Post from the Past: The 80-Year-Old 43 Year Old

This post was originally published in 2007 on the first incarnation of this blog--no longer up.  I wanted to repost some good writing from time to time just to remind myself, even in all the busy craziness, that I can do it!  I also wrote this when my parents were not well, but now they have both died, so it makes this post even more poignant to me.  


This post seemed especially appropriate because today's first Mass reading is from Job 1, with all the servants coming to Job and saying, "I alone have escaped to tell you."  That's the title of Ralph McInerny's beautiful memoir, and I write about today here today.


Several weeks ago,  I was at a gathering of moms.  I made a comment about "being older" in some context which escapes me now.  We all laughed about whatever the comment was, but then one mom said, laughingly, something along the lines of, "When you make a comment like that, I always think about it like you think you are some 80-year-old lady."  It was a funny aside, but it gave me pause.  I have noticed myself that I tend to make these "I am getting older" comments and I think my (just a bit) younger friends are a little perplexed, or think I am giving up.  I've been reflecting on this lately and wondering why I do this.


When my mother was 60 years old, I was 25.  I remember her saying, "I'm old," and it seemed to me at the time as a kind of giving up or a hopeless statement.    And I said, "Mom, you are NOT old.  You are 60--that's middle-aged!"  She replied, "60 is not middle-aged.  Nancy, how many 120 year-olds do you know?"  That set me back a little, but I still argued with her and talked about how active she was, how much she did, how much of her life was left to live well.  She agreed with all of that, but persisted in saying that it was "real" that she was old.  Now I think I understand a little of what she meant by the statement.  It's just an acceptance of a reality; a meditation in a way on the end of human life.  What one does with this reality is the important thing. 


I am officially middle-aged now.  I don't really see it as a crisis or a tragedy--oh, no, no more miniskirts! (never me anyway), but as a reality that can be frustrating, funny and frightening, all in the same moment.   Having a preschooler when one is over 40 and very (though happily) gray-haired in a small community where more people have grandchildren than children at this age sometimes makes me feel a bit odd.  My husband and I laugh about it, but we tire of having to say, "No, they are my children, not my grandchildren."   It is kind of funny to have to admit my wounded pride there.  Do I really look or act that old, I think?  I don't feel that I do; I stay active and love having little kids; I know I am a much better parent at this age than I would have been as a younger me (though children earlier would have been good for me in so many ways!) 


There is a sense in which these comments of mine, even internal comments, are my mid-life crisis--really coming to terms with and meditating on what it means to grow older, and yes, to die.  I am so much more aware of it than I was in my 20s and 30s.  The physical signs are only a little bit of what I'm feeling.   While it is true that I don't bounce back from injuries or late nights or overeating as I did in my "younger days,"  I I would say I am in better shape now than many times during my life, and I am much more careful about taking care of myself.


But at the same time, I feel a growing sense of urgency to accomplish goals before... I don't know; it's not exactly getting old, or dying....  Even though I know that decline is decades in the future, decades is not so long anymore.  It is so easy to keep putting things off and putting things off until it really is too late.  Time is just moving too