Irritability Begetting Irritability?

 

curmudgeonly - adj. - bad-tempered and negative (especially of an old person) (Google).

Can irritability beget irritability? Right about now, you are probably wondering what stimuli emanating from the dark, dank day worked mutually to motivate this question. Two, actually. The second, a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned stimulated the first, which involves yesterday's visit to nursing home. First, allow me to provide some context regarding the novel: Anthony, the romantic protagonist in the book, is drafted into World War I, leaving behind his frail, emotionally capricious wife Gloria. Almost immediately after seeing him off to bootcamp via a train disembarking from Grand Central, she returns to her lodgings at the Biltmore to write him a protracted letter of love and longing. The third person omniscient narrator includes the following, post epistle: "The Anthony of late, irritable, weak and poor, could do less than make her irritable in turn." After reading this, I thought of the aforementioned question's first stimulus, my adventure to an area nursing home to visit my ailing aunt, the last of the Mohicans a.k.a. the G.I. Generation, who had fallen in her kitchen two weeks ago. At the conclusion of three days in the hospital, her physicians could find nothing wrong with her; ergo, they deposited her into a rehabilitation clinic, formerly known in pre-P.C. times as a nursing home. 

Yesterday, upon my arrival at the facility, I braved the entrance requirements, similar to Ft. Knox's, but in the modern age of Covid, found her room, and then spent twenty minutes with my aunt and a jocund roommate who had no idea how long she had been at the home, which she termed "a prison." Ensconced in a wheelchair, my confused, glum aunt was slumped over a table littered with used Kleenex, presenting quite a different portrait than what I had viewed previously. At the beginning of the month, she had been nestled comfortably at home, fully cognizant of her surroundings, mainly lucid, and quite jovial. Unfortunately, her circumstances of late (poor treatment at the rehab center) set her on an emotional collision course within a mere 24 hours, terminating in her curmudgeonly, irritable attitude. Which I fought valiantly by interfusing one comically ironic comment after the next between the bouts of complaints that she hurled furiously and gratuitously at innocent me and the unsuspecting roommate. Because my aunt is borderline senile, she kept repeating the myriad criticisms, managing to duplicate the phrases with acute precision at given intervals. As a result, I started to lose the battle of positivity and began to feel irascible Impatience creeping in, which prompted me to depart abruptly with a promise of take-out meatloaf should I decide to revisit in the near future. With that, I discovered a panacea for all curmudgeons–edible cuisine preferably from a decent restaurant–as I was able to leave my aunt salivating with the vague semblance of a smile on her face.

When I arrived home, I relayed the anecdote to my daughter with a postscript of "If I ever turn into an irritable curmudgeon, please shoot me," providing a simple answer to the initial question: Can irritability beget irritability? Yes, it can, if you let it. And I did. Patience is a human virtue that I continue to work on as I walk through life. 

How about you? 

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