An exercise in futility

I’m certain that the feeling of distress that envelops me as I sit here in the dentist’s chair has less to do with the dental work - which by the way I loathe, and more to do with the concept of futility. 

Today I am having a crown replaced. Dentist: We’ve found decay under one of your existing crowns. Me: Great. So the initial trauma of the crown is now compounded by crown part two. Oh, also, a cavity. The ineffectuality, the time given to repetition and routine, is that what causes me to bristle? The cumulative minutes, hours, days of time spent in brushing, flossing, rinsing, all leading up to this most recent episode of dental futility. I know myself well enough that the need of a re-crowning can’t be the only thing bothering me about this, my reaction is too intense. I decide to take this time while I am captive in this chair to try to understand. In the mean time, I instruct my tongue to stay far away from what remains of my tooth. Any accidental bump makes me slightly nauseous, as I consider what it must look like without it’s protective crown. 

A little over a year ago my 86 year old Grandmother lost her front tooth. It dropped out of her mouth, and I envision her catching it in her cupped hand, her long fingers closing around it as she gasped in horror. This was a front tooth, not to be taken lightly. She didn’t, she was so upset she didn’t leave her house until she could be seen at the dentist. Like a sentinel surrendering his post, with that loss my Grandmother became wholly vulnerable to aging. She reacted as I am sure anyone would in that kind of trauma, with an all out assault against time. And in doing so she replaced ALL of her teeth – with big, bright white shiny choppers. 

It follows that when you are fighting for the very idea of yourself that you will do anything you can to dig in and hold on. I try to look upon my Grandmother’s decision, which I found both upsetting and unsettling, with a kind eye. I am only beginning to have an understanding of what it means to have your youthfulness leave you. Leave you, abandon you, betray you, whichever, depends on my mood and the day (mid forties are just around the corner). I believe the choice to have an entirely new set of teeth attached to her head was both painful and humbling, not to mention very expensive, and sadly I don’t think there was any going back once the process had started. In the fight against aging – despite arming herself with a shiny new smile, she remains on the losing side. Her teeth look ill fitting, her speech is affected, and somehow her face has changed. It looks, well it looks like someone has stolen her real face. 

My Grandmother was a beauty for most of her life. I have the gallery wall in my house to prove it. She was a stunner at sixteen, a pinup girl in real life, frolicking on the sandy beaches of Lake Ontario. The photos I lovingly rescued from exhausted old picture albums came with scalloped edges and black and white glimpses into a another time. I treasure them, but I wonder if they make this process of letting go of youth and beauty even harder for her. She held on to her enchanting looks long after her contemporaries. It is perhaps her greatest achievement, as hers was not a mind for education, and she was raised in a time and place and culture and family that didn’t value her for much besides her looks. That makes this surrender even more poignant - no matter her late age. 

Your crown is ready! My dentist chimes, as she lowers the chair back down and prepares to attach it to what used to be a very nice tooth. Now, to everyone else, the change is invisible. But I know.

In spite of the pulling and continued requests to tap tap tap my teeth together, I begin to grasp what has affected me so. In two short hours this process has restored my tooth, and thereby some earlier rendition of me. Is this how my Grandmother felt? That with the help of those pearly whites she was able to be some younger version of herself? The drive to appear younger is not new, by any means. But lately something inside of me, or outside of me, or both, is trying to convince me that younger is better, and that is new. Analytically I understand that idea to be a fallacy, but emotionally it is harder to dismiss. Today a two hour process to a new tooth. Last week, a suggestion of fillers to plump up my cheeks in an effort to alleviate the dark circles under my eyes. A trick here, an add on there, all to mask the way we are aging. But besides being a temporary balm, it remains, ah, there it is – an exercise in futility. 

I am as old as I am, just like my Grandmother is. We can’t go back, and likely we wouldn’t really want to. We have hard earned crows feet and smile lines, bodies softened from having babies, wisdom showing on the tops of our hands, and more, so much more. I comfort myself with the knowledge that age is the great equalizer. We are all aging, even those in their twenties, there is no getting around that.  

Now, off to the gym.