Not a moral failing

I had the great good fortune to be able to spend my last undergraduate semester as part of the Wesleyan University Program in Germany. (It was called WUPG and pronounced Whoopie-Gee by all of the participants.) I was thirty-five years old at that time and, of course, much older than the rest of the students. My age and the fact that I was a working-class woman who had just recently fought her way out of homelessness and poverty created a bit of a barrier between me and the young, well-off students who were also in the program that semester. Still, I managed to make friends with a few of the students. One of them, a young woman named Caroline, and I decided to take a short trip to Amsterdam during our semester break.

Amsterdam was a joy. It was a miraculous blend of modern architecture and centuries-old houses wrapped around canals and bridges and brightly colored barges. The Dutch themselves were a breath of fresh air after spending months cheek-by-jowl with the more uptight Germans. As our adviser had told us matter-of-factly before we left on our trip: "The Dutch have been wacky for about a thousand years now." He had that right. Friendly, helpful, relaxed, prone to laughter - they made me feel completely at ease being on my own in a foreign city. And yet the memory that comes first to mind when I think of Amsterdam is at once both more personal and more distressing than anything surrounding it from that trip.

Caroline and I had just left Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, and we were waiting at the corner bus stop along with about five or six other people. I'd found the wax figures to be disturbing (I've never been a fan) and the staging to be dark and disorienting, so I was happy to be out in the sunshine again. Our little crowd was mixed group, but my attention was taken by the elderly (to my eyes then) man dressed to perfection in a cream-colored suit and vest; he was wearing a hat (also light-colored) and I remember that his hat band and his tie were the same color. He was very attractive, as were all the Dutch who we saw (we used to joke that they killed the unattractive at birth, apparently), and in my memory he looked a great deal like the dashing Peter O'Toole. No one else was paying much attention to him - until he suddenly, in distress, gripped the street post; his whole body stiffened and then shuddered slightly. And he began quietly to cry.

I looked down and saw a puddle of urine forming at his feet, and his elegant pants were showing wet streaks. He was devastated, humiliated. No one knew what to do for him, and we all looked away. I didn't know whether to go to him or not, if my acknowledging what happened would just embarrass him more. The younger people were blushing and looked as horrified as he was. I don't even remember what happened after that, whether he joined us on the bus or stayed there, holding onto the post, shaking and weeping. I just know that I've never forgotten it, and I've never recovered from the shame of not knowing what to do to help him in some way. The truth was that then I couldn't imagine what I would do in those circumstances. But now I can.

I'm incontinent. I have been for a few years. It's not a big, shameful secret; it's not the end of the world. It's just a fact of life for me and for many others. To some degree it's a part of aging; it's also exacerbated by the two major surgeries I've had that moved my bladder around and left it sensitive, and it's definitely not helped by lupus, which in my case manifests in muscle weakness and nerve damage. So - I pee when I'm not really intending to. Not always, but often enough that I have to take precautions.

I never leave the house to do even small errands without hitting the bathroom first. If I'm going to be on the road a great deal, I won't take the diuretic that I've been prescribed to help control hypertension caused by disease and medications, and I'll let myself get dehydrated while I'm out and about. I also wear incontinence pads - and may I say here that I give huge, thundering applause to whomever came up with that simple but priceless idea. (I wish that the Dutch gentleman I wrote about had had access to them, but it was a different time.)

I am on occasion frustrated or (yes, I'm going to say it) pissed off when I can't make it to a toilet in time, but I am never embarrassed or ashamed. Because it's biology, not lack of moral character. I have enough things that I do consciously that cause me rightfully to be embarrassed or ashamed; I'm not taking up my time adding to that list things that are beyond my control. And I hope that neither will any of you in similar circumstances. It comes with the territory of living, and I'd rather live with it than give up the territory.

If I could go back to that day, given the experience and understanding that age has brought, I'd like to think that I would calmly approach the man and help him to someplace where he could clean himself up and regain his composure. Then I'd try to reassure him that he was not alone, and that he'd done nothing worth remorse or shame. At least that's what I hope that I'd do.

"Biology is destiny" is a controversial statement in gender studies and politics. But it holds some truth when taken as an argument for the human condition while aging. These things will happen: your hair will gray, your skin will lose elasticity, your muscles will weaken, your joints will ache. You could also have hearing loss, vision loss, mobility loss, muscle loss. None of this or their comorbidities is a failing on your part. My flist is growing up and growing older. I just thought you should hear this from someone a little bit farther up the road from you.