#13. I See Old People.
From hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot: and thereby hangs a tale; Fifty, 'the youth of old age'; Ghosting this joint with some passion and some style. A ramble.
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.
― Maya Angelou
The people who were young in the 1970s, comfortably off and not born in a warzone, probably had the most fun in the history of human civilisation. They broke from tradition. They ate, drank and smoked what they wanted. They raised their children like wildflowers and watered them with sugary beverages. They knew how to have a good time! These people are now old, and many if not all suffer from their youthful excesses. The next generation, the one now entering middle age, cannot rest on the ample bosom of ignorance. We have the information. We got the memo. We get it all day, every day via WiFi. We work out, we meditate, we manage our stress and respect our circadian rhythms. Or at the very least we die trying. Compared to our parents, we are crashing bores. Damp squibs. Squares. But does it have to be this way? Is there a Middle Path? If not, could I forge one?
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
- Victor Hugo
As a young woman on a search for this path, I looked at middle-aged women to help me plan my journey. As the years went by I looked at much older women to help me plan my journey. In the mix were activists, artists, poets, lawyers, writers, movie stars, businesspeople and punk rockers. Some were extraordinary women like Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Jane Goodall, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinham, Patti Smith, and Slyvia Earle. Some were pop culture icons like Vivienne Westwood, Jane Fonda, Sophia Lauren, Yayoi Kusama and Iris Apfel. Some were matriarchs, homemakers, householders and teachers, right under my own nose amongst my mother and her peers. But what these women had in common, I came to realise, is that in ways obvious and inobvious, they reminded me of the red-shanked douc. In maroon trousers, blue eyeshadow and silver-grey glossy hair, like that primate, they seemed, among other things: unique, self-aware, wise, creative and fearless.
On Youth, Beauty.
When I was 6 my mother was 31 and by any standards, smokin’ hot. She greyed early so she dyed her hair because that’s what (most) women did. My parents did interesting and important things and their friends and colleagues reflected that. We grew up around ideas and adventure, houseguests, dogs and cats. There was always a party, a protest, a plan a-brewing. Through it all, my mother was irrepressibly, effortlessly glamorous. She wore heels under nightgowns. And could climb trees in them too, if required.
Years later, my sister went to Bryn Mawr College and imported into my life all manner of feminist theory. I read Friedan. I read Steinham. I read Audre Lorde. I read Naomi Woolfe’s The Beauty Myth. It made me mad. For myself, for all the women in my life. For women everywhere. My sister my mother and I asked ourselves some tough questions. And at some point, when there was no debate about the toxicity of the contents in that box, my mother stopped dyeing her hair. Unsurprisingly, she did it with some passion and some style.
Further along my Middle Path, I found Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls and Strong is the New Pretty in my children’s school library. I found Stronger Movement and Ageing Disgracefully on Instagram and Jessica Defino’s utterly brilliant The Unpublishable on Substack. I found that lifting heavy things was empowerment, in every possible way imaginable, and that it helped not only with bone density, glucose disposal, inflammation and other ageing-related concerns but also, gave good butt. I had finally internalised the cliche. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder was Me, Myself and I.
Rich cultures, patriarchal cultures, value thin women, like ours; poor ones value fat women. But all patriarchal cultures value weak women. So for women to become physically strong is very profound.
- Gloria Steinem
On Love, Loss.
And then there was 2020. On my phone screen, I saw the words ‘Mom’ and under it, ‘Missed Call ’. She tried me as they wheeled her into emergency surgery and before they took away her phone, her earrings, her tiny slippers, her handbag: everything that was not her. These were the days when we stripped at the front door when we came in from outside, wiped down the groceries when we got a delivery, and saw, when we closed our eyes at night, a spongey sphere with pom poms on it, coming to get us through the gaps in the shutters. Death was in the air. Death was on the air. It was, even Dickens would concede, the worst of times.
The cardiologist said heart failure. The surgeon said a 30% chance of survival. Give or take. Which would it be? We, her family, were locked outside the hospital courtesy Covid 19. We stood around in the parking lot staring like sheep. We went home and did not sleep for days. Ensconced in our separate bubbles, we listened in on conference calls with the doctors and checked in thrice a day on the phone with the nurses. We had left her all alone in an ICU, with a broken heart.
