It Gets Better With Age

Following my mom through the line at the drug store, I placed my items on the counter, and the cashier methodically rang them through. Fabric softener that was on sale, a tube of cheek and lip stain that wasn’t on sale, and such like. The total was tallied and displayed, but then she tapped a few more keys, and the amount dropped. I was momentarily curious, but then it occurred to me that she had probably given me the senior’s discount. Whaaat?! I’m sure it’s because I was with my 85 year old mama…

Years ago, a friend told me that you know you’re getting old when you start watching birds. Guilty as charged — on both counts.

It’s a funny thing this growing old. When we’re little, we’re pleased when someone thinks we’re older than we actually are. Then we get a little older and want to be taken seriously in spite of looking very young. But then time continues its forward march, and we are older but typically are pleased if we’re thought to look younger. “Ageing well” almost always refers to a person’s appearance, but surely ageing well is more nuanced than the absence or appearance of added lines and silver threads.

I recently read an essay by Helen Garner entitled “the insults of age – A one-woman assault on condescension” where she tells of her experience with ageing. She rails against the head patting that can come with added years, but she also revels in a new-found freedom of using her voice both for herself and for others. After an exchange with a young waiter who unwittingly asked the idiotic question “How was your shopping?” of Garner and her white-haired friend, Garner unleashes a zinging retort his way. Tired of being assumed as addle-brained simply because of her advanced years, Garner took issue with the waiter’s perceived condescension. His respectful response “garnered” him a nice fat tip (and had Garner musing of the psychological affect of “turning the other cheek”).
www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/may/1430402400/helen-garner/insults-age

I’ve heard it said that we lose our filters as we age, saying things we wouldn’t have said when we were younger and making our kids cringe. It strikes me though as a tad odd that we need to rely on a filter to have our responses and reactions appropriate as ageing adults. Maybe rather than bemoaning lost filters or trying unsuccessfully to keep them fastened in place, maybe we could cultivate an interior that requires less filtering. Filters are typically used to keep impurities from contaminating the end result. What if more attention was paid to the things that gum up a filter so that there’s less need for a filter in the first place? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, or so the adage goes. But hey — we’re not dogs.

Cultural and patriarchal embedded norms and expectations can have us bewitched by a perk that has long since peaked. My mom describes with mirth her changing shape with the added years. Sometimes I feel like an adolescent adult as I go through these middle-age years. I think that should be a thing — the puberty of middle-age. In many ways, the bodily changes that happen at this age are no less surprising and disconcerting as they were when I was a pre-teen. That was the age when Mom told me I was too old now to be wrestling with the boys. Now disgruntled joints are begging me to pay heed when I want to toss my grandies in the air or jump on the trampoline with them.

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, pens the poet Dylan Thomas. I hear in these lines an invitation of sorts to not roll over and quit engaging in living but to adopt a “growth mindset” (Thomas might beg to differ on my take away from his lines, but that’s ok). Ageing needn’t quell our vitality. In fact, ageing could possibly fuel our vitality. Jean Vanier (may he rest in peace), when asked what his measurement for growth was, responded by saying it was “the capacity to be wounded”. Not exactly the kind of stuff we’re conditioned to strive toward..

I just passed another birthday. Can you tell?! And as the days and years go on, I keep wanting to find pathways that enlarge living and embrace each season of life as it unfolds. What does it mean for me, for you, to live with a “capacity to be wounded”? How can that rather upside-down way even be a way? It seems easier to batten down the hatches of our soft hearts and burrow into an isolated safety rather than practise that kind of vulnerability.

At the end of her essay, Helen Garner quotes Reverend Ames from the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson whose character, as Garner says, “sweetens and strengthens as he approaches death”. Reverend Ames, in a letter to his son born to him in Ames’ old age, says that “It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire”. Imagine all sense of grievance simply diminishing and no longer having a hold. What a life-giving picture of old age. Maybe that is what ageing well looks like.