ELDERS: Shocking, yes, but you just may become one yourself someday

My dad with his great-grandson

If you are over 25, you’ve probably experienced a bout of the cognitive dissonance inherent to aging.  It comes with being able to remember decades – that you graduated from high school ten years ago, that it’s been twenty years since you were in elementary school. And it gets worse as you get older: “Wait, I’m fifty? But my mother is fifty!”  It’s hard to assimilate the fact of aging especially as you begin to approach the age of people you once thought of as “old” and, ummm . . . irrelevant.

Personally, I’ve always had an affinity for old folks.  In my early twenties, at home during the day with a new baby, I sometimes watched a public television show on aging called “Over Easy with Hugh Downs." It gave me some much needed perspective as I was in the process of being bumped up into the parenting phase of life.  Later I lived near my grandparents for a while and was amused when my maternal grandmother sometimes called me or one of my daughters by my mother’s name. She had had two little girls who had two little girls, and now one of them (me) had two little girls. It must have seemed to her at times as if life were recycling itself with slightly different faces – same make, different models. Being close to my grandparents helped soften me toward older people in general, even the slow-moving ones who would aggravate me when driving. I would imagine they were my grandparents experiencing their last years of independence and freedom before their license is taken away.  I have appreciated the older people in my life, and the grand arc of life in general, but I still have had plenty of youthful arrogance in my attitude toward their opinions and ways.

Now, true to form, in my “middle years” I am appreciating more the wisdom of elders - in part because I can actually imagine myself becoming one. But also because I have personally lost so many of them at this point in my own life. My grandparents’ generation of teenage flappers, depression parents and WWII workers and soldiers, watched their roaring 20s youth re-lived  in the free love of the sixties.  They’re almost all gone now.  With them goes their particular insight into youth and old age, patriotism and genocide, wealth, loss, family…  And now my own parents are going. My father was diagnosed last year with a terminal illness that affects his brain. One effect of his illness is a compulsion to tell stories, which flies in the face of his lifelong reserve.  It’s as if something in him knows his time is up and he wants us to remember him a certain way, to honor what he was and what made him who he is.

I ask myself what I have to tell, or will have to tell in my old age – and whether anyone will want to hear it.  Right now I feel particularly fortunate to have young adults in my day-to-day life.  They are dealing with so many of the same issues that I did when I was their age. I particularly appreciate the conversations with them about their parents and the struggle to separate from them, to grow up.  At my age now, it seems like yesterday that I was managing those same tensions -- discerning which of my parents' values would be useful to me, how to step out into my own life while still giving due respect to those who gave it to me, how to honor their values while tossing quite a few of them out.  But I also hear my younger friends’ struggles through the filter of being a parent myself – close in age to theirs.  I feel the loss and fear of having people you have loved since birth, and did your best for, begin to make their own decisions – some very contrary to your own.  There has got to be some value to this, some wisdom in holding both of those mindsets in one brain. I am reminded of something I heard once somewhere about our being not only the age we are, but all the ages we have been before. So I am 5, 10, 21, 30, 40, 50 . . .  What more will I be when I am 60 and 70 and beyond?  Like almost all adults of a certain age, I wish I had asked my grandparents a few more questions before they left.   “Remember” was the last word my grandmother said to me.  How much wisdom is out there in our own communities waiting to be heard, carefully sorted through, perhaps, but really listened to?

*****

Recently I came across a very sweet website about aging: Time Goes By: What It's Really Like to Get Older. It's smart and funny and honest (reminds me a little of good old "Over Easy") - a glimpse of the future that might someday become your present, if you work hard at it.

*****

And some more inspiration for you - from my young adult friend Kim: A little India Arie. Lovely.

Comments

[Laia]

The thing about being all the ages we've been reminded me of one of my favorite short stories by Sandra Cisneros "eleven". She talks about all those other years rattling around inside her... We read it (way back!) when I was in high school and she has been a favorite author ever since.

[your rafiki]

Kelli, thank you for writing this.
I should read your posts more often. This one brings a smile to my face and warmth to my insides. It makes a lot of sense to me, for obvious reasons. :-) It also inspires me and gives me a little kick in the booty. Before I sat down at the computer, I thought to myself, "I should call Grandma tonight." But then I decided I'd rather just have a quiet night to myself - reading, writing, thinking, and perhaps sending a flirtatious text message or two to a certain French-speaking friend of mine. But now I think calling my grandma is probably a better idea than any of those things, however nice each one may be. :-) So thanks for that.

Quick question for you: Do you ever actually feel your age? Do you always feel all your ages at once? Or is their a certain age you most often feel? For instance, I've talked to women a bit older than you who say they often think of themselves as 25ish, and then look in the mirror and are sometimes surprised by the physical reality that stares back at them.

P.S. That is a BEAUTIFUL picture of your father and grandson. :-) By the way, it's kind of crazy that you are a grandma. I never think of you that way, just FYI. You're much more like a mom (except that you do bake fabulous cookies), and my friends are always shocked when they ask how old you are and I tell them. They never believe me. People like you make getting older a beautiful and desirable phenomenon.

Sorry, one last thing: I found this book of poetry called "The Best is Yet to Be" @ the friends of the library. I think you might like this poem by Mildred Bowers Armstrong:

"Strange - to grow up and not be different,
Not beautiful or even very wise ...
No winging-out the way of butterflies,
No sudden blindfold-lifting from the eyes.

"Strange - to grow up and still be wondering,
Reverant at petals and snow,
Still holding breath,
Still often tiptoe,
Questioning dew and stars,
Wanting to know!"

*Sorry to write such a novel in your simple "comment" space.

[Kelli]

Thanks so much for the sweet comments, Kim. I thing that in general I most often feel the ages I most enjoyed being. When I'm with Riley I can imagine being three, and can look at things (like his little sunflower) through three year-old eyes. When I do things I did when I was in my 20s (like cuddle a baby or sew children's clothes) I feel like that old younger self. I think I live most often as the mid-thirties me for some reason, and that's where it seems to stop. I am still getting used to being in my 40s now that I turned 50!

But just very recently I have looked at women I admire who have gray hair and still-strong bodies and grown children and interesting lives that grow more free each year and I think, "Hmmm, I could be that." And I think I am beginning to grow into it.

I am never a teenager though. Hated those years and have blocked them from my mind!