Nothing should be more expected than old age:
nothing is more unforeseen.
Simone de Beauvoir
The unforeseen arrived on an autumn day some twenty years ago in Canberra, Australia. I had been living there for fifteen years, having immigrated from the U.S. to spend my life with a man I had met on a train in the tropics of far north Queensland. We were not young when we met, both in our forties, but we were fit and healthy and in love. In the years that followed, we pedalled the bike trails of Canberra, rode camels through the outback, hiked through forests of towering gum trees, kayaked in tropical archipelagos and travelled back and forth to my birth country, held in the rhythms of our midlife adventure as if they were perpetual.
On that day of the unforeseen, I discovered I had lost my driver’s license. After a search of purses, pockets, and under the seats of the cars with no success, I dropped in to the shop front that handled such matters. I scrolled through the menu of licensing options from boats to pets, took a ticket from the machine, found a seat, and opened my book to wait my turn. When my number appeared on the electronic display board, I approached counter A and described my situation to the grey-haired civil servant. In Australia, we renew our drivers’ licenses on birthdays divisible by the number five. Since my lost license was due for renewal the following month when I would turn fifty-five, I explained, I was hoping I could renew it rather than replace it so I wouldn’t have to come back in a month.
He scanned his computer screen for my details. “It shows here you renewed your license last year on your fifty-fifth birthday.”
“Well, that can’t be,” I replied. “I’m still only fifty-four.”
“What’s your birth date?”
I rattled off the numbers.
“According to my calculation,” he said, “you’ll be fifty-six next month.”
“Fifty-six?” I said with alarm and a bit too loudly.
It was easy to lose track of birthdays after I moved to Australia. Once associated with lilacs and tulips and lengthening days, my birthdays in the U.S. had been a celebration of renewal. In the Southern Hemisphere, my birthday landed three weeks before the beginning of winter, when bare trees combed the colourless sky. And, apparently, there had been nothing remarkable about turning fifty-five.
“Your lucky day, though.” The man smiled. “A new license will only cost you $26, and you get to have your picture taken.”
Fifty-six. I turned the words over in my mind. According to Hippocrates, fifty-six is the year that marks the beginning of old age. It was as if I had lost years from my life. I had walked in the door with youthful confidence, just past fifty, and would leave through the same door, now pushing sixty, elderly. When the man handed me my new driver’s license, I slipped it into my wallet without looking at the picture―sure I would see my own grandmother looking back at me―and walked quickly through the maze of reception chairs into the autumn sun.
In my car I dared to look at the photograph. My mouth drew downward, my face looked thin. Were those cords in my neck? Was my chin sagging? I pulled down the sun visor, noticing as I reached for it the age spots on my right hand. In the mirror I saw hairs sprouting from my chin and crinkles around my eyes. My chin was sagging. I pushed the skin of my face up and back from my jaw near my ears on both sides, imagining how I would look with a face lift. In the lighted mirror my bottle-blonde hair looked dull, a bit dry. My blush reminded me of the rouged cheeks of my first-grade teacher, her ancient face sickly pale, pink dotting her cheekbones like a circus clown. I bared my teeth, remembering how twenty years earlier, as a divorced woman, I was dating a man in his fifties, and one of my friends claimed he had green teeth.
I was overcome with vanity. Throughout the rest of the day, I caught my reflection in store windows. Did I look dowdy? Was I beginning to stoop? Have a dowager’s hump? Had I lost all sex appeal?
That night, safe behind the closed door of my small bathroom, I filled the bath with hot water. I usually preferred to kick start each morning with a pounding spray and a vigorous scrub, but some days the aching soul demanded a long hot soak. I undressed, stood on the terra cotta tiles in front of the long vanity mirror and studied my body in the bright light, older now though unstretched and unscarred by childbearing. I wondered if my husband still found me attractive. Would he be repulsed when my triceps jiggled like bags of suet, my knees dimpled, and cellulite made my ass look like congealed tapioca?
I remembered a conversation I had overheard in the law office where I worked before I moved to Australia. A group of alpha males in their mid-20s, stars rising, animas not yet risen, had gathered in the office next to mine for their morning coffee and daily male bonding session, which was typically about the previous night’s football game or women.
“Did you know women sprout hairs from their nipples when they get old?” came the voice that caught my attention.
“Oh, how disgusting.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“They lose their pubic hair too.”
“Stop, stop, you’re grossing me out.”
It felt personal. Having gone back to law school as a mature-age student, and then nearly forty, I was the oldest junior lawyer in the firm. I was not a good fit, something that became apparent in my first week, when this same group of men, keen on bonding, organised a getting-to-know-you outing for the new recruits―three women, the other two in their mid-twenties―where we yawned through several hours of a live Seattle Mariners baseball game, all the beer and hot dogs you could eat, compliments of the firm.
