It was probably unwise to dive into Gail Godwin’s new book, Getting to Know Death, while still nursing a head injury from my recent gravitational difficulties. I was already feeling a bit fragile, uncertain of my footing, and her sober meditation on the trials of advanced aging left me feeling old beyond my threescore and 12 years.
Perhaps it was karmic that Godwin’s memoir — sparked by the consequences of a serious fall — arrived in my hands a couple days after my own collapse in the bathroom. I had ordered the book weeks earlier, expecting a bit of literary escapism; it instead forced me to consider what had earlier been unthinkable: Could this be the point at which things begin to break down?
At 84, Godwin had lived alone in upstate New York for more than 20 years after her husband’s death. She was at work on her latest novel on June 6, 2022, when she decided the frail dogwood tree in her yard needed watering. She’d fallen a few times in recent years — without serious injury — so she grabbed her cane and headed outside as carefully as usual. She shuffled around to the side of the house, turned on the faucet, and considered her next move:
You muster resolve. Gravel lies in front of you. Step into it with cane, and turn right toward the little dogwood tree.
A wavering pause. A doubt, a loss of nerve. A wobble through space, and you’re falling forward.
WHAP.
You are down. Flat on your face in the gravel.
It has happened.
Your head and neck are twisted to the left.
Blood dripping onto the gravel.
Your head and shoulders are in the hot sun.
If you could crawl backward into the vinca shade you might lie down and take a little nap.
Godwin managed to crawl back into the house and call for help. In the emergency room, she learned that the fall had broken her neck and that she was too frail for surgery. She donned a neck brace and spent the next several weeks in a nursing home. Upon her release, she welcomed a small contingent of home healthcare aides into her life. She also began thinking about death and what she describes as “the desperate place,” in which three beliefs dominate: “I can’t see a way out of this. Things will not necessarily get better. This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.”
Relegated to the guest bedroom on the first floor of her home, Godwin muses on what her life would be like if she hadn’t gone out to water that dogwood. The temptation, of course, is to assume all would be well, but when she revisits some of her journal entries from earlier years, she’s not so sure. “I had been remembering a much more active person than I had been in years,” she writes.
“In those old journals, I found the me of two, three years ago asking whether I would ‘ever again have anything like my former energy,’” she notes, adding that she had often skipped meals back then and lounged around “completely still for what seemed hours.”
The morning after I finished reading Godwin’s book, I awoke feeling more or less prepared to climb on my bike and pedal across the river and up the hill to the office for a series of meetings. Three days had passed without incident since my bathroom collapse, so it seemed like an opportunity to return to normalcy.
Was it the slight wooziness I noticed when walking toward the back door that forced me to reconsider that choice, or was it a trace of paranoia nurtured by Godwin’s cautionary tale that magnified a sensation that may have been benign? Paranoia won out in the end, though I told myself it was simply an abundance of caution; I stayed home, suddenly wondering how to practice the mindfulness necessary to prevent the kind of accident that sent me to the ER without retreating from the activities that make life worth living.
There are volumes of research, after all, that demonstrate how our beliefs about growing old influence our overall health as we age. Cultivate some optimism about the future you and you’re more likely to find yourself healthier and happier in your later years. As Yale professor Becca Levy, PhD, puts it in her 2022 book, Breaking the Age Code, “A common theme of negative age beliefs is that debilitation in later life is inevitable. As a result, we found that people with negative age beliefs, compared to those with positive age beliefs, are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors, since they regard it as futile.”
The next morning, determined to get back on track, I returned to my normal morning meditation and workout routine, skimmed the sports section over breakfast, and cranked out some copy at my home office before biking a couple of miles north to my favorite coffee shop. It made me feel like I’ve not yet arrived at Godwin’s “desperate place,” though I think I’ll be a bit more cautious in the weeks and months ahead. And that’s probably a reasonable response to a frightening situation — and a prudent acknowledgement of my body’s limitations.
Godwin eventually recovered enough to continue her work, and though she doesn’t aspire to soaring heights of optimism, she freely expresses her appreciation for the people she’s met and the care she’s received as a result of her accident. It’s a gracious response to a harrowing situation, but I think it falls a little short of the baseline level of gratitude that I’ve come to embrace: It could’ve been worse.