But I will skip the horrorshow intermediaries and say this: against the odds, my mother survived. She thrived. She did it with some passion and some style. She emerged from the hospital eight days later and from the sunroof of my father’s car, waved to us - her children and her grandchildren - like a movie star, or a queen. Later that month, still not allowed visitors, we celebrated her 71st birthday on Zoom. Which was strange and made stranger still because the year before, we celebrated her 70th birthday in real life. Friends and family arrived from all over the country. The party guests ranged from eight to eighty. There was music. There was dancing. My father, who is usually quite conservative in attire, wore a long green wig. We have photographic evidence. There was a Looking Forward to a new stage of life, with bells, with whistles, with those we love and with those that love us.
However, the universe had other plans.
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love.
- Sophia Loren.
My mother got stronger. The pandemic raged on. All around us, people broke. Some became unwell. One of those people was my mother’s best friend, our beloved Aunty Royina. The two of them had been through it all together. Raising kids, watching them grow and leave home, and getting older themselves. All the drama, all the pain, all the joy. When the news came, my mother was not out of the woods with her own health. Her doctors recommended she not travel. She could not be at her best friends’ side. She could not be there with her friend’s daughters when their mother passed. While much of this was the product of the times we lived through then, it is when I felt the full impact of what it really means to get older, something that was on my mind, having arrived at the mid-40s. It is not the wrinkles. It is not the grey hair. It is not the aches and pains, or the never before hangovers from a couple of negronis. It is losing the people you love the most. The helplessness of it. And then, the figuring out of how to negotiate life in a world without them.
The love, of course, goes nowhere. Nor do the memories. They don’t follow the loved one to the afterlife, whatever that is. They linger here, in the land of the living, with us. An aunt who lost her 30-something son, said to me: ‘Where can he go? He can’t go anywhere. He’s here’. He was there. In his things. In his mother’s bones. But also, he was very much not there. His voice, his glittering eyes. Where were they? The pain is deep. The pain is wide. The pain is so fucking awful that our brains will not, after a point, entertain it. We figure out how to forget. Shove it under a rug. Let it slide. So what if it oozes out of our pores every so often and fills the universe with untreatable sadness? We push it back. We do it to survive.
On Life, As It Is.
As my mother got better, at first we marvelled at modern medicine. I wanted to fall at the surgeon’s feet, anoint him with holy water and declare him prophet and king. But I didn’t. The world reemerged, and the virus receded. We came out of our holes, some stark raving naked, others in N95s. We were all stuffed to the gills with illness and death. Many of us worked hard to move on, to look towards life again. What a difference a year made! How we changed. Eased back in.
A case in point: A few nights ago, on the way back from a screening of a documentary film on Frida Kahlo’s horrible, horrible, life, my mother and I argued. I did not want a big party for my fast-approaching 49th birthday and she could not understand why. I said, Mom, would you like a lifetime membership to a gym for your approaching birthday? She looked horrified. Exactly, I said. Touché said her eyes. But not for long. At my age, she replied, a lifetime membership would be a rip-off. She wasn’t playing fair. I was trying to forget about all that, remember? Mom, I said (knives out), as we have just learned, Frida Kahlo was 47 when she left the building.
And so, we let it rest. We spoke instead about Frida. And how art can ease the pain. I dropped her home. The path to her front door was dark, unlit. I resisted the urge to walk with her. She could find her way. As shall I.
We can do this.
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being…
- How to Grow Old by Bertrand Russel
“After several months of our twice-weekly workouts, her bone density began to increase. Her doctor told me: “I'm not sure what you're doing, but keep doing it.” And keep doing it we have. …she's graduated from doing push-ups against a wall to doing them on her knees, to full-on standard push-ups. Justice Ginsberg is T.A.N. (tough as nails).”
- Bryant Johnson on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s Workouts. She worked out twice a week, until her death in 2020 at the age of 87.
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And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye
Says very wisely ‘It is ten o’clock.’
’Thus we may see’, quoth he, ‘how the world wags.
’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more ‘twill be eleven.
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.’
This is one article I totally identify with Tara.
"The love, of course, goes nowhere. Nor do the memories. They don’t follow the loved one to the afterlife, whatever that is."....love these lines, and they really resonate with me. They're totally true of course!
Beautifully written. Being roughly the same age as your mother - albeit male rather than female - this piece resonates deeply. At this point in life, the road ahead and its ultimate, inevitable destination is hardly inviting, but it's the only path left, so we take it one step at a time and try - in the words of Kurt Vonnegut - to "ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good."