Death and Dental Hygiene
I have been going to the same dentist for almost 30 years now. Some time after I began seeing him, in my early thirties, a young lifetime of marginal dental hygiene was starting to manifest itself. Whether it was inadequate brushing, a voracious sweet tooth, or a total disregard for flossing, it had become time to start making payments on a past debt.
I usually was not in need of some urgent care, or facing some immediate dental emergency. My afflictions, although potentially serious, introduced themselves as gentlemen. Very gradually, they would make themselves known, and seemed willing to wait their turn until each one was sufficiently addressed and entertained, one at a time. Every year or so, about the time that my regular cleaning and checkup came due, when the question of whether I was experiencing any new pain or discomfort would inevitably come up – almost always, it had.
And, after a careful examination, my dentist – as skilled an artisan in his craft, if there ever was one – would calmly and meticulously explain what he thought was going on, and then, what the best course of action should be. This discussion would often end with him saying something like, “if this were my tooth, I think that’s what I would do”. He never pressured me in any way to accept his judgment, but I had no doubt as to what his opinion was and what he thought was necessary, if not essential, if I wanted to keep the tooth in question.
And, each problem, as novel as they seemed at first, would after a time become a deja vu reiteration of the same thing – an old cavity filling, of which I did indeed have a mouthful, had begun to deteriorate. This introduced decay and fracturing of the tooth, which resulted in increasing pain whenever I might suddenly bite down on something hard. The standard solution was to remove as little of the tooth as was necessary to secure a stable and decay-free enamel platform on which to place a dental crown.
This continued in this way over the years, until today, when I now have eight such crowns in place. Some of these have served me for 15-20 years. Others have had to have some additional work or had to be replaced, entirely. Whatever the case, today, I am quite happy with the work and am glad that I elected to have it all done. However, after the fourth or fifth one, I was starting to feel like this was going to become a regular occurrence, and that I was just going to have to get used to this as just a normal, and yearly, part of the process of growing older.
Then, when all the previously-cavitied teeth had all been fixed accordingly, I began to experience what become a new normal of having gone for what seems to be a considerable amount of time without complaint. The question (and answer) of whether I had been experiencing any pain or discomfort had become monotonously similar, and now are still monotonously similar, but in an entirely different way.
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I have also recently discovered, that at least a couple of very good friends that I had known in my younger years, had passed away. Unfortunately, even though I had loved them and had known many hours of fun and good conversation with them, through reasons that are too complex to dissect here, we had parted ways and I had not spoken to them in the many years since college.
Their deaths still came as quite a shock to me, however. I was saddened, both by the news itself and by the means by which it came to me. One friend’s demise I learned about after having Googled his name, during a reflective moment in which I was remembering the good times we once shared, and being suddenly and naturally curious as to his current whereabouts. Another’s, I came across through my alma mater’s monthly newsletter, with which I have recently been engaged in the – what some might deem – morbid practice of scanning the memorial notices which appear in the final pages of each issue, particularly in the graduation years nearest to my own.
The particularly troubling thing about all this is that neither of them were at what most would refer to as an “advanced age”, nor am I. Of course, none of us are/were in “spring chicken” category, either. Only one obituary mentioned the cause of death – a rare, genetic, and incurable malady. This left me to wonder if the other’s death might have been Covid-related. I may never know.
Still, even though it has been some time since these events came to my attention, I have had trouble shaking them off, and the reality of what they mean for me, and for all of us, keeps coming back to me at ordinary times and in mundane and commonplace ways.
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