She tilted forward to the point where she was practically against my ear and hoarsely whispered, “For years I thought I was the only one with this problem! Now I hear about it everywhere.” This rangy woman with springy red hair was, to my surprise, suddenly the most animated I’d seen her all afternoon. I had just mentioned that I was doing some contract work for an adult diaper vendor and she immediately ran with the subject. She had a strange mixture of relief and reluctance written on her face.

We were sitting in some worn cafeteria chairs at a high school reunion neither of us thought we would manage to make. But here I was, seated beside my dear high school confidante, Sherry B. Why I had never made the effort to get in touch with her during the lapsed decades was beyond me. She was such a vibrant soul, despite the physical changes that were impossible to ignore. So many youthful friendships are dropped at the end of high school when everyone goes off in different directions, there was nothing unusual about this case either. But perhaps back when I was about 20 and my mother mentioned that Sherry had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, I just didn’t know what to do with the news and wouldn’t touch the distance between us. But here was Sherry with canes clipped to her arms and sporting the same old broad grin as ever.

It was as though certain aspects of time had stood still and we related to each other as easily as ever. We did the customary flip through each other’s family albums and gave a quick bio for each of our children. Then she asked me what I was doing now that the kids had pretty much flown the coop. That is how the subject of adult diapers worked into the conversation and she certainly sparked to it. It seemed like the practical aspects of managing incontinence was pretty much old hat to her by now, but there still was a deep need to talk about it with an old high school confidante, one who found the subject to be in her comfort zone.

“I can’t tell you what I went through up here,” she tapped her forehead with an angular finger, “when I first realized that peeing my pants was something I was simply going to have to live with. To lose control over something most babies master by the age of two and a half is downright frightening, not to mention humiliating.” She looked me square in the eye and said with a laugh, “I had to learn to let go of letting go and get on with the rest of my life. Thank goodness for the internet. Buying feminine products at the drugstore was one thing, buying adult diapers is another.”

“After all the pain and agony I went through at first, thinking I was the only one with this problem, now it seems everywhere in magazines and on television there are ads for incontinence products. And even you being the business. What gives with that?” she asked.

At that moment, my admiration for my dear long-neglected friend almost pushed me to tears. While listening to her talk, I had been imagining what it could possibly have been like for her, raising those three smiling, rowdy boys to young manhood as her photo album testified, never knowing next what wrench her MS would toss into the works. How dull and uncomplicated my life must have seemed to her in comparison. Instead she waited, genuinely wanting me to answer her question. So I indulged her with my usual professional breeze of statistics about the graying of America and the rising demand for adult diapers.

With a projected 147% increase of citizens 65 and older in the first half of this century, and with the promise of increased longevity, this means a lot more people have already begun to size up adult diapers than ever before. Incontinence can strike people from all walks of life and of all ages but it is the increase of an aging population that is bringing the topic to the public forefront. I assured Sherry that she was on the cutting edge of this wave because of her positive attitude and that she should not be shy about it. She should share her voice on the subject of incontinence. Start blogging or podcasting, getting the word out. I was on a roll, handing her PR assignments.

It was a good thing I stopped my selfish spiel when I did. Sherry was slumping slightly in her chair, like a wilting chrysanthemum. I realized how silly my little speech must have sounded to her, this woman who had just flown across the country, enduring the humiliation of airports while teetering between canes and wheelchairs and coping with incontinence. She was simply here to lay eyes on some familiar faces from long ago, from a time when she had far less cares. She was not looking for the PR assignment I had tried to hand her. A listening ear and a little help to the ladies room was what she needed right at the moment. She maneuvered into her wheel chair and asked me for some push power. “Just wheel it to the door and dump the cripple in,” she instructed. I stopped dead in my tracks, wondering if I had heard correctly. Then I saw her teasing grin. Attitude is indeed everything and Sherry’s spunk rules.

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