On Aging

When I worked for the assisted living facility I thought daily about aging. It looked me in the face, and it followed behind me. It caught my eye through open doors, down hallways and in resident care summaries shared at morning meetings. I saw creased faces, whittled elbows, and patchy sideburns Eyeglasses were ubiquitous. I watched one woman pull herself up grimly from her chair by her walker, and then gather herself briefly, resting her elbows on the hand rests. I observed one man napping in another chair, his mouth slack, his hands gripping the cane on his lap. In the clinic, there would be one or two people waiting for their name to be called. The years of waiting wore like tarnished metal on their faces. Splotchy, hardened, with bits of shine.

                At that time, I was raising four children and there was no room to think about my own aging. They were each bursting forth with their own transformation, like an accelerated video of a seed breaking out of the earth, stretching into a stem, firing out a bloom and then resting as a full-fledged flower. Jay and I worked valiantly to keep up, to process what we were seeing. Each time they left the house we prayed they would return mostly the same person, with only microscopic wounds and signs of maturation.

                At that time, I had however been confronted for the first time with my parents’ sudden aging. As if they woke up one day in new skins, the former skin being plusher and regenerative, the latter being full of oncoming fragilities. When I looked at them, I could see how the light fell differently across their faces, alternating between the muted colors of late summer, when trees begin to shake loose what they no longer need, and the quick sunset of early winter; a dark blue tempered with streams of gold.

                It was easy to not see myself in them, despite the genes that tied us together. Aging was a concept only. It had not yet stopped by to say hello, like a neighbor out walking who notices you on your knees, pulling weeds in the front yard. Sure, I had noticed the small creases by my mouth when I sucked hot liquids from a cup, the furrow of worry on my brow that no longer sprung back like kneaded dough. I still had the same smooth skin covering my calves and stomach, slightly toughened by years of exercise, and giving birth. And that flash of white hair at the top of my forehead was an aberration my hair stylist had been dueling with for several years. My eyesight had gone downhill in my early forties when I first struggled to read the contents on a can of soup. It came in clumps of time, when I would perceive myself straining to read something in fine print. At the drugstore I would try on increasingly higher magnification reading glasses until I Ianded on the perfect fit: Cinderella slipping her foot into the glass slipper.

                This year is the second year of the pandemic, and it has been over ten years since I worked in the assisted living facility. Some years, you feel the impact of living more viscerally, like recovering from a car crash, a protracted illness, or the loss of someone whose body you will never forget. This has been one of those years, and it has aged me. I have been literally brought to my knees with pain. I have seen the skin sag below my arms where muscle used to be. I have noticed the expression on my face that old women acquire en masse: slightly bitter, recalling joy, reconciling the two and amiably projecting wisdom. I have had flashes of myself as an old crone, bony and listless, watching the evening news with the sound turned off, squeezing the tea bag in my cooling mug.

                Meanwhile my mother seems to have stayed the same age for a decade. Her hair is now snow white, but her eyes and her face are still the same. She hurts when she walks, but she bounces in her sneakers with skinny stocking-covered legs and colorful skirts.

                I stopped speaking to my father two years ago, when the local newspaper reported he had had sex with at least three of his students he taught at the high school I attended at the same time. I imagine that there are physical costs of his exposure, which has not tempered what was already an aggressive aging process for him, starting around age sixty-five. In terms of overall genetics, I take after my father. In terms of how I have cared for my own body, how I have strived to preserve my sanity and reconcile poor decisions and right any wrongs I’ve made in my life -- I am nothing like my father.

                Severing ties with a parent, losing a friend to suicide, putting your first and only dog down – these things do not stop you from aging. I am not stupid, but I like to fantasize that I can bounce back, even if only by a few months or so, to the age I was before. All selfies taken on my phone look terrible, until I begin scrolling back a few months, and years. I see the girl who became all the things, and then kept walking. Past the bar with loud music and pick up lines. Past the home with a yard and full refrigerator. Past the baby stroller, the classroom, the track, the pumpkin patch, the corner office, the high rises and long flights, the dinner parties, chiropractor appointments, 10Ks, parent-teacher conferences, fire pits, college applications, holiday baking, and mountain cabins. It’s all there, the history of being that brough me here, the aging that accompanies it, as true and reliable as summer turning into fall.

This age I am at is a novelty, something I had not expected. In losing my vitality -- that glistening youthful appeal that in my younger years I took for granted but always held close -- has disappeared. I am in the beginning stages of fully disappearing which women have written about. It recently dawned on me what a blessing it is to disappear. That opportunity to completely rediscover the insides of myself -- all the yearnings, the longings, the aspirations that went unmet in the years leading up to now. I can revisit them now with sincerity. I can look at them again from all angles, and I can choose how I live from here. I can live from the inside out because what the outside thinks of me matters less and less. I no longer have the need to give a false impression of who I am. Even if no one else sees me, I see myself. I am free of their interpretation, and I take joyful ownership of my own.