To Embrace the Gift of Old
Photo by Luis Machado on Unsplash
I never meant to grow old. Not that I intended to die young, you understand, but rather that I seem to have believed, without ever quite letting the idea rise into consciousness, that old was something that happened to other people.
Like divorce. Like cancer. Like bringing a child into the world, bringing him even into adulthood, and then watching him die.
I never meant for any of those things to happen either.
But they did. And to me. And now here I am, smack dab in the middle of old, and arriving here has been so natural, so unsurprising, so inevitable that my astonishment at my own creaking joints and flighty memory seems silly.
Silly or not, though, the astonishment never quite goes away. How did this happen? And what does it mean to be me … and old?
I’ve been creating stories for as long as I can remember, which is another way of saying I’ve been using the contents of my life to make meaning. These lives we are given don’t, after all, come with meaning intact. They just come. That’s one of my deepest convictions, that meaning isn’t delivered out of the ether. We must create it ourselves. Each one of us. As isolating as the search must be.
For me, as I suspect is true for most children’s writers, that search always begins with my child self, with acknowledging her, with healing her. (Is there anyone who survives childhood without the need for healing?) You might think, in my ninth decade, I would have left that long-ago girl behind, but the opposite seems to be true. With each passing year, she stands closer. And the more fiercely I embrace her the more fully I find myself living into the woman I am now.
For more than half a century, I’ve been using the substance of that once-upon-a-time girl to inform my stories, using the scrim of fiction as my shield. (This isn’t me, you understand. It’s just a story.) I wasn’t conscious of using my own child self. If I’d set out directly to plumb my psyche, I probably couldn’t have produced anything of value to others. It’s perspective that makes art possible. I simply allowed my unconscious to bring forth its riches without asking where those riches came from.
The most blatant example of the way this worked lies in my novel Foster Child, the first I wrote, my second to be published. I had foster children in my care when I conceived and wrote that novel, and I used to ache over the vulnerability of foster children. I volunteered as well in a program that supported at-risk young people. One teenage girl I took under my wing had been sexually abused in her foster home. In a quiet fury, I began my career writing about a sexually abusive foster father and a vulnerable girl. The foundation for my story, obvious. Right?
And it is. Incredibly, though, it was only many years later that I recognized what my novel was really about: the sexual abuse visited upon me!
I hadn’t forgotten what had been done to me. Not for a moment. But in order to take the experience on, in order to turn it into story, I needed to look at it slant, to see it through the lens of an imaginary girl. Thus, witnessing the powerlessness of foster children and the wounding of that known girl gave me the idea for my story. The creative energy that propelled the novel rose out of my own long-ago powerlessness, my own wounding.
And that’s the way I found my stories, again and again and again. Each usually began from a concrete source, a small paragraph in the newspaper, an incident remembered about a childhood friend, an ancient book I had loved. What mattered was that the idea when it arrived touched something deep in me. Something deep but amorphous. That’s what allowed an energy I never tried to name to carry me through the laborious process of discovering my story.
Something has changed in recent years, though. I have wandered away from fiction, both the writing and the reading of it. Perhaps the young girl has been so thoroughly absorbed into the woman I am today as to be its own healing. Whatever the reason, instead of spinning stories out of the substance of my psyche, I find myself ready to present the girl I was, the woman I am straight on. To tell her story.
Which is what I’ll be doing with this blog, telling stories of the long-ago girl, the woman, the old lady.
For what purpose? To celebrate the gift of life.
To embrace the gift of old.
The Mirror
I stood this morning,
an old woman before the truth-telling mirror,
stood dreaming of another time,
another mirror,
another face—
also mine.
Many miles away my son lay dying.
We all knew except,
perhaps,
he.
Control of his body slipping away,
Control of his mind, too.
Visions we could not share galloping through his brain.
We watched him, son, husband, father
leaving.
All watching.
He so certainly leaving.
We,
who had been so sure he had come to stay.
And during those days,
during those months that stretched into years,
I rose each morning,
stood before the bathroom mirror
and noticed that in the night
my face
had fallen
again.
It didn’t matter,
that fallen face.
More a curiosity than a concern.
Watching your son die,
even from a great distance,
teaches you not to care about such things.
When you go out into the world
there is so little,
after all,
you can say.
Your face is only doing its best
to speak
for you.
Still I stood then,
toothbrush in hand,
studying the grieving mother who studied me,
the collapse of flesh a strange comfort,
a substitute for the tears,
vanquished
by the long
grieving.
Now,
when even grief lives far away,
as though all happened in another lifetime,
to another mother,
I find strange comfort in this aging face,
in the parentheses descending from nose to chin,
in the mouth tugged into shape by a purse string.
The strange comfort that comes
with knowing
that Death
will
rescue
us
all.