My own aversion to the aging female body was seeded in childhood. I remember a day when I was perhaps eight. I was sitting on the carpet in my bedroom cutting out paper dolls. Strains of raised voices filtered in through a ceiling vent from my parents’ bedroom next door. “You need to talk to your mother,” I heard my mother insist. Granny had come to live in the basement of our new house in southeastern Idaho three years earlier. I did not know, then, she was like a bad penny that had been passed between my father and his sister for years and had twice before lived with my parents until their marriage reached a breaking point. And while I didn’t understand the history of enmity between Granny and my mother as they vied for my father’s love and attention, I picked up the sharpness in their exchanges almost immediately after she arrived. I often came upon my mother crying. At night, I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom, and many mornings the adults were not talking to one another at breakfast. My father cleared his throat; my mother closed drawers with extra force; Granny lifted her fork to her mouth with her eyes down and her jaw tight. I became a skulker and eavesdropper as the mood in our house shifted; I needed to make sure my mother was all right.
That afternoon I listened to my mother tell my father that she did not want Granny undressing in front of us. She didn’t want her children to see an old woman’s body. She wanted us to see the naked body as something beautiful. “You’ll just have to ask her to undress in her closet with the doors closed when the children are in her room.” I was too young to understand whether my mother found Granny’s obesity and the effects of ageing offensive or whether this complaint was part of her overall rancour when it came to Granny.
My younger sister and I often spent evenings in Granny’s room watching TV or playing Chinese checkers. My sister, who had been a toddler when Granny arrived, seemed unaware of the tensions created by her presence, and the two of them had formed a tight bond. Perhaps sensing my wariness, Granny simply tolerated me. To me, she seemed a large, joyless and friendless old woman who spent her days watching soap operas in her room.
I had never paid attention to Granny’s nightly routines, but a few days after I overheard my parents, my sister and I again sat side by side in the dark green La-Z-Boy recliner in Granny’s room, watching Maverick on her TV. As Granny readied for bed, my eyes followed her into the walk-in closet. She closed the doors behind her, but I could see her through the crack between the doors, where she was fastened in a stream of light from a bare bulb. As I remember it, I watched as she unbuttoned her plaid housedress, let it crumple to the floor, stepped out of it, then hung it on a hook before pulling her slip over her head. She removed her brassiere and out slumped two small-nippled empty sacks. Heavy sighs of effort and relief mingled with the noise from the TV as she removed each piece of clothing. She unlaced the pink corset that contained her and unleashed what seemed a tumult of flesh, satiny and lumpy. Next, her underpants, as big as a pillowcase, slid down her thick legs to the floor and exposed the baldness of her most private space. She pulled the cord to shut off the light and shuffled back into the room wearing a white flannel night-gown patterned with tiny rosebuds and trimmed in dainty lace. She sank onto her bed, which my father had elevated at one end to help with her poor circulation. She stretched out each leg, one at a time, and rolled a flesh-coloured elastic stocking down her network of prominent blue veins, over her crooked toes, into a donut she deposited on her bedside table. Her horny feet with long toenails were covered with corn plasters.
Whether Granny’s body repulsed me at the time because I was influenced by my mother’s comments to my father, her loathing of the woman, and my own guardedness, or whether I was simply curious, I’m unsure now. But in my child brain, the picture of her aged nakedness synapsed with emotions of shame and disgust and formed a phobia that would be reinforced throughout much of my life by the prejudices of the culture at large.
To become an old woman was to become the cliché of that woman who lumbers and grunts and farts out loud and smells like an old chest of drawers; she with knobbed fingers and ridged brittle nails, a whiskered chin, a warty nose and a crackling voice; she who peers through thick lenses that magnify her eyes like the telescopic eyes of an insect; she whose head leads and hips hitch as she walks.
To become an old woman was to become the caricature of the desperate, horny Granny in Playboy magazine cartoons that I first discovered in my father’s dresser drawer; she with her jutting chin, big nose and ears, breasts swinging under a see-through negligee, launching one pathetic and futile scheme after another to get laid.
To become an old woman was to become:
Granny fanny
Greypuss
Hagalope
Old cheese bag
Oldie Locks
Prunetang
Raisin pussy
Rot box
Saggatron
Sag tits
Soggy bag
Vaginasaur
Warthag
To become an old woman was to belong secreted behind closed doors.
