I’m old-ish. Having just turned sixty, I’ve entered the third act of my life, which may be shorter than my first two. But I’m not old like my mother is old. She is 90, so she probably has entered the last decade of her life, unless she crosses the century line (Go, Mom!).
These are empirical numbers, however, and it’s caught my attention lately that the facts of aging don’t mean much to people talking about being “old.” Or rather, about being called “old.” We want to avoid being called “old,” apparently, because the label signals that we’ve lost a bounce in our step or in our minds. And sometimes just looking a certain way—like, growing in grey hair after years of colouring—can signal this decline or a willingness to let this decline occur. We need to look like we’re going to fight “old” every inch of the way.
We are all familiar with the description of post-menopausal women as decrepit crones, and one hopes feminists fight ageism when they see it, calling out the misogyny hidden in the word “old.” But I worry that for fit feminists, the temptation to stay on the younger side of “old” may complicate what we know and don’t know. We value our fitness and we work hard to maintain it. Competitive folks may like their AG (age group) wins. Even if our times get slower, we like being faster than our peers. All this is well and good, but it doesn’t necessarily bring us face to face with the cold hard truth: death is coming for us, sooner, in my case, rather than later. We watch the elderly struggle and pray that our cardio and strength training will preserve us. We pretend that the products our social media feeds are so keen to sell us will erase the lines we see in the mirror, that we can push through tiredness and ignore changes to our bodies.
But, as a friend of mine pointed out, those of us who are able-bodied are only temporarily so. Anyone, through injury or accident, can find their embodied lives radically transformed in an instant. And death will certainly put an end to all of us one day, whatever the tech-bros say. Are we ready?
In a poem titled “In the Waiting Room,” Elizabeth Bishop describes her seven-year-old self accompanying her aunt to a medical appointment. While in the waiting room, the child hears her aunt cry out in pain. The sound prompts a sudden realization of the humanity that the young Elizabeth shares with her older relative:
What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
These days, I’m trying to listen to the less steady steps of the elderly and to witness my own aging without simply imagining ways to avoid it. I am working toward giving up the dream of radical autonomy and accepting myself for what I am: a frail mammal given a brief moment to share this beautiful world with other living things who will also die one day.
Jane Goodall enjoying a wetland walk with an elderly friend.
William Waterway, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
