Old Denny had looked forward to the warmth of the summer months, an escape from a cold Salem Spring that permeated his joints and bloated his energy bill. But at the June solstice a murderous lower respiratory infection found its way deep. The fever peaked at 103 on the fourth day, but he was so wrung out thereafter that the return of 98.7 didn’t feel much better.
Just as the unproductive cough loosened, an upper rear molar he’d nursed—cracked below the gum line and dormant for years—became unchewable upon. They yanked it out on a humid morning, leaving him with a hole in his head and warnings about dry socket. Implant? Probably not, the tooth wasn’t essential.
He and his lady friend rented a cabin in the rolling hills near Independence, Oregon for the July 4th holiday. Not wanting to spoil the getaway, he never once mentioned the mild vertigo, or the Advil he was taking. Denny had skirted true old age better than many, but as the summer of ’26 wore on he often imagined and joked about as “late-stage” youthfulness had reached its expiration date.
The grandchildren are the blessing amidst the aged foreshadowing. Their noise, energy, the ridiculous squabbles and relentless preoccupation with bodily functions. Even at their most feral, the girls can see he’s slowing down. It’s hard to get up off the floor. He keeps calling the cat he while they keep reminding that it’s a she. At a swim party, two-year-old Tate throws a forkful of cake—fork included—into the pool after his mother warns, “Don’t you dare throw that fork into the pool.” There’s the youth, the resistance, the future.
Denny keeps his flip-phone close, not because of any desirable connectivity, but because it’s become a Life-Alert device. Stories circulate in his orbit, cautionary tales seniors tell about old folks who’ve fallen. Some save themselves with grit or a device. Others survive with mobility issues. Some who fall alone never get up.
One morning he dreams that he’s awakened predawn when his dead father gets out of a bed they share to answer the doorbell. Who the hell is that? Denny thinks.
A female voice next to him in the bed, his mother, still living, in a senior care facility several miles away. Her voice is young, as she’d sounded in the 1960s, the prime of her life and the threshold of his adulthood.
“You don’t have to go, Denny,” she says. “You can stay right here with us.”
He wakes, glued to the mattress by a Cortisol spike. Fight or flight, something’s wrong. No, nothing’s really wrong, just get up.
Just get the fuck up