OLD
1/1/09

"If wrinkles must be written upon our brows,
let them not be written upon the heart."

––– James A. Garfield

"May you live all the days of your life."
––– Jonathan Swift 

I turned forty-nine today (I realize that I just committed a great sin, according to most of my women friends), and the above quotes came from two really great birthday cards that I received. When you hit a certain age, the cards start reflecting either good-natured jokes about old age (usually welcomed) or more sensitive reflections on the beauty of aging (never a bad idea, in this fragile, age-obsessed culture). These two gave me pause.

            We all know that at some point in time in our lives (if we aren't already there) we're going to have to make peace with aging. We're all destined for this reflection. At least if you're from this American culture. Other cultures embrace their elders as the venerated among them.  And that veneration being inherent in the very blood, there is no real need for reflection upon it, for it is welcomed as a crown. But in this culture, we have had the great misfortune, shaped and molded by our media, of nullifying our elderly and the very idea of growing old. We'd rather die young and leave a good-looking corpse than to wrinkle, lose hearing and bladder control, grow gray or bald, have to depend on our children for our care, and watch the sexual part of our identity slowly fade away. These are mortifying concepts to most Americans. And mortifying not because it means being closer to death, but because it means becoming society's invisible. How do you claim thick, opaque, rich visibility in a society that refuses to regard you?

And therefore, at least if you're a thoughtful and conscious human being, the time will come when you must reflect on aging, and make peace with it.

            I recently ended a long-term relationship with a much younger man. Though the reasons for our break-up had nothing to do with our age difference, I suddenly became profoundly preoccupied with the subject. It HAS to be that I'm an old broad now, I often thought, though my rational brain knew better. If anything, my beautiful former beau, and still great friend, was ridiculously proud of showing off his "older woman" as such, which was often way too flattering for this old sucker. And yet, this insidious paranoia.

So we amass our tricks for coping.

            I have often used my "old age" in a self-deprecating humor, a way to deflect my sense of grief over losing my youth. I am often told to stop denigrating myself this way. And while I understand the impulse in those who love me to encourage me to love myself, and I merely say "thank you, I will" in response, what I really want to do is tell them to wake up and smell the coping mechanism, and to please allow me that.

             And perhaps, as well, in other more subtle ways, the humor is also a way of embracing aging, of not having to desperately cling to youth, of refusing to view old as a dirty word.

 If we say it enough times, it'll lose its negative power, is undoubtedly what I'm really trying to manifest.

I have had a recent epiphany regarding this matter. (I love calling these little thoughts and discoveries epiphanies, because it automatically eliminates any contradictory position. There is sacredness to one's epiphany. You don't dare touch it.)  It is this:

            I can either yearn to be young again, a place to which I can never return, therefore the instinct to obsess over it is a complete, self-sabotaging waste of energy; or I can embrace the age I am by simply choosing to be better at it.

            One way I can accomplish this is to realize, and own, that my graying hairs, my creeping lethargy, my mid-section spread, my aches and pains that come from nowhere, do not belong to me; they belong to my body. And my body is not me; merely the house I live in (I have my Buddhist and Eastern-thought studies to thank for that implantation).

            And by being able to put that in its proper place, perhaps I stand the chance of forgiving myself these "afflictions," as I have viewed them. Of recognizing my own power to be empathetic to them, and to ultimately transform them from afflictions into trophies. Of reconciling both the flower and the thorns of my body. Of claiming that aging isn't a sentence - it is a call-to-arms. A call for me to wake up and be alert, to realize that the days ahead are more precious than the ones behind, to recognize that the awareness of time running out gives me (a naturally lazy person) a swift kick in the rear and tells me to move, to produce, to achieve, to make my mark and leave my legacy, and to make every moment in the remainder of this life one of quality and vibrancy. It means taking better care of myself, yet being forgiving of my body's DARING to get old.

            And it means not being afraid of that word. OLD. OLD. OLD. Because while it may invoke our Western-culture-indoctrinated images of fatter, slower, frailer, grayer, less sexy, invisible…it also, and more importantly, means Wisdom. Experience. Seasoning. 

            That was yesterday's epiphany. Today I woke up with a swollen toe and cursed God for making me forty-nine. 

"Old age is no place for sissies."

––– Bette Davis