled.” I have seen and even buried those who have faced disability and mortality far younger than I. Yet, now how cannot I feel it so acutely when the disability is mine?

Here’s the real rub: I know that my existence still makes a difference. People are still touched by the things I write. I can still pull together the critical mass of good-hearted, bleeding-hearted, and discontented people to make causes happen. I can still get a yuk out of a Biblically-relevant joke that I crack at my ragtag weekly Bible class.

Yet, it’s the finality that is killing me, boys – now having been declared “disabled” by social convention. No, no, don’t you see that I am perennially 16, a silly teenager still full of puns, double-entendres, goofy voices, and practical jokes. In my mind, I am immortal. Now, I face the reality of being named elderly at age 60.

How much of a man’s worth is bound up in his employability? Worth should come from ones ethereal, spiritual majesty, brother. Tell that to your preacher, not to someone whose nose is rubbed in a Medicare claim each time he visits his doc. “Take a little nap every afternoon,” he says. I need it, he says, for all the meds I’m taking. Then go get the mail and watch the cycle revolve around another letter from the Social Security office, all the while struggling with the thought that I am still far more hippie than Yanni.

I could make a friend, call a friend, but . . . I could go to the lunch for seniors at the synagogue, but . . . So damned much apoplectic self-pity, the weight of depression. Linda knows better, God bless her. The shrink will listen impassively, so long as I can afford the faux-empathy. The meds help me avoid sleeping fitfully until 4:00.

One day, rationality will once again prevail. Promise lies ahead. I know that the best is yet to be. I will again feel it again and even preach it. It’s just that mortality means to accept that a smile can occasionally just mask the fear, and even the feelings of uselessness, announcing that one has already arrived at the “last of life” for which the first was made.

Ah, feeling better already. Excuse me while I go back for another dessert.