Growing Old

At fifty-four, I am past the mid-point of my life. If I am lucky enough to live as long as my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat, 48 years old was the mid-point of my life. My grandmother died in 2006 when she was 96, and I was 48 years old. My grandmother was 48 years old when I was born. If I were a numerologist, I might take comfort in those numbers. Since I am not, I have to take comfort elsewhere, beyond magical thinking. I keep a cut-out black and white image of my grandmother taped to the frame of my computer screen to remind me how to grow old gracefully, but I still wonder what growing old gracefully really means for me. For I am realizing that growing old gracefully is an individual experience and that not everyone will exhibit "grace" in the same way. I am on a journey to discover and to create my own way, and that way may be much like my grandmother's but different in some choices I make or behaviors I exhibit.

The topic of aging and how to approach one's physical and mental decline is on my mind because of an article I just read in Salon titled "Old Ladies who Didn't Love Me," by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The writer is thirty-six years old, a mother of a 14-month old baby, and she is obsessed with growing old. She begins to recognize that all the dreams of her youth will never be realized, that as one ages, doors close behind one. In this, I sympathized with the writer. I, too, had my children relatively late in life, in my early to mid-thirties, and thus child-rearing came right in the middle of my career and at the beginning of that stage where one is still fully engaged with the world while at the same time beginning to see the first signs of aging. And one's lovely children hammer home the contrast between youth and age.

Children are expert observers. One morning when we were dressing for the day--I was blow-drying my hair while my son was playing around at my feet--my son looked up at me in surprise. "Mama," he said, "you have spider webs in your hair!"

I looked quickly at my image in the mirror and saw the glint of, not spider webs but, gray hairs. I laughed and told my son that my hair was graying. I was thirty-three years old.

Some years later my daughter would look at my hands and pull up the skin on the top of one hand, noticing how loose it was, how it puckered briefly before assuming its duty as covering for the bones and veins underneath. Then she pulled at the skin on her own hand; it was firm, returning immediately to its previous form. She was fascinated with this difference between my aging skin and the elasticity of her own youthful skin.

So, yes, I sympathize with the writer who sees in her own child her approaching old age. Poets and philosophers have sung this song for millennia:

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw night, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them..."(Ecclesiastes 12:1) So the old man tells the young man.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/ Old Time is still a-flying,/ And this same flower that smiles today/ Tomorrow will be dying.... (Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time")

But then the writer loses me in her self-absorption. She joins an exercise swim class, not a class of people her own age, but a class of women many years older than she. This is not an accident. She has watched these women from her vantage point in the gym, where she contrasts her own youthfulness with their age: "I knew the class was populated by old women; I had a view of them from my treadmill, where I’d exercised back when I was young and could run for my health, bounding like a deer toward a television that only played shows about the Kardashians. Beyond that TV were the old ladies, splashing and working out."

The old ladies. She joins this group because she wants to use the backdrop of the old ladies's  wrinkled necks and sagging bottoms to validate her own youthfulness: "I would take water aerobics and emerge feeling young, grateful for the plump of my skin, the relative tightness of my jowls. We’d all be buoyant in the water, but only I would remain so as we dried off."

She sizes up her competition: " My poolies, the ones at my gym, had necks that had long since defied definition. Massive freckled cleavage became neck became chin became face and so on. They wore bathing caps with plastic flowers and swim suits with pointy foam bra cups. Underneath, their hair was teased and thinning in shades of copper and yellow."

Yet despite this self-absorbed motivation and unkind, condescending comparison, the writer expects these women to embrace her immediately, to be her wise friends who will shew away her fears of aging as a grandmother would shew away a child's fear of the dark. She expects them to be as interested in her life as her grandmother was, to subsume their own desires to her desire to be loved: "I'd remind the old ladies of their daughters. They’d pass on wisdom. I would confide that I didn’t think I could wear a miniskirt anymore, at my age. They would snort and hoot and tell me what a child I am. I’d realize how silly I’ve been. I would learn that I had plenty of time."

In a culture where youth is worshiped, perhaps it's not surprising that the writer expects these old women to worship her, too. She compares the less-than-friendly greetings of these old women to her yoga class, "where people applauded when you just showed up."  She seems to be a victim of our culture's promotion of self-esteem above self-knowledge, in which everyone gets a trophy no matter the level of performance.

And so she is crushed when these old women do not live up to her self-centered expectations: they hoot with laughter at her inability to keep up with them in their exercise routine, they point out her own imperfections (the unshaven legs) even as she is silently cataloging theirs (the sagging skin), their teasing has a mean edge to it. To her credit, the writer, in retrospect, admits her embarrassment and shame, though it is accompanied by self-pity. She is embarrassed because she suspects the old women realize, at least partially, her motivations for attending that particular exercise class and refuse to be diminished by the comparisons she is making between her youthful appearance and their old age. She is also shamed by her own self-absorption, for expecting that any old woman would embrace her as her grandmother did, wholly, without reservations, with immediate love and self-abnegation:

They were old people and they were tired of being called cute by young people. They had become mean. No one was safe here. My grandmother’s friends had seemed so much kinder, so much more, I don’t know, grandmotherly. Had it all been a show? Had it been a front for grandmothers everywhere? I had come here to seek the gratuitous validation that only grandmothers can provide, and learned it was only my grandmother who would provide it.

In the end, the writer swims alone, "under the cover of late afternoon."

And here, perhaps, is where the writer approaches something close to wisdom: that aging is an individual experience. We cannot expect our culture to validate our existence as we age, and while some cultures are more accepting of the elderly, all struggle in one way or another to deal with how to view those whose aging bodies remind us of our own mortality.  Also, old age does not necessarily bring wisdom; some people do, indeed, grow mean and bitter. The trick is discovering how to age without bitterness and how to accept one's own sadness over one's impending mortality without projecting that sadness onto others.

I have discovered that, for me, moving outside of myself, beyond introspection to action, helps me cope with aging. Imagining, planning, and physically creating gardens provide me with activities that exercise my mind and my body without reinforcing the tendency to dwell on what I cannot do or on regret for what I did or did not do when I was younger. Working with my hands is therapeutic, whether it be with a hoe or a crochet hook or a paint brush. This is what I learned from my grandmother, who gardened until she could no longer walk outside by herself, which was just a few months before she died. She crocheted until she could no longer see to knot the stitches. She engaged with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who visited her.

I also take photos to accompany haiku that I write in response to those photos. I have written poetry since I was in third grade, but haiku strips away poetic pretension or self-indulgence. Writing haiku-- traditional haiku--forces one to look at the thing itself and reflect on that object, perhaps to see connections between the object and oneself but not to wallow in the pool of one's self alone:

Basho's death poem:
   Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
   the withered fields.

Issa's dealing with his father's approaching death:
   Last time, I think,
I'll brush the flies
   from my father's face.

Issa's reflection on poverty:
   The holes in the wall
play the flute
   this autumn evening.

Haiku leave no room for self-pity.

Other people have different ways of coping with aging, of accepting the inevitable.

Once I asked my grandmother how it felt to grow old. She said that when she looked in the mirror, she didn't really recognize the face that stared back at her; she was still fifteen years old inside.

I look in the mirror and barely recognize the face staring back at me. The face that I remember as my own is captured in first-grade and seventh-grade photos of a young girl with an enigmatic smile. But this aging face IS mine. I acknowledge it and hope to shape those inevitable wrinkles into ones that exude grace and acceptance rather than bitterness and self-pity. Only time will tell.