HOW OLD ARE YOU? DOES IT MATTER?

 

Picasso, "The Mother," 1901

There's some conventional wisdom about age, about the difference between being young, middle-aged or old. The young do more, the old know more, so they say.  The middle-aged do a little less than the young and know a little less than the old. Still, it's considered by most to be the prime of life. 

Where being young ends depends on our age, doesn't it?  Our parents always seem old, even though my mother was 44 at my wedding and thought she was pregnant!  I didn't smoke because my parents did.  How could anything they did be cool?  Our children always seem young even though they may be middle-aged themselves.  My grandsons can't sign a contract, buy a car, support themselves, really do much besides homework.  But they think their mother is old and their father even older.  Their mother bristles at jokes about her age, but their father takes it in stride.

Within my family I'm old (and loved) because I'm the grandmother.  But as a wife I'm just me, no age at all.  When my husband and I go to bed at night we don't think, well here we are--two grandparents.  

As professionals, as each of us ages we become more experienced and high-priced.  As consumers we have more disposable income.  And of course with our friends we are all ageless.  Same with our interest groups--yoga, biking, book club, kayaking. . . age is not relevant.  

The question is, is it ever relevant?  

Every day we are both young and old--the oldest we have ever been and the youngest we will ever be.  So said Paul Simon (b. 1941) in "The Boxer." 

I am older than I once was

And younger than I'll be 

But that's not unusual.  

No, it isn't strange 

After changes upon changes

We are more or less the same

After changes we are

More or less the same

                         

There are so many quotes on aging--"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age."  Who said that? You would think a comedian, like Nora Ephron.  Instead it is Victor Hugo (1802-1885), the creator of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. 


Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014), Nobel Prize for Literature 1982, wrote: "Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega.  An end in itself."  

Edouard Vuillard, "A Seamstress," 1892

I had a great grand-mother who used to sit by the window in her bedroom.  The window was upstairs over a front-porch roof, so she couldn't see the people passing on the sidewalk.  But she could smell the trees and hear the leaves rustle and the rain fall.  She could hear the thunder and feel the air.  She was nearly blind.  Thin, frail, skin drawn over sharp bones, white hair pulled back from her face.  This is my memory.  A daughter lived with her, my great-Aunt Lillie.  I wish I knew if Aunt Lillie helped her dress, brushed her soft hair, creamed her hands and face for her. She must have. I picture this done lovingly.  My great grandma had none of the sights or smells that sometimes children associate unkindly with old age.  She was soft and sweet-smelling, her bony hands just slightly chilled, her eyes blue with cataracts, her house-dress clean and crisp.  We loved her. 

When my mother died and I wrote her obituary, my father said, "I never thought of her as 82."  Seeing it in writing surprised him. 

Robert Frost says, "The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected."  In my own mind now that my father has died too, I must be in the afternoon.  Still, younger than I'll be.  That's not unusual. It isn't strange.  After changes upon changes I am more or less the same.   Do you feel like that?  Are you happy with yourself no matter what your age?  I'd like to stay that way.  Our inner lives eternal. That could be a prayer.    With affection, Nina Naomi