[NO PHOTOS WITH THIS POST!]
As a young woman, say, back in my twenties and beyond, I tried to hide my impatience when old people expressed astonishment at being old. How could they be surprised? Hadn’t they looked around since childhood and realized that anyone who didn’t die young became old in time? Aging hardly made a newsworthy story: “Woman Lives On and Becomes Old!” Really, why the astonishment?
And then people die. My grandparents went first. (Actually, two of that generation known to me were step-grandparents, as my father’s mother had died when my father was still a boy, long before I was born, while my mother’s biological father was someone our family never knew except for tantalizing story fragments.) For grandparents to go first was not surprising. My only senior cousin’s death, however, came out of season, years before aunts and uncles started dropping off the family tree. Then years after that, and after my father and his older brother and a younger aunt by marriage were pruned from the living family tree, my mother remained the last of her generation. Now she is gone. And now I, the oldest remaining cousin on both sides, am #1 lemming at cliff’s edge, staring into the abyss, the generations gone before me having vanished from sight, the crush from behind increasing every year.
And I tell you, it is astonishing. Not only being the oldest but the whole business of being old.
The year I had my first vegetable garden out at the farm, before we had moved from Leland to the old farmhouse we’ve now occupied for almost two decades (is that really possible?), summer was a season of drought and the new well we needed before we could live there yet in the future. My solution was to carry buckets, two at a time for balance and efficiency, repeatedly downhill to the little willow-bordered, no-name stream and back up to the garden. I was learning my home ground back then, and water-carrying during the drought taught me that the little stream, while it never went completely dry, sometimes ducked underground for long stretches, so that fetching water could sometimes mean searching for it first. Downhill, uphill, over and over, not counting the trips. The job did not feel easy, even back then: my realization today is that it was then possible.
One afternoon following a tremendous thunderstorm the little no-name stream became a raging torrent, its usually soft, burbling voice the thunder of a cataract. Amazed and intrigued, we followed its course upstream, against the current, and into the edge of the woods, where a waterfall had appeared to cascade into a deep, dark pool. All that noise, depth, and energy! All temporary….
“Everything is temporary!” a character in one of my favorite movies memorably exclaims — a truth that did not remain for the 20th century (now past!) to discover. Socrates believed in eternal, unchanging essences he called Forms, but Heraclitus before him saw a world of continuous change. Many of the enormous old willows have lost large branches in storms or even fallen to ground themselves, pushed down by winds off nearby Lake Michigan. There is no path remaining downhill to the stream, and the accumulation of obstacles would put old ankle, knee, and leg bones at risk, were I to attempt to repeat that old après-storm exploration or even my former daily water-carrying expeditions.
And how can certain dear friends be dead and gone forever? Grandparents, yes, but how is it possible that contemporaries can have vanished, when they are so present to our thoughts on a daily basis? The unfairness of it, the unreality, is staggering! As if the stream were one day to disappear completely. But no, it is more as if the neglected garden were to go back, as it has done, to grass and violets, only rhubarb at one end and giant herbs at the other remaining as witnesses to the past.
In reality, youth and vigor, like the raging high waters following the storm, are the aspects of life most strikingly and obviously temporary. — And yet, strangely, it is the insults of age that we experience as if they should be transient. In our hearts and minds, we remain young — if not sixteen, then at most fifty — and surely this aching creakiness upon rising in the morning will pass eventually, will it not? Like a bad case of the flu? All these conversations focused on illness, weakness, surgeries, and medications are not really about us, are they? Isn’t this all no more than a patch of rough weather we just have to get through with good grace and humor? Go away for half the year, and when you come back you see that friends have aged perceptibly. Then catch sight of your reflection when you aren’t expecting it, and you see yourself as those friends see you and realize that your appearance too has changed. Year by year, you are growing older, and then one year you realize you are old. Astonishing!
Along comes another crop of high school graduates, another flood of college graduates, wave after wave of weddings and babies (and weren’t we just yesterday in the midst of all that?), and the crowd behind us gains increasing magnitude, while ahead of us the group thins out until we are — that is, I am — looking over the edge, into the abyss, knowing our, my, turn to be pushed off the cliff will come next.
Here we are, old. Astonishing! Well, now I get it!
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