Aging even as we speak

Edith and I were crossing Queens Boulevard a little behind Eva, so we got a good look at the back of her head, with its thinning purplish-brown hair. I said, “It’s time for Eva to stop dyeing her hair. It looks ridiculous.” Edith said, “You know Eva’s very vain and she’s having a really hard time with aging.” I said, “She’s still having a hard time? She’s 86! She didn’t get used to it yet?” Edith said, “Of course she did, many times, but the problem is, just as soon as you get used to it, you get older again.”

Yikes! I laughed for a while, then stopped laughing. I hadn’t thought of this. Was it only three years ago that I was screeching by myself in front of the mirror, noticing for the first time the way the skin of my inner elbow was doing this … thing, like a piece of drying clay or a neglected leather pocketbook?. Oh, I was so young then!  That was baby stuff. I’ve moved on, to other screechings. Next week will be my birthday, and I’ll be 52. The fear-and-loathing-ridden wisecracks started already last week. As I am writing an email comes back from a university tech guy; I’d asked him to put my title on a university webpage along with my name and contact information. I’m a Professor; I am tired of high school students or their parents calling me and saying, “Hi Karen, are you the girl who I should be speaking to?” The tech guy writes back: “Would you like me to put your age, too?” Ooh yes! That would be effective! YES, I wrote, and then realized – he was joking. What woman wants her age made apparent? Especially when she is 52. 52 is a bad number. So here are my alternatives: I’m a girl or I’m a hag.

Actually I do want my age listed, and I want it made apparent everywhere. This isn’t because I don’t care. It’s because I do care, and I want to deal with it, because it’s the worst part. Being 52 can’t possibly be as bad as being fucked up about being 52. I want to be flooded with the fact of my age and my aging. I want to immerse myself in it, even if it means panic, to get over it, like a claustrophobe in therapy in Macy’s the day after Thanksgiving. But there’s a difference. As soon as I get over my panic, I’ll get older.

And that’s where the living comes in, the living with aging and the living with dying. It’s not a heroic moment, or a crisis to be overcome, it’s life itself, its own processes.

To love being alive is to want to keep being alive, to resist oblivion, and yet the terms of life itself require dying.

A friend said, “All this striving, all this learning, all this love, all this work, all this talking talking talking, and then, boom, you die. It’s the mindfuck of all time.”

I don’t mean to be writing about dying. I mean to be writing about aging, and I keep writing about dying.

And where are my comrades? A nice young colleague says, Your dad must be pushing seventy. Are you kidding? I said. He’s pushing 84.  He repeated, “Like I said, he must be pushing 70 –”  I didn’t get it, and like a jerk repeated, “No, he’s –”  Pause. “Oh,” I said, “You’re, um, flattering me?”

But friends don’t do that – friends help face fear and anxiety! Problem is, my friends are all terrified and anxious.

AGING IS A TERRORIST. The next time someone asks how I feel about becoming 39, I’m going to put them in a baby carriage and suicide bomb them …

I hated being an adolescent. When I was fourteen my father came into my room at night where I lay suffering, waiting to grow up, and he said, “People are going to tell you that these are the best years of your life. Don’t believe them. They are the worst years. I wouldn’t be fourteen again for all the money in the world.” I have to thank my father for saying that, because it helped me get through. He, of course, was one of the reasons I hated being an adolescent so much. And then I hated my twenties. Thirties were a period of improvement, and forties were delirious with fun. Why shouldn’t keep getting better? Except for sadness, for regret, for mourning, for body going the other way … over the hill is great expression …

And not just expanded self-awareness but expanded capacity for joy. And not only because life is short, but because eyes see more, I am calmer, there’s less internal suffering, more self-awareness, less self-involvement, and some things let go.

 

I have to thank my parents, who never were involved with any of that cultural shit. My mother, at 50, took me to the dentist (I was seventeen) and when he politely asked her what she was reading so intently in the waiting room she responded, showing him the book, “It’s a book about menopause and how one can prepare for it in a really healthy way – look – perhaps you’ll want to recommend it to women you know!” This was 1971, not today. And why women have to hide the tampon when they go to the bathroom? Doesn’t everyone know we bleed?

My parents weren’t on a crusade, just oddly unaware that they were outrageous; we’re just realistic, they would say, and what’s the point of hiding something that everyone knows about anyway? It seemed illogical to them. And when it came to death and dying they were sometimes more frank and frontal than I could bear. “Can’t you just wrap me in a sheet and bury me in a nice place near a body of water?” my mother asked plaintively. I had to explain that it’s against the law. “But why?”

“What do I care what you do with my body?” my father says. “It’ll be your problem, kid. Just put me in the dumpster on Staten Island.”

My father, age 84, is coming to Iowa for a visit and for the party. Almost every day he calls me and says, “I don’t think you kids realize. I am an old man.”

“Believe me, Dad, I realize.”

“I’m not so sure.”

When I visit him in New York, I say to him, “Let’s take a little walk. We could just go around the block.”

“I don’t want to walk!” he says. “What’s the matter with you? When are you going to understand that I am old! Your father is an old, old man! And speaking of age, you’re not so young yourself! You’re getting there too, kid! You’re not going to live forever!”

“I didn’t think I was, Dad.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You and your sister are very unrealistic.”

I owe him eight dollars, and he’s continuously bothering me about it. Finally I say, “Dad, what’s with the eight dollars? I bought groceries, I bought lunch, and and we’ve never kept track of these little things on our visits anyway …”

He says, “I’ve decided that it’s high time that you kids get weaned off the idea that your dad is always there to pick up the tab.”

“Dad, don’t you notice that we don’t live near you, we have jobs, and we’ve been picking up our own tabs for a few decades now?”

He shakes his head. “You kids think that your old dad is always going to be there with the wallet, and you can depend on him to pay for things. But it’s not always going to be like that. You need to start getting used to the idea that I’m not going to be around forever, in fact I’m not going to be around for too much longer.”

“Oh, I get it,” I say. “One day we’ll be sitting in a restaurant and the bill will come, and we’ll wait and wait, but no one will pick it up, and finally we’ll say, Oh my god, Dad is dead – and it will be so awful, like adding insult to injury! Not only will you be dead, but to make matters worse, you won’t pay the bill!”

“OK, joke about it. But you’ll see when the time comes.”

 

Coming toward death, my mother was brave and honest. In the last hours, sedated, unconscious, her whole jaw lifted, her mouth opened, she sucked in the air so greedily, she looked like a baby, expectant, enthusiastic for every breath … It killed me. Maybe she wanted more? Maybe she wasn’t done? Was it just her organism, like a fish flopping madly in a bucket, wanting to live?

 

But we are all fishes flopping in a bucket! I don’t want to die, and the extent to which I don’t want to die is directly related to my increasing capacity for joy. Most days I take a walk, and more and more I’m only walking around the limited streets of my neighborhood because more and more I see more and more that I’ve never seen before. I walk with Ingrid, and say, “That house was never there before! They moved it in over the weekend!”  — “Or maybe they moved the streets around, not the houses.”

 

So at my party I want to make a request and a call for comrades. Help me deal with my anxiety and I’ll help you deal with yours. Let’s make a pact to not make those cracks anymore, to say the numbers, to tell our age at every opportunity, so that 52 won’t be an ugly number or a shameful number, but a fact, to be dealt with with sadness or happiness or any of the emotions with which we deal with facts. What kind of button or t-shirt should I have made up? ASK ME HOW OLD I AM, like those people who invite you to ask them how they lost weight. Or AGING EVEN AS WE SPEAK.

Or it could just say, very simply, FUCK OFF. Suddenly, smoke is coming out of my ears. I have just HAD IT with that shit. It is indeed hard, aging, and I don’t like thinking that I have lost the beauty of years back, and that I am going toward death, but it is reality, and I am committed to being in reality, and more and more every day that’s how I feel, that it might be tough but it IS, and we must BE IN THE REAL. And assholes denying my real age is not helping me. This is not what friends do! Friends help you deal with, confront, your fears and anxieties, they don’t jump in there with you and drive on your fears and anxieties. Of course, it’s their (our collective) fear and anxiety too. But when I have my birthday party — and I always do have a birthday party — I am going to find some way to toast to aging and dying, and to say that I am working on being in the real with A-G-E and fifty-two and three and ninety and so on, and I want help, better I want companionship, comrades in facing up to it all, and, Happy  Birthday, cin-cin, I am going to die …

I am thinking also of getting a button or a t-shirt made up for my birthday which I would wear and it would say something about that … something like FACE AGE … nice and ambiguous.

Any suggestions? Help me with this. I love writing slogans, but this one is really tough. Partly it’s that it’s a mixture of fear of aging and fear of death; they are together but also separate; the vanity issue of aging is also big, and real. The gender part, to deal with that or not? I had a sick idea a few years back to get a button made for me that said AGING SPINSTER but even my friends laughed in such a pale, horrified way that I chickened out. It became clear it was not going to be the start of a movement. What about ASK ME HOW OLD I AM, kind of like those buttons that say ASK ME HOW I LOST WEIGHT — ? — I think the problem of naming age is of course specifically a female problem, and I get mad every time a woman refuses or avoids telling her age. These people are absolutely part of the problem.

Jon says: What about those buttons that say in that distinctive bubbly pink script Ask Me About Mary Kay? You could do Ask Me About My Decay!”

Being in the real — well, it is everything, and it is the hardest thing, I agree. Strip away layers of built-up artifice, as you say, but also simply face up to whatever it is that is happening, I mean HAPPENING, like the reality of aging and dying. The artifice: I have some self-confrontation or self-looking going on lately that I find painful (issues of insecurity and work) and I’ve been remembering how paranoid I used to get when I smoked pot, which I haven’t done now in years. I smoked pot between age 14 and age 30 on and off always trying to like it and always hating it. It drove me into an intense, freaked-out self-awareness that was partly nuts and partly true and totally unconstructive. Usually it involved some sort of self-discovery that induced tremendous shame and horror. “Oh my god, I’m really ….” something or other, but very exaggerated and, in retrospect, funny. At the time it made my hair stand on end. Don’t ask why I kept doing it, maybe just because all my friends loved getting high and I believed that sooner or later I would break through into the beauty of it all …

NOT ASHAMED OF AGING could be another button, but it’s 1. too preachy and 2. not exactly true! The trick here is to call attention to the fact of aging with some sort of shock technique (AGING SPINSTER was nicely shocking, I thought) but not preach and acknowledge the fact that I am having difficulty as are we all … but acknowledge the DESIRE to work my way into the real …

Susan, the philosophy professor, says, “Weren’t we going to make a line of philosophical fragrances and lingerie, like Overman Underwire, and Will to Power Firm Belly Control, and Nausea? And now there is that stupid Philosophy product line! Disgusting! And if we don’t act fast, there will be our best product line stolen from us in the finest of stores: La Terror. There is La Terror Tout Les Jours (day creams) and La Terror Dans la Nuit; when you wake up sweaty and freaking out you need to apply it with just the tip of the ring finger very gently to not distress the most delicate skin, and of course the special Rain of Terror – the anti-aging face-misting bottle in the shape of a guillotine. When the miniature gold-colored blade falls with a flick of a dainty wrinkled pinky, the Age-Mist-Defying Anti-de-Terror, the “rain of terror”, gently yet firmingly shoots out from the exact place where the severed neck of the aging female guillotine victim would be lying …  This is good, but perhaps we also need a line of Home(land) Insecurity? The terrorist attack of wrinkles in the night that greet the aging female [victim] upon waking and looking into the mirror – that awful moment of Home Insecurity! TO combat such terrorism, we use the Age-Defying Gas Masque and the the soothing Fog of War Against Wrinkles. It’s a subcategory of the Terror line, the “War Against …” product line. There is, for instance, The War Against Bags, which is actually a line of handbags! This is, as you know, the Year of the Bag, and with huge, sexy bags with zippers and fringes we sassily defy the  bags under the eyes, the baggy breast, the belly bag, the sagging arm bag, etcetera etcetera! Other ammunition: L’Infirmment Body Armor, the In-firming emollient for the aging body. Not to be confused with the product of a competing line, L’infirmament Body Armor, which actually uses powdered meterorite from the Mojave Valley, and Anti-Gra-Vite, a mineral compound in a capsule which purports to not only slow the graying of the hair but also to improve the elasticity of the organs, of which the skin is the largest …

One thing I do know: There will be a party, since with every year I become more convinced that birthday parties are important and the way we celebrate kids is the way we want to be celebrated ourselves. It’s true for me, anyway. And the more anxiety there is about the birthday, the more it must be celebrated with maximum energetic silliness and intergenerational penetration – as many bambini as possible to scream and blow out the candles with. And on my birthday cake? 52 candles and, in nice blue bakery script, FUCK EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A JOKE.