Fierce Realities - The Meows and Roars of Growing Older
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Recently, I found myself rereading a chapter from The Lioness in Winter - Writing an Old Woman’s Life by Ann Burack-Weiss. The chapter, “Fierce with Reality,” was the inspiration for this post. The chapter was rich with ideas to reflect on. Two of the quotes, one by Doris Grumbach, “death arrives in installments,” and one by Alice Walker, "sit with the thought of erasing yourself" led to pages of journal notes. Journal reflections, glimpses into my recent life, and looking back over my own life in relation to where I am now, in The Precious Days, distilled into this piece. I hope you find something to reflect on, too.
Last month, my husband and I spent three appointments with a lawyer and more than a few agonizing hours of back and forth at home stressing over the biggest decision of our marriage. No, we’re not getting a divorce. We were planning our wills.
To say I squirmed in my seat at every appointment would be an understatement. I didn’t want to be there. It felt almost ghoulish. And every time I tried to silence all of the noise about heirs and assets pounding in my head, I would hear the Emily Dickinson verse, “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me –.”
Our lawyer didn’t want to accept my constant offering of “To Be Determined" as an answer to every question. Bank accounts, stocks, property all had to be itemized. An Executor and Power of Attorney designee had to be named. Who gets into the will, who is shut out. But as the days passed, the answers revealed themselves.
The final task to complete was the Advance Directive. Talk about being a document that is truly “fierce with reality.” What would my “end of life” wishes be? I envisioned myself strapped to a hospital bed, loaded down with tubes, or in the road with limbs crushed or severed in an accident, or in my basement suffering from a brain bleed after a fall from the treadmill. In these scenarios I saw myself as I am right now. None of my nightmare scenarios involved me at age 100, sitting in the lounge of the assisted living home, solicitous attendants making sure every visitor had enough information about me to marvel at my accomplishment. Here I am at 67 years old and I seldom envision myself as nearing-death-old. What’s that all about? Clearly, old is my future, but I guess I never thought that the death that would come with it was meant to be my destiny.
Remember in the blush of youth when death felt abstract and romantic? “Live fast, love hard, die young” we wrote in high school yearbooks, thinking it was cool. We had no clue about death. About the kind of death that comes from living a life out to its last days, organs shutting down, and the body giving out because, well, it’s just done. We thought we’d die tragically in our twenties because somehow that seemed, what? Better? More exciting? More rebelliously glamorous than imagining living to our 30s, 40s, 50s, or god-forbid, to the age of “positively ancient”? I remember when I was maybe 9 years old, we learned about measures of time like decades, centuries, and millenniums. I remember calculating that in the year 2057 I’d be 100 years old. That seemed impossible. Me? An old lady with white hair in a house dress and sensible shoes flying around in a jetpack? Intriguing to think of living like the Jetsons, but mostly silly. Childhood me rejected the space-age sounding year, its sci-fi trappings, and any possibility of my living to be a centenarian. Yes. Impossible.
Now, the impossible has kind of become my goal - minus the jet packs, and minus the tubes and severed limbs. I welcome the idea of an assisted living community room, planting myself next to the cheese plate, glass of wine in hand, jewelry jangling. Life of the party.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Now, winding down my 67th year, the daily reality is different. Most of the time I don’t feel old. I feel like I am just getting started on this aging journey. I’m on the installment plan for aging. Since retirement, every year has offered dividends. There are the slow mornings of coffee and lost-in-thought gazing at flowers, clouds, crimson leaves or falling snow. There is the space and time to read, to write, to enjoy time with my husband and friends, and to volunteer. The expectations placed on me are mine alone, and the clanging stress of the hustle and grind is an increasingly distant din. But there have also been a few penalties for withdrawal from decades in the work world and sanctions have been placed on my once youthful body. Now there is a struggle with a sense of purpose and relevance, wondering where the sexy went, and watching my skin sag - a time lapse with each reflection in the mirror. And there is an accelerated frequency of these “I’m not as young as I used to be" moments. They happen when I catch a full body glimpse of myself. Or when I decide I can do something by myself if I just put a little extra muscle into it. Or when I am with a group of younger women, and none of them seem to put much weight in my opinion. Neither side of the age ledger is cryptic or obscure, making it hard to ignore. Entries made are vibrant and affirming on one side and stark and foreboding on the other.
That ledger can feel like a harsh “book of life” at times. I vow not to erase anything on my record prematurely. “Aging” is one of the most important transactions with life I have ever experienced. Besides, there are plenty of others ready to do that erasing for me. As you grow old, younger people and society in general do a superb job of it for you ... blowing away the eraser dust of your aging personhood like some untidy inconvenience, as if your inevitable erasure, perhaps even your death were a shared goal.
So, yes, there is indeed a fierce reality in aging. You are increasingly ghosted by your past selves, while being thoroughly spooked and hounded by the specters of your future.
So I am not going to rush it. I am going to grow old. But … I will treat the word “old” in that pronouncement as a noun, rather than an adjective. I will grow old as one grows wisdom, nurtures a relationship, builds a practice, cultivates a garden, or develops a flexible framework. A flexible framework. Because the standard blueprint for living, at some point, ceases to yield fruit and the container breaks, as Florida Scott-Maxwell observed. So whether from the seedlings of my past or a petri dish filled with the quickening cells of the future (a future that perhaps I can still only imagine), and by taking tutelage from wiser women, I am going to grow a bespoke “old” that is uniquely suited to me…both fierce with reality and the gentle dreams of a future centenarian.