I sometimes recall a university departmental party some fifty-odd years ago. At one point in the evening, I noticed the half-inebriated male professors and graduate students huddled together, scanning the room in unison, arguing about numbers, then bursting into laughter. They were so obvious in their tiresome male ritual of rating the women at the party. But these were clever men. Given to empiricism. A male friend told me the next day that the Mohs hardness scale―a geologic ordinal ranking system for the hardness of minerals―was their standard. Each woman in the room was rated based on the anticipated hardness of the erection the men might achieve given the prospect of sex with her. Talc being 1, with an absolute hardness of one; and diamond being ten, with an absolute hardness of 1600. My friend told me I had rated somewhere between quartz and topaz. “Unattractive” women and women over fifty dropped below talc, below whole numbers to the likes of caesium at 0.2, a soft, silvery-gold alkali metal that is liquid at room temperature. In those days, our insult would have been that we had not received a higher rating.
As I stared closely into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror on the evening of that day the unforeseen arrived, I had never felt more vulnerable. What was I to do with this parade of new faces and bodies that would appear in my mirror in the years to come? A new sag or fold or spot. More fat around the middle, a prominent vein on the left calf (or even the vulva, for Christ’s sake), the latest geriatric wart joining the forest under my right breast, a handful of hair in my brush, teeth a shade darker.
I thought of an older friend who, over her lifetime, had collected fabrics from around the world―organzas, organdies, brocades, crepes, fine cottons, linens and silks. She had told me that as she ran her hands over each piece, she’d once pictured the linen suit, the flannel slacks, the brocade jacket she would pattern and sew. But caught up in the chaos of her life, she folded the fabrics neatly into boxes, and each year her body became rounder and softer, her skin crinkled and sagged, the creases in her forehead deepened, her jowls loosened, and her left breast was removed. From time to time, she would open the boxes, smell the lavender nest of the fabrics, finger each piece, admire its texture and colour and drape and movement, run it across her skin. At age sixty-four, she believed that to fashion the fabric into a garment for her aging body would be a desecration.
How was I to grow old, steeped in my own biases and shame and the shallowness of a culture that would do its best to turn me against myself?
I would like to tell you that night in front of my mirror was an awakening and that in the subsequent twenty years I moved through aging in an enlightened state of grace. But the character test had just begun. The insult to personal vanity is merely the first of the many challenges of aging, though perhaps the most startling and dreaded in our image-focussed and youth-obsessed society.
In the intervening years, a procession of the unforeseen has astonished me and scrambled my sense of self. Who was to know that as my years accumulated far from the country, culture, and landscape that sculpted me, I would often feel I belonged nowhere. That I would become a different person from the one who left and be overcome with sadness when, in some cases family and ‘forever’ friends, carried along trajectories unfamiliar to me, became estranged. I had not anticipated that my husband and I would branch onto disjoined paths as once shared interests and passions became singular and need to renegotiate our relationship every few years. Or that menopause would snuff out my once healthy libido, and sexual intimacy would take on a whole new form. And at sixty, when I still had an illusory sense of control over my life, I was stunned when I landed in a heart hospital in New Mexico in a state of advanced pericardial effusion and myocarditis with my oxygen saturation rate dropping rapidly, and all my organs shutting down. I learned that when Death cosies up to you with its bad breath, the life you’re in the middle of looks pretty damn good, and you begin to see how those gnawing regrets about your unlived lives also foul the air.
I suppose I expected that as I matured and became wiser, the world would as well, but each new war, genocide, mass shooting of children, clearing of old forest, extinction of a species, and rise of this or that tyrant has proved me wrong and upended my belief in humankind. And although I knew that I would lose people from my life, particularly grandparents and parents, I had not anticipated the kind of absence that leaves cavities in the heart as the journeys of those who have been part of mine have ended.
Most recently, the knees that once supported me to climb mountains, walk across sandy deserts, and brace in my kayak demanded replacement parts that have come with limited warranties and pain beyond my imaging. I had catastrophised about the surgery for months, having read on Dr. Google about all that can go wrong with bilateral total knee replacements. I had imagined myself crippled with one leg shorter than the other, racked with chronic pain, or worse, dead from a blood clot or paralysed from a stroke. The morning of my surgery, as my husband drove me to the hospital, I looked across the lake towards Black Mountain. A heavy fog sat on the surface of the water and shrouded the slopes of eucalypts. The pale-yellow light of dawn bled through the mist and cast an ethereal glow over all. The exquisite beauty filled me with a sense of equanimity. Whatever was to come, ultimately, I would become one with the light and mist and air and earth and water. Scatter into the eternal, into the ineffable.
