When Spouses Outlive Spouses

Jeff does this very morose thing every time he goes on a trip. He leaves me as equipped as I can be for his not returning.
He vacuums, cleans the house as much as possible, tells me about upcoming money things (that he probably should have already mentioned, but that wouldn't have been on my radar anyhow) and we both, if we travel by air, send pictures of the location of where our cars are parked in case the other should need to retrieve it from the airport parking lot.

Jeff is genuinely morose about it - I'm more practical in my mindset. I'm thinking: "Hey, I took this picture of where I parked the car so I could find it when I get back. I'll share it with Jeff in case he needs the car for any reason between now and when I get back."

Also, the other thing Jeff says constantly is that I'm going to outlive him. He points out that most of the retired people are women living alone who have outlived their spouses. What he fails to realize is that these women are from a generation that didn't work outside the home. Many of the ones I've met never handled their finances -- it was just something that their husband always did. Now they've either had to take a crash course in their retirement investments and monthly income or leave their financial affairs to one of their adult children, usually the oldest son.

My grandmother out-lived my grandfather by decades. But the greatest stressors in her life were feeding a bunch of hungry teenage boys whatever they wanted like a short order cook. That was a fleeting point of time in her life and the rest of it was spent at Bible studies where she nourished her spiritual well-being and being surrounded by loving family. She traveled, tried all sorts of diets (mostly healthy and vitamin based...some hokey things like magnets in her shoes, too) and followed her passions and was a caretaker.

Compared to my corporate life, which she genuinely can not have imagined, she had a life with limited stress. I don't have to outline how being a working mom, with a husband who travels, in a male dominated corporate world where I need to do every twice or three times as better as my male counterparts to keep my job and climb. (Because climb, adapt, move or find a new job. You're like a shark, you need to keep moving and proving your worth.)

Travel, overtime, toxic and even abusive bosses, challenging work (which is both good and bad) have been just as (more?) stressful then my husband's career. It's not a contest, but he's had white male privilege and stability within a non-toxic work environment for nearly all of his career.

Not to say his life has been without stress. His reaction to stress included losing chunks of his hair. So, again, not a contest.

But my health is for shit these days. I was trying to figure out how old I am last night (yeah, your mid-to-late forties just kinda all blend together) and my helpful daughter who first shamed me for not just doing the math said: "You're not like a 46 year old. Your body is like...beyond 60 years old."

She's right. I have more medical conditions and medications than I could have ever imagined, even 5 years ago. I've already posted about how I take more than 20 pills a day. I don't want to and I'm sorely tempted to skip many of them...but I have physicians who would be very angry with me if I did.

I have a freakin' CPAP machine now. I can't sleep without a device on my face. (Or, I'm not supposed to, and as I just found out in a very creepy way, there are strangers tracking that I am wearing it and how many hours I'm wearing it and how many times I still stopping breathing each hour when a nurse called me up and talked to me about my data--which they can SEE.)

So my theory is this: Jeff's assumption that I'm going to outlive him and all his preparations as such ("Here's how you do this.. if I wasn't around you'd need to X, Y, Z) are unnecessary. Of the two of us I'm the one with the shitty body and looking like I won't make it to 55.

I've had doctors chastising me that I'm going to have a stroke any moment and devastate my family since I was in my late 30s. (Gee, thanks Doc!)

I'm still sorely tempted to stop taking every pill I'm taking every day. To just walk every day and eat as healthy as possible and leave life to its whims.
I'm having a hard time just letting age ravage me and leave me with age spots, fat around my middle and gray hair.

Part of me wants to "Rage, rage against the dying light" and the other part of me just wants to say F*CK it, let nature run its course.

The stressful job isn't going anywhere. Life changes aren't possible on the horizon. All I can do is take care of me to the best of my ability, with the limited time in my schedule and limited budget available to me to take care of minor things like age spots.

Sun screen, like everyone says after the fact, is what I should have worn.
Screw it. Maybe I like the sun on my face. Just not right now while I'm vainly paying a few hundred dollars to wipe out some age spots.