Part One of Running Away to Colombia
I can get out of bed again.
That is not the same thing as being well.
Every morning begins with a negotiation.
Not with Michael. Not with Colombia. Not with doctors, banks, landlords or government offices.
With my body.
I lie still for a few moments and take inventory before I even open my eyes. What hurts today? What works? Which leg do I trust first? Then I roll onto my side, push myself upright and sit on the edge of the bed while my legs decide whether they intend to cooperate. They hang there like two employees who have reported for work but have not yet agreed to do any.
I reach for the urinal and empty my bladder, giving myself one less thing to think about when I finally test my ability to stand.
The walker waits beside the bed.
A year ago I would have seen it as defeat.
Today it’s equipment.
Glasses.
Hearing aids.
Phone.
Walker.
Age has a way of editing your definitions.
I am seventy years old, living in Bucaramanga, Colombia. A few weeks ago, I came home after ten days in a Colombian hospital, completely dependent on others for even my most basic needs. There, doctors performed a spinal procedure that reduced the pain enough for me to stand and walk again.
I even made a YouTube video called I Can Walk Again to celebrate my success.
The title wasn’t dishonest.
It just wasn’t complete.
Walking sounds binary. You either can or you can’t.
Reality is messier.
I can usually walk around our apartment with a walker. I can make coffee—if I am sitting in a wheeled chair. I can take a hot shower, carefully seated beneath the less-than-enthusiastic stream required for truly hot water from an electric showerhead. I can walk to the elevator and, on a good day, visit the porter in the lobby of our apartment building. Later in the day my body often loosens enough that I almost recognize the man I used to be.
Almost.
My right foot still refuses to do its full share of the work. My balance has developed opinions of its own. Every trip from one room to another begins with a small calculation. Is this worth the effort? What do I need to carry? Where can I sit if my legs decide they’ve had enough halfway there?
Still…
I can walk again.
That sentence deserves gratitude.
It just doesn’t tell the whole story.
For several months before the procedure, pain had become the organizing principle of my life. Six feet to the bathroom could feel like another continent. Getting out of bed required planning, leverage, medication, profanity, and sometimes help from Michael.
I remember screaming.
I remember watching Michael watch me.
There are few things harder than seeing someone you love unable to rescue you.
Oddly enough, I don’t remember the pain itself as clearly as I remember everything built around it. The pillows. The ice packs. The heating pads. The medications lined up like obedient little soldiers. Friends who accompanied me to appointments. Too many appointments. Translators. Wheelchairs. Waiting rooms.
Pain is strange that way.
While you’re living inside it, pain becomes the whole universe.
When it begins to retreat, memory quietly packs most of it away, leaving behind the logistics and the witnesses.
The procedure did not give me my old body back.
That body has left the building.
My spine is fused in places, narrowed in others, arthritic throughout and increasingly unwilling to negotiate in good faith. Rehabilitation may make me stronger. Physical therapy may improve my balance. Exercise may preserve abilities I still possess.
None of them are going to make me thirty-five again.
That’s disappointing.
It’s also liberating in strange ways I am still discovering.
Somewhere during the past year I stopped asking how to get back to normal.
I started asking a different question.
What gives me the most life now?
Sometimes the answer is a walker.
Sometimes I wonder if it might be a mobility scooter.
Sometimes it’s choosing to pay someone to help me with something I stubbornly insist I should still be able to do myself.
I’ve spent most of my life believing independence meant doing everything alone.
I’m beginning to suspect independence actually means deciding where help belongs.
That question is one of the reasons Michael and I moved to Colombia.
Not because we wanted an easier life.
Because we wanted a life that still felt possible.
And is it wrong to admit that exotic and exciting sounded pretty good to me, too?
We were approaching retirement in the United States watching healthcare costs, housing costs, insurance costs and ordinary living expenses steadily consume the margin that made retirement look like something other than financial endurance.
Then we asked ourselves a dangerous question.
What if our Social Security wasn’t too small?
What if we were simply living in the wrong country?
That question changed everything. It led us to sell almost everything we owned, reduce a lifetime to four airline suitcases and a small storage room, and leave the only country either of us had ever really called home.
People often assume this story is about escaping America.
It isn’t.
It’s about trying to build the best possible final chapter of our lives before time makes that decision for us.
So far…
Colombia has given us remarkable doctors.
Remarkable friends.
Remarkable kindness.
It has also given us challenges we never anticipated.
The Colombian peso strengthened against the dollar. Our rent increased. Medical problems multiplied. My body became more expensive than our financial plan had anticipated.
Life happened.
Which brings me to this essay.
I don’t know exactly where this series ends.
If I’ve learned anything during the past year, it’s that certainty is one of the first luxuries illness steals.
I do know this.
This is not a story about moving to Colombia.
Not really.
It’s about growing old.
It’s about loving one person for nearly half a century.
It’s about trying to build a meaningful life inside an increasingly unreliable body.
It’s about discovering what matters after many of the things that once defined success have quietly disappeared.
And, if you’ll permit me…
It’s about what comes next.
So welcome.
Come with us.
The adventure isn’t over.
It’s simply become more interesting than either of us expected.
Next: We Were Leaving
