WE who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. If it’s a long defeat it is also a victory, meaningful for the initiates of time, if not for those who have come, less far.
Being old, I am out of step, troubled by my lack of concord; and it is confusing, wondering. I feel exposed, bereft of a right matrix with the present crime, violence, and nihilism heavy on my heart. I weigh an appearance of appraise, recoiling, suffering, but very alert. Now that I have withdrawn from the active world, I am more alert to it than ever before.
Old people are not protected from life by engagements, pleasures or duties: we are open to our own sentience. When I am with friends, I try to find them, or try to find a point in myself from which to make a bridge; or I walk on the eggshells of affection trying not to hurt or misjudge. All of this is very tiring, but love at any age takes everything you’ve got.
There are no effects of age on me. Age only defines one’s boundaries. Life has changed and improved me greatly, but it has also left me practically the same. I cannot spell, and I am over critical, egocentric and vulnerable. I cannot be simple. In my effort to be clear I become complicated. I know my faults well that I pay them small heed.
They are stronger than I am. They are me.
Now, at the sunset of my life, I am myself as never before. I am aware at the mercy of multiplicity.
Ideas drift in like bright clouds — arresting, momentary — but they come as visitors, shaft of insight that can enter the back of my mind and when I turn to greet it, it is gone. I did not have it, it had me. It is no longer I that choose my moods. I accept them, but from whom?
The family
I love my family for many reasons — for what I see them to be, for the loveliness they have been, for the good that I know in them. I love their essence, their “could be,” and all this, in spite of knowing their faults well. I love the individual life in them that I saw when they were still buds. I have spent so much of my life watching it unfold — enchanted and anxious.
I have felt respect, even reverence, for I have seen it meet tragedy and gain nobility. I have watch it win its prize and I have learned the hard truth that a mother learns slowly, that the quick of intimacy she has known becomes hope for loved strangers.
A mother’s love for her children, even her ability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition.
No matter how old I’ve become, I watch my middle-aged daughters for signs of improvement. It couldn’t be otherwise for I’m impelled to know that the seeds of value seen on them have been winnowed.
I’ll never outgrow the burdens of love, and to the end, I’ll carry the weight of hope for those I bore. Oddly, very oddly, I am forever surprised and even faintly wronged that my daughters are just people, for like many mothers, I hope and half expect that my new born child makes the world better on one’s 80th birthday is a time of thinking about the future, not in the past, after all, for that younger person’s life is still a battle royal of each against them, but now I have nothing more to gain or lose.
Here on the sidelines, I can hear the shrieks of exultation, the moans of the gravely wounded, and meanwhile I feel secure: nobody will attack me from ambush.
I sympathize with every 80-year-old’s lonely soul, but the men and women I envy are those who accept old age a series of challenges. For them, each new infirmity is an enemy to be outwitted, an obstacle to be overcome by force of will, and enjoy each little victory over themselves. Sometimes they win a major success.
I turn to records of the past and books, only to find not so much realistic advice as I had hope for about the problems of aging.
This happily phrased maxim can be a comfort for the elderly: “Old age,” Cicero says “Is the closing act of life, as of a dreamer, and we ought to leave when the play grows wearisome, especially if we had our fill.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
