“Age is Just a Number”
“Age is Just a Number”
Yet, I’m living it. When in our twenties and thirties, we would load up the kids (those born to us and those we took in) and travel to my grandmother’s senior-living apartment in Florida. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, enjoyed our visits, enjoyed being around ‘young folk’ and bitterly complained that she was surrounded by old people. She never joined in with the myriad of activities available to her: bingo, cards, outings to town in an 15-seater old-people-mobile. She hated living with old people, with scheduled activities, and nurse check-ins. She refused to be babysat or to drink the kool-aid of Oldness.
As children, we grandkids would call her our modern grandma, as opposed to my father’s mother, who was our old-fashioned grandmother. I loved them both. My modern grandmother lived in a retirement village on the Suwannee River and her apartment was furnished in plastic mushroom-shaped lamps and mid-century modern couches and chairs. When we were young and she still drove, she loved to put the pedal-to-the-pedal and drive fast. She sent back food when we ate out at the Dixie Grill if it wasn’t to her liking, which it often wasn’t. She embarrassed my mother to no end. They loved each other, but were worlds apart in temperament and world views. I was too young to care that she was difficult and brash, often insensitive to others, and a racist although I didn’t know this until years later when she was moved into a nursing facility and her roommate was a black woman: “They’re dirty,” she said to me and my mother when we visited, sending my mother into paroxysms of shame and anger. To be fair, modern grandmother had slid into dementia by then, and it was the first and only time I ever heard her say such an awful falsehood.
Only once did I hear her acknowledge the feebleness of old age. She had traveled up to Chicago to visit and I was driving her around the city when I stopped to run into a store. She wanted to stay in the car. I put the car in park, but left it running. When I opened the car door to get out, she said, “Stop, don’t leave the keys in here. Someone will come and steal me and the car.” Surely, my fearless, modern grandmother would tongue-lash a prospective car thief until he/she would end their evil ways and join the peace corps in atonement. But she was conceding a feebleness that made her a target, or so she feared.
And just like that our roles flipped, I was the protector, she, the one in need of protection. At the time, I was pleased. I had moved from child to adult in her eyes, a strong woman capable of living in the big city and navigating possible robbers and miscreants. Capable of protecting her.
Now I’m approaching an age when I realize how easy it would be to push me down, incapacitate me, take whatever I have—though, of course, a mugger would be sorely disappointed as I have never ever (not even when I was much younger and working) had anything of monetary value on my person, or in my apartment, or in the bank, or anywhere. Nowadays traversing this world from daily walks around the block to road trips feels slightly precarious in a way they never did before and I see how easy it would be let fear shape and block the sense of adventure that I depend on to not lose hope. I don’t want to be afraid for my last twenty years and I don’t want to fear what’s next. After death.
Most of the time, I’m not. I’m too caught up with the here and now. Sometimes I even think of death as the biggest grand-finale adventure out there. A portal to the next higher-up adventure. Some days, a part of me is ready to pack my backpack and go now.
For, as I’m attached to it, this body’s high adventure days are waning, as a rapidly encroaching tide of aches and pains and mental lapses washes ashore my beach, The one resplendent with palm trees and hidden coves.
Homer told the story of Eos, a goddess who fell deeply in love with a mortal named Tithonus. She could not bare the thought of his dying while she lived on so she asked Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life, which Zeus did. But Eos had forgotten to ask for eternal youth too, so while Tithonus became immortal and could not die, he could still age. So he got older and older and older. As the centuries went by, his bones grew brittle, his muscles withered, his brain atrophied until his memories were wiped clean and thought escaped him. Eventually his body shrank until he was no bigger than a bug and Eos carried him about in her pocket often forgetting he was even there.
It’s a cautionary myth, but it’s also a rather quasi-scientific explanation of what would happen if we were immortal in these disposal bodies.
Age is not just a number. It’s a reality. But like all realities, we shape them with our how we think about them. So, while the realities of ageing is more than just a number, it’s also just one more adjustment to the constant change of this gift of Life. We have never stood still. We have changed from embryo to baby to child to teen to twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and it seems to me that each age has brought its challenges and brilliant explorations into wonder. If I was given the chance to do it all again the number one thing I would do, that I never did enough or as intentionally as I should, would be to stop, listen, and look carefully. So carefully.. Breathe this life in, everyday, every hour. Old age is teaching me patience, something I’ve always lacked. I’m so much smarter now.
I’ve never understood people who say that they regret nothing. I can find things to regret from this morning, yesterday, last week. My regrets of my past behavior—sins of commission and more importantly sins of omission—and ignorance would fill a library. I could easily get lost in the burden of remorse, but age has also taught me that this is a journey, a process toward transcendence from what was and what we were to what will be and what we will be. When we know better we do better. That’s a saying to grow old by.
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