*A Benediction from Bopa Rai*
Dear Girl,
I hear you’ve taken up gerontology —
not in theory alone,
but in practice:
where adult diapers stack beside medical notes,
where Parkinson’s doesn’t rhyme with anything poetic,
and where the seats are padded thrones of vanished kings.
And I smile.
Because you are a swimmer —
not a splasher, not a show-off,
but the kind who *knows how to exhale into water*,
who understands that the trick isn’t speed —
but rhythm.
The art of going forward
while the world pushes back.
You may find yourself one day
in a ward full of farts and forgotten birthdays,
charting the degrees of dignity
between a tremor and a smile.
They won’t tell you this in textbooks,
but old age is a country with no map.
Some walk into it backwards.
Some lie down and sprout roots.
Some resist with pomposity —
the Trumpian farts and Putinic constipation we’ve discussed —
some with quiet grace.
You’ll be asked to measure things:
frailty scales, Barthel Index, MMSE scores.
But remember this:
A woman once kissed her husband’s IV pole
because it had “been with him longer than anyone else.”
Another whispered to the nurse,
“When I forget your name, remind me I called you sunshine.”
There is transcendence here —
not loud like hymns,
but soft, like chlorinated echoes in a pool at dawn.
It lives in slowed speech,
in the blink of recognition across a fading face,
in the absurd courage of someone who still wants to button their own shirt
with trembling fingers.
You will feel helpless.
Good.
That means your heart is not yet encased in gloves.
You will ache.
Perfect.
You’ll know where to touch.
And you will float —
sometimes above it all,
sometimes inside it —
through the aches of bodies that once ran, danced, or fought wars.
Swim gently.
Carry their stories like sea salt in your hair.
You are not there to fix them.
You are there to accompany them across the shore
some of them will not return from.
That, dear swimmer,
is not medicine.
It is grace.
And you,
you are exactly the right size for it.
—
With folded hands, and creaky knees,
Bopa Rai
(Passenger, Observer, Occasional Howler)