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Tremor

By Eulalia Benejam Cobb

My mother used to read me a story from a Catalan children’s book about a family—father, mother, little boy, and grandfather—who lived together in a big farmhouse. The grandfather was very old. He had no hair or teeth, and his hands shook so badly that one night he dropped his soup bowl and it shattered on the hearth. With that, his daughter-in-law had had enough. Not only was she expected to put up with her father-in-law, but now he was breaking her china. She asked her husband to make a wooden bowl for the old man, and from then on the grandfather slurped his soup out of the wooden bowl while the family ate out of regular dishes. Then one day the father found the boy out in the farmyard, whittling a block of wood. “What are you doing?” he asked. And his son answered, “I’m making a wooden bowl, for when you get old….”

I have been thinking about that grandfather because, although for now I still have teeth and hair, my body decided to mark its 80th birthday—which happened two months before the 2024 election—by developing a hand tremor. It’s the kind of shaking that causes doctors to shrug and mutter sentences starting with “as we age….” Coffee makes the tremor worse, but I am loath to give up the ten-minute, badly needed hit of joie de vivre that I get from my morning cup. Anxiety makes it worse too, which explains why, in the evening, it vanishes after two sips of wine. Other than causing death by embarrassment, this kind of shaking, known as “essential tremor,” is not deadly, but I dread the idea of a wooden bowl in my future.

I like the term “essential.” It conveys that my trembling comes not from any injury or disease, but issues from my very core, the depths of who I am at this moment. There are so many reasons to shake! Just at the time when my mind and body are starting to fall apart, when I really need the systems around me—the economy, say, or the healthcare system—to be functioning at their best, the country looks like it’s going down the tubes. I put on a reasonably cheerful face when I am around people, but my hands betray me.

I suspect that we all shake, whether inwardly or outwardly, as we age. Has there ever been a generation of elders who thought that the future looked rosy? Did the grandfather in the wooden bowl story shake for purely physical reasons, or did he shake because he heard the rumblings of the approaching Spanish Civil War? How did old people feel about the prospects of humanity when Hitler invaded Poland? The sense of imminent apocalypse gives every generation the shakes, but lately I’ve been wondering whether our  trembling is even more justified than that of our ancestors.

Trolling the web for tremor remedies that did not involve heavy-duty pharmaceuticals, I learned that clenching a fist for ten seconds repeatedly throughout the day can alleviate the trembling. I have been clenching practically non-stop since I read this, and it does help. I can mostly bring a cup of coffee to my lips without it knocking against my front teeth. Not only that, but I find a deep significance in the clenched fist gesture. It is the gesture of Rosie the Riveter, which gave women courage and hope during the darkest moments of WWII. It is the gesture of resistance, and the polar opposite of limp-wristed despair.

So I go through my days clenching my fists, reminding myself that, as Rosie put it, “we can do it!” We can survive until sanity returns to Washington. We can live as greenly as possible. We can be kind to each other and to the creatures around us.

And if all that fist clenching also saves me from having to eat out of a wooden bowl, I will not complain.

 

 

20 Responses

  1. Thanks for the warning – and the tip. Maybe if I start clenching my fist periodically during the day I could even stave it off! Today is my 76th birthday, and I don’t have a tremor yet.

    I type so many words daily – I wonder if that helps.

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  3. Lali, I have had essential tremor since my 50’s and as I was told, it gets worse as you age. I went to a specialist at NYU who suggested a medicine that didn’t work. I find a glass of wine is the best med but don’t take it usually till evening- occasionally at lunch eating out with others who don’t shake. At my doctor’s suggestion I got larger handled silverware and take B1 500 per day and they seem to help some but not totally. I feel your pain literally and it can be embarassing in social situations.
    Alice

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  4. My body has not been kind, although my hands are still steady enough for an honest account of a Bach cello concerto (the lute pieces are hopelessly beyond my competence). My 80 years have afflicted me with many other crosses to bear: cancer, heart disease, cardiac artery disease, and horrid arthritis which, through some angelic economy, does not affect my hands. Clenching my fists would remain a hollow gesture, but the condition of the country which through some joke of history I inhabit, does force me daily into a tooth cracking clenched jaw.

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      1. You are so right. I can unclench my jaw; it’s an act of the will. An anecdote: my beloved guitar teacher talked to me about breathing at least once a week for 18 years. I was so bad at remembering to breathe that she finally put little red lines on the score above the staff to indicate when I should take a breath. It was like magic; the breathing relaxed my torso and the sound improved enormously. I try to remember that, but I do get carried away by the engrenage of events that corrupts our daily life. I do know that the creeping Fascism we are facing in the US is not peculiar to this country, however the increasingly inhospitable attitudes towards difference are a very real, concrete concern. People actually die because of hatred and intolerance here and that is not the case everywhere. Nor is the number of firearms available or the sense of entitlement about using them to kill those suspected of curtailing your freedom. I know that I would be happier living elsewhere, Sweden or Denmark, but my marriage to Tom is more important and he still cares for aged relatives and we have our (his) daughter in Detroit. Nothing is simple, no matter how much we wish it were so.

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  5. Love your writing, Lali. After years of fighting the world’s ills ( and being very depressed about them), Pete Seeger performed joyfully at Obama’s inaugural and died not long after. I’ve always been glad he had that moment.

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  6. Thanks so much Lali. So good to have a clear description of changes of aging and one’s emotional reaction. The wine solution sounds congenial. And I’m going to dig out my statue of Rosie the Riveter; the clenched fist seems a perfect treatment for so many difficulties–and its right on hand!
    Jill

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