I hate taking medicines.

Yet I know their worth.  I am not a holistic, naturalistic hippy-dippy nut.  I am not against taking medicines.  I just don't like to.  However, I have to.

I turned forty three years ago.  That was the year my body decided to fall apart.  My vision started getting blurry, so I had to give in to reading lenses, and my opthamologist recommended I take a fish oil supplement to help dryness.  I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism, so I am now forever taking synthroid, with an ever-increase dosage.  I'm on prescription-strength Prilosec.  Rashes and hair are turning up all over.  My gums are receding.  At forty years old I have one of those weekly pill boxes, each compartment filled to the brim between medicines, vitamins, and supplements.  It's a scary prospect.

As I fill the box each Saturday for the following week, I think about watching my grandfather sitting at the table filling his box, laying out a cloth and separating his pills.  Of course, to my young mind, I always envisioned him as much older, but he got sick and passed relatively young, so my memories have to be from his late fifties or early sixties.

And then I start to think about my mortality.  I'm certainly much closer now than I was twenty-plus years ago when I was out nearly every night at coffee shops (remember those - real independently-owned coffee shops?) or jumping around drinking and smoking at First Avenue in Minneapolis watching my favorite bands play with no ear protection (oh yeah, I've been living with tinnitus for years, too - thanks a lot, Moby!).  We all know the end is inevitable, but in those years it seems so far away; never mind it can happen to any of us any time.

It's not just my pill box that frightens me.  Having so many entertainers who I grew up with who really mean something to me pass away last year (Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Garry Shandling, Carrie Fisher) makes you pause.  I'm starting to have more relatives leave me in recent years, relatives I don't get to see very often because we're all scattered to the four corners of the country and I never plan well to get home to our annual reunion.  Both of my wife's parents passed two years ago. I haven't seen my own mother in over four years (if you don't count the rare Skype sessions), and she is starting to have some issues, although, thankfully, she should have plenty of time left in her, but she is getting on.

So I take the pills.  If not just for my own health and longevity, but so I can be around for a while for those who need me.  Selfishly, I need them more, because they may be the best daily medicine of all.