I’m Old. And Here’s What I Like About That

I’m old. Eighty-two years old. I’ve crossed over into old age and I like it here.

A lot.

I’m here with the old folks now, in a place I’ve been looking at — askance mostly — since I was little kid and I first noticed the velvetiness of my grandmother’s cheeks and the droopiness under her chin.

Old can’t be good, I thought. It makes you slow. It makes your voice go wobbly. It makes you not in the thick of things any more. The other adults are talking, and you, old you, are mostly listening. Can you even hear what they’re saying?

And now that I’m here in the land of the old, with my brand new hearing aids, both feet planted in what I’m reckoning is the last ten, but I’m hoping twenty, percent of my life — now that I’m here, I’m liking what I’m seeing.

Not the wobbly voice or the sticky joints, of course, nor the slowed-up heartbeat that I couldn’t get to go over 123 bpm during my spin class the other day. Those things are the price you pay for admission to the land of the old.

I’m Old

What I’m liking about being up in years is that I’m not in the thick of things anymore. I don’t have to be.

Young people, the ones I know, if I can permit myself a biggish generalization, can’t see past the thicket of their doings. Their responsibilities, their ambitions, their needs, their check lists of gotta-dos: secure a spouse, children, job, place to live, friends, and secure enough money to finance all that, plus a little extra to pay for a fishing trip to the Upper Peninsula or a ski trip to Tahoe.

Now that I’m closing in on the end of my life I’m finally catching on to what’s been referred to for generations as the wisdom of age.

I used to think the word wisdom referred to stuff like how to best invest your savings or how to calmly ask the guy in the apartment overhead to please turn down his stereo. No, it’s not that. That’s all thicket stuff. The things of the thicket are pleasures in their own right, and vital to attend to. But they live within a larger context.

What I’m talking about here is the wisdom we’d rather not be privy to — the knowledge, the acceptance of the death that awaits us all, and some of us sooner than others.

Living Alongside Death

Ever since Jon died two-and-a-half years ago, I have been living alongside death. Jon’s death. My own death. The possible death of the beloved people around me. It is real. As real at the property tax due on Nov. 1, as real as the 4-year-old refusing to eat her vegetables.

And death, the closeness of death, the proximity to the end of life, to the end of getting the kids off to school and arriving at work on time — the closeness of death puts you right next to whatever it is that arranged for you to have life in the first place. It puts you right next to the great mystery, the holy.

It’s there. It never leaves us. Whatever it is, it’s there. Something is there, and it’s trying to get our attention.

Outside the Action

My aunts and uncles took good care of my grandmother. They saw to her needs. But it seemed to me that they patronized her. I didn’t know the word patronize at the time, of course, but I got the concept. My grandmother was no longer in the thick of things; she was outside the action.

Did my grandmother know something her busy children didn’t know? She lived to within a month or two of her hundredth birthday. By the time she died, she had spent plenty of time in the land of the old. Good chance she knew a thing or two.

On the lighter side, “The Truth Behind That Happy Family Photo We Just Sent You.”   Also, “The Lost Art of the Telephone Conversation. Here’s What Happened to It.”