Posts
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 physically? Emotionally? How does the world react to our 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 imagining 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 litany 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. Or 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.