But it was not my time to become part of the sublime. Instead, I returned home two weeks later with my bionic knees and joined the ranks of those old women who have lost their independence; who have a basket of pills and gels at the bedside to manage pain, inflammation, infection, scarring, indigestion, constipation, and blood thinning; whose remodelled accessible bathroom is cluttered with a raised toilet seat, a shower chair, and adaptive aids for dressing; whose partner has had to relocate to the couch in the study; whose friends deliver food and pull a chair up to the bedside; and whose only outings are to the hospital for rehabilitation sessions. I can tell you that my altered sense of myself in those days had nothing to do with nipple hairs, flabby arms, balding genitalia, or green teeth.
To my surprise I found a delicious peace as I gave myself over to my body, to its most animal needs and the prolonged processes of healing. Days unfolded without event or urgency―the lack of urgency a gift of old age. And despite my grief that I would probably never again hike to the top of Rams Head in the Snowy Mountains and that a return to Antarctica to kayak would be out of the question, given that my travel insurance would now cost nearly as much as the entire trip, I was filled with gratitude not only for what had been but for what was, then. Life was sweet, in spite of its new challenges. On those winter mornings, my husband arrived at my bedside layered in pajamas and a heavy wool sweater pulled over his stooped shoulders, wearing slippers and a beanie and looking very much like a garden gnome bearing a cup of hot coffee. He plumped up my pillows. He opened the blinds to allow in the faint light that filtered through the large eucalypt in the neighbour’s yard. The first signs of spring unfolded with knots of yellow ready to burst into tiny blooms of sun on the wattle trees. The furnace purred. Every day of my recovery I remembered the lesson of the poet Antonio Machado: “Walker, there is no path: the path is made by walking.”
Over the past twenty years I have come to realise that the question I asked myself as I stood naked in front of my bathroom mirror―How was I to grow old? ―was the wrong question. It was a question inclined to societal biases. A question that presumed aging is nothing more than a passive process of subtractions that I would have to endure. A question that lacked imagination. A question that revoked my power, revoked my relevance, and revoked my humanity. A question that disaffirmed old age as a significant part of life. A question grounded in fear.
The more emboldened question is: How do I want to be old? We cower at the gate to the unforeseen as if we know the unknowable path. Will there be hardships? More than likely. Will there be frights? Of course. What about joy? If we allow it. Will there be ambiguities? Most definitely. But as any child knows, when we blaze a trail, we must be prepared for anything: armed with curiosity and courage; a good knife for slicing through setbacks and a pair of binoculars for perspective; a loud song, a strong bladder, and a flagon of humour.
Several years ago, I happened upon a painting by the late realist painter Rory Wagner in a small gallery in Taos, New Mexico. He had been commissioned to paint a picture of a beautiful woman. In the completed portrait, warts gathered at the bridge of the woman’s bulbous nose, scattered below her eyes and from her mouth to her chin. Skin the colour of cinnamon, her face craggy with age. A single, thick, grey brow sprouted below the furrows that scored her forehead. Dark lines fissured from the corners of her eyes to her temples and down the sides of her face. Small lines radiated from her pursed lips, where there was the hint of a smile, but the corners arced downwards, and her careworn eyes brimmed with sorrow. A white streak of paint smeared diagonally down her cheek like a tear track. Thinning grey and white hair sprouted from a middle part, flew untamed to her shoulders, and a knob of fat earlobe nested in the strands. The gallery notes explained that the man who commissioned the painting refused to buy it. One critic had claimed Rory Wagner painted in sonnets.
Here was a rarely sung song about the wholeness of a woman’s life worn on the body: the cold memories of joy and rapture and awe; the shattered heart, the dashed spirit, and the self, fragmented by love and loss; perhaps the sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Here was the soul bathed in magnificence and misery.
The poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote a sonnet about freeing the trapped ‘rainbow-bird’ as the body breaks down, of a transcendence into gaiety, no longer constrained by the ‘wobbling and wavering’. Hers is thought to be a song of affirmation, marked by the energy of an emphatic exclamation mark at the end.
Now, as I go even deeper into that unforeseen but expected place and not without trepidation, as my resourcefulness and good knife have been blunted by time, I, too, sing more loudly an emphatic song of affirmation. A song that honors the gift of this failing body as it continues to deliver the world to me through all its senses and remains steadfast in the gales of what the Buddhists call the eight worldly winds: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, success and failure, praise and blame. I cannot say that a time will not come when the path is too steep, and I choose to cut short my journey. But for now, I am guided on my path by the sweet hum in my old bones, the slowed but familiar rhythms of my body, the muscle memory and secrets folded in the skin, the eyes with the long view. I treasure the intimacy of those I love, yet I delight in the fact that, in old age, I have the power to reduce the testosterone-fuelled members of an entire football team to the hardness of caesium, that shimmering, benign warm liquid.
