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----- Forwarded Message -----
From: ann turner <annpturner@gmail.com>
To: deantudor@yahoo.com <deantudor@yahoo.com>
Cc: Ann Tudor <atudor1958@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2025 at 01:00:44 p.m. EDT
Subject: Re: Fw: Once and for All plus Book List for June 2025 (attached)
Haha, thanks!
To: ann Tudor <atudor@pathcom.com>Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2025 at 11:21:47 a.m. EDTSubject: Once and for All plus Book List for June 2025 (attached)
Once and for All
Once and for all let's deal with this question of age, of being old,
becoming old. I was with a group of friends recently; our ages ranged
from 91 to maybe 65. That youngster of 65 had many things to talk
about besides age, but the rest of us? No matter where our sentence
started we ended up back at that irresistible topic of what it is like
to be as old as we are.
So many permutations: what does it feel like? How does the world react
to your oldness? Analyze the issue from the viewpoint of physical,
mental, emotional, and spiritual changes.
That's a lot of territory to cover in one little lunch party. Here's
the thing. It's all new. Wandering into this new land (not
voluntarily, I might add) separates us from everything else. I guess I
was more prescient than I knew when I wrote "Hesitating at the Gate"
and described (from my relatively young 70 years then) the border
between the Land of Old and the rest of life.
The hardest stumbling block is that things don't get better. Every
physical insult that befalls you becomes the new normal you. Things
don't get healed, you just get inured to them and accept them as a
part of life.
I remember a time (at 70) when I bemoaned the loss of words. I don't
talk about it as much now because the loss is on such a large scale,
so all-encompassing, that I can if I wish spend hours fretting over
the difficulty of finding a word I knew perfectly well in the previous
moment. The only thing to do is let go. Let go of your need for the
word or phrase or idea. Maybe it will come to you some other time.
This morning at 7 I lost and could not retrieve the name of the
daughter of a friend. I knew it began with C and had an O in it, but
Cordelia was all I came up with and that wasn't right. Just a few
sentences ago it came to me: Courtney. Blessings on you and all of us,
Courtney.
We inspire fear in the younger ones, I'm sure. Our children vacillate
between seeing us as immortal and all-powerful ("Mom, you will never
die") and dreading the day when we lose yet another of our important
faculties and become the dreaded thing: a burden. The one approach is
simply denial, the other is a form of catastrophizing.
Not to mention the physical changes that frighten off the young:
wrinkles, thin and wispy hair, bent and limping legs, groans upon
rising from a chair, thinning arms with pleated flesh that dangles,
ears that grow impossibly large, noses that become the focal point of
the face. No wonder they ask: where is my dear little grandmother?
As usual, I've wandered off the original topic as I imagined it and
have reduced the whole issue to a catalog of superficial ills. Not
what I wanted. What I was trying to convey was how very separated we
become, as old people, from everyone else. Our issues are not
comprehensible. Blame enters the picture: if she'd done the Wordle
puzzle every day she wouldn't be dealing with dementia now. If she'd
walked every single day the way we told her to, her legs would still
work.
Here I am at the end, still a long distance away from any final word.
But I'm done for the day.
