What’s worse: growing old—your body and mind fading along with your societal usefulness—or accepting that you won’t?

I wonder how many people feel, deeply, that they won’t live long enough to see old age.

Fatalism? Realism? Or just acceptance in a different hat?

To be clear, I’m not talking about the terminally ill. Or people who treat their bodies like carnival rides or rental cars and then act shocked when the car jumps the tracks or the engine throws a rod. I mean relatively healthy people. Average people. People who don’t stand out in a crowd. People housed in the meaty middle of the bell curve.

People like me.

I’m not exactly average. Not exceptional either. I have moments of above-averageness. Honestly, I don’t know what the hell I am. My obituary—if I get one—will probably be dry.

Since all we ever really have is today, allow me to describe myself as I am now. I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I don’t care what anyone thinks. Or maybe I do. That’s what my last therapist told me. Either way, these are just the facts as they exist in this case—bare naked on the table, ready for their post-mortem.

I was born in the Rust Belt of Ohio in 1974. Middle child of three. My parents were stereotypical; they married at eighteen and divorced when I was eight. Or nine. I don’t remember. I’ve been married for twenty-five years. No children. Bachelor’s degree. Master’s degree. Atheist.

Since 1998, I’ve worked for nine companies. I started two small businesses. Both unsuccessful—at least if you measure success by money, which is, inconveniently, how we tend to measure it.

My body has been unreliable for a long time.

In high school, I contracted a viral infection in my left eye that never really left me alone. Herpetic keratitis. Because naming something makes it better. It came back years later, left scars, required lifelong medication, and eventually convinced me to try surgery. Surgery that left me with an eye no better than before and a big stinking pile of regret.

The details are unpleasant and mostly beside the point. What matters is the lesson: the body can fail quietly, repeatedly, and without asking permission—and attempts to fix it sometimes just rearrange the damage.

That lesson sat with me for decades.

What I didn’t understand then—what took much longer to see—is that some failures don’t arrive as events. They come as companions.

I’ve had Ménière’s disease for most of my adult life. It announced itself softly in my late teens and early twenties: tinnitus in my right ear, a faint, high ringing that never shut off; a little hearing loss, easy to ignore. At the time, it felt like a defect, not a diagnosis. An annoyance. Something I could live with. Live around.

In my thirties, it stopped being polite.

The vertigo came in violent, unpredictable waves. The room didn’t spin so much as detach itself from physics. Bed spins without the drunken memories. And then the vomiting. The exhaustion. After each episode, more hearing disappeared, as if something inside me was crossing items off a to-do list. 

These attacks had no respect for schedules, dignity, or public spaces. I learned where the bathrooms were everywhere I went. I learned how to lie very still and wait for the world to unspin. 

This was also when the monster got a name. I had researched it enough. I was comfortable in my self-diagnosis. But I needed confirmation. So many tests. An entire day spent solving the puzzle. 

An otic hangman. A diagnosis by exclusion, but still.

Over time, my Meniere’s, more syndrome than disease, morphed again. I learned it always does. The bouts of vertigo became fewer, less dramatic but more insidious. Eventually, they faded into my background, but the damage settled in. My vestibular system—my sense of balance—was permanently impaired. 

What’s left is a constant unsteadiness, a low-grade negotiation with gravity that never quite resolves. Vestibular migraines with aura arrive without warning. My right ear is mostly deaf now. A hearing aid is part of my daily routine. Tinnitus lives in both ears, now, a permanent internal weather system.

Ménière’s isn’t something you beat. It’s something that evolves. It adapts. It teaches you how provisional your relationship with your own body really is. You can function, yes—but only by building your life around its uncertainty. By assuming the floor might tilt at any moment. That it’s not gone, just waiting.

This wasn’t a crisis. There was no ambulance. No dramatic before-and-after. Just a long education in mistrust.

So by the time January 2021 arrived, my body and I already had a history.

I had a transient ischemic attack—a TIA. A mini-stroke, as if smaller makes it friendlier. Such a cute little stroke. I called my wife. She ordered me to call 911. A quick ambulance ride later, it resolved on its own. I spent a day in the hospital. They ran tests. They shrugged, white-coated; it wasn’t their brain.

“Your scans appear normal.”
“It likely won’t happen again.”
“We don’t know what caused it.”

Cryptogenic, they called it. We have no fucking clue, wrapped in a beautiful word. As if shit in an origami crane stinks less.

I went home with paperwork—So You’ve Had a Stroke—a little fear, and the uneasy sense that I’d just been handed back something fragile without instructions. By the next morning, it already felt like something I might have exaggerated.

Life resumed. Mostly.

So did the anxiety. Now I could say I knew it.

In December of that same year, the universe circled back.

Per my last message…

This one was not subtle. An ischemic stroke. Vertebral artery dissection—cervical, C5–C6, cerebral consequences. Once the groin is involved, you know it’s serious. Thrombectomy. Three days in the hospital. Real symptoms. Real damage. A price tag north of $150,000, most of which insurance mercifully absorbed. Apparently, my life is expensive, even when it’s malfunctioning. We’re worth more when we’re malfunctioning.

This stroke had a cause.
A mechanism.
A name.
Agency.

This somehow made it worse.

The TIA taught me uncertainty. The stroke taught me scale. It taught me that reassurance is temporary, that “resolved” doesn’t mean safe, and that the body keeps score and forgives nothing.

But I survived.

Survived is a word that fights way above its weight class. It doesn’t promise stability. It just means I didn’t die that time.

I’ve felt like I wasn’t long for this world for as long as I can remember. A knot in the gut. A sense. People say we know our bodies better than anyone else. Maybe that’s true. Or perhaps we’re just good at building narratives that make anxiety feel earned.

Either way, this shadow has followed me my entire life. I can only see it out of the corner of my eye. It disappears when I try to look right at it.

Not that it matters much. I don’t want to grow old.

I know there are outliers—people who live to be a hundred. Minds intact. Independent. Mountain-climbing, marathon-running centenarians. One day alive, the next day gone.

I’m not one of those people.

What I fear isn’t death. It’s erosion. Biological breakdown. DNA makes mistakes every time it replicates, errors that add up. It’s the slow loss of agency—becoming a managed object instead of a person, kept alive efficiently and without dignity long after anything recognizable as a self has left the building.

My wife worked in these institutions for years. She saw what happens when decline is outsourced. When it becomes churn and profit. Once you’ve seen behind that curtain, longevity stops sounding like a blessing and starts sounding like a risk.

Some people can imagine aging alongside their partner. Growing old together. A graceful decline. Holding hands in side-by-side Hillroms.

I can’t.

What I’ve come to suspect is that this certainty—that I won’t live long enough to be old—isn’t prophecy. It’s armor. If I assume I won’t be an outlier, I don’t have to hope for it. And if I don’t hope for it, I don’t have to grieve when it doesn’t happen.

Maybe that’s pessimism. Maybe it’s pattern recognition. Maybe it’s just what coherence looks like when you try to make sense of a body that keeps breaking its promises.

I don’t have a conclusion. I’m not offering wisdom. I’m not arguing for despair.

I’m just describing what it’s like to live with the sense that the future is already shrinking—and refusing to lie about it. That there’s much more time behind me than in front.

For now, though, I’m still here. Still seeing—imperfectly. Still thinking—sometimes clearly. Still writing.

Goddammit.

This complicates my obituary.