It happened a few weeks ago. Okay, I look the same as I did the last day I was seventy-nine, but I don’t feel the same.
Not at all.
It’s big and sobering moment, the awakening that birthday morning. The seventies were good to me, one of the best decades of my life, actually. I felt fit and energetic, published four books and a number of poems, some of which received awards, and was lucky enough to get many fellowships to residencies that gave me precious time to write and reflect. I did a good amount of travel to some pretty exciting places (Tibet, Bhutan) with my husband and avoided Covid (so far). My son and his family were still in Concord, and we saw each other a good bit, which was wonderful.
But eighty. No more “the young old,” but moving towards the “old old,” the age for falls, fragility, and increased physical vulnerability. I know this, but I’m not there in my mind. My mother lived to celebrate her hundredth birthday and my father almost to it. I guess I’ve just assumed I’d make it to that point as well.
But eighty. There is a kind of heaviness in that integer. It brings me pause.
People say, “Age is just a number,” “You? Eighty? No way!” “Eighty is the new sixty,” but clearly, they have not yet reached this age or would feel differently, I suspect.
And I wonder if I would feel differently, too, if the world was not daily lurching from one crisis to another. If politicians and judges in Washington were not trying (and mostly succeeding) to turn the current world into one more like the one in which I was young, where women were chattel, men ruled, children were to be seen and not heard, everyone I knew went to church on Sunday. A stable world, though, in which few challenged much of anything.
If, if, if.
It feels as if bad spirits have been unleashed all across the country. It’s certainly not the one I thought I’d be inhabiting at eighty, in the sixties and seventies when I marched, protested, braided my long brown hair, took off my bra, and devoured “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Susan Faludi, Ms. Magazine.
I thought we’d fought hard to change the idea held by so many, the Catholic church, the general patriarchy, even women themselves, that there was something wrong with simply being a woman.
Certainly, I have worked hard all my professional and personal life to challenge that odious concept. And in the beautiful “Boombox” I received as a birthday gift from my husband and son filled with messages, pictures, and memories from many of you, I was reassured that many responders see me as someone who always stands up for what she believes, no matter what, takes no bs, and has helped many others to learn to do the same.
I think that was my favorite message, even though there were so many more very special ones. I was flush with gratitude and joy as I read through them, regret over mistakes and poor choices banished for that happy day. I forgot Covid, our horrendous political situation, my husband’s unsteady gait, my wrinkles and thinning skin, my son’s relocation to Switzerland, my grandsons leaving for everywhere.
It was a pretty perfect day, my eightieth birthday.
While I am writing this post, notification comes that another of my college classmates has died. A blue and white booklet called “Five Wishes” is on my desk, it will tell people how I want to be treated if I get seriously ill, although my husband and I have thoroughly discussed these things.
We have our cemetery plots.
But then, last Sunday I had lunch with an astounding woman of ninety-four who is still creative and vibrant. I just finished an excellent novel by Alice Elliot Dark, “Fellowship Point,” about two eighty-year-old women who haven’t stopped living for a moment, whose friendship is rich and vital. I myself continue to write, garden, go to yoga class, walk four miles a day, feel energy and enthusiasm for living, intend to apply for more residency fellowships and hike part of the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
John Keats, the English poet, wrote about “negative capability,” which he describes it as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and which I have always understood as holding two opposites in one’s hands at the same time.
That concept has been my poetic foundation.
And so, eighty may inherit that conundrum for me—a sober beginning to the last chapter—but a time of relishing the knowledge, experience and yes, acceptance, that age has delivered.
And of continuing to try to face life as though I’m going to live forever-- and die tomorrow.
A good mantra for any age, I think.
*********************
Thanks to so many of you who encouraged me to reach out with “To the Mothers of Uvalde” and send it to a wider audience. Our local paper published it as a guest essay, and today it was published in the Uvalde Leader-News as a guest essay. It makes me so happy to know I’ve been able to reach out to those suffering women.
https://www.uvaldeleadernews.com/articles/embracing-heartbreak-keeps-you-connected-to-lost-child/