“Whatever is old age for?” a writer friend once grumbled. I had no idea, so I asked a friend in her 90s the same question. She was a thoughtful woman struggling with pain and enduring loneliness in her one small room. “Absolutely nothing,” she replied — “but don’t ever lose your sense of humor!”
An elderly painter friend takes a Zen attitude, “We are born, we live, we die, we are fortunate if we reach old age, so every day above ground is a good day. Open the front door, open the the back door and let the problems flow through, but don’t let them stop for a cup of tea.”
In a culture and at a time when elders are very often reduced to pensioners or institutionalized and blithely ignored, it is not always easy to refrain from violating that shaky border between remaining decorous, as some would wish us to remain, and speaking angrily, pontificating, as we watch the earth and its inhabitants being mercilessly destroyed for the profit of the greediest among us. If only they’d listen, we carp from our proverbial rocking chairs amid our proverbial aches and pains.
Yet, after 80 years, I have no more understanding of how to live my life within the circumstances I find myself than anyone else does. Common sense and a smidgeon of the hard won wisdom that any crone acquires, demand that I speak first of my gratitude for having lived on this stunning earth at all: each of us a confluence of matter arriving, by chance, on what we understand to be a unique small blue planet swirling in the unimaginable universe.
I read a lot. I write. I draw. I have my heroines. Two in particular sustain me: one is Kathe Kollwitz, the great German artist, who wrote in her 70s, “I live along the the fringe of life.” I find this to be true, but even on the fringe I still confront issues along its diffuse edges and examine them.
I am constantly aware of the ever-increasing inequalities for example, in education and health care. I wonder about the mysterious lives of others, about my own secret self’s ability to cope with old age, and of how our country is struggling to maintain a measure of decency and save its severely threatened constitutional freedoms. Old ways of thinking and feeling about so many things are always being challenged.
Another heroine is Emily Dickinson. In poem J443, she mentions Miles on Miles of Nought. I confess to dreading extended emptiness, especially during the long dark days of winter. I would like to hide myself away and not have, To simulate — is stinging work —To cover what we are From Science— and from Surgery.
Then a chickadee speaks to me on my way to the compost pile or I receive a handwritten note in the mail, a rare treasure these days. As Dickinson suggests, We do life’s labor— Though life’s Reward — be done — With scrupulous exactness — To hold our Senses — on — And our senses, I find, even if diminished, can still receive the smile of a stranger, the sound of a Mozart duet or Cohen’s Hallelujah, or the late light of the sun falling on the trunk of a pine tree.
Or perhaps you will be the one a child finally dares to tell his secret to, or the one a dying friend asks to hold her hand. Our justifiable anger may never be appeased but our endurance and the little bits of wisdom we managed to glean along the way may prove sustaining to another . Is our presence enough, a presence not unlike the gnarled aged maples along old dirt roads sheltering the passersby?
Margot Fleck lives in Northfield.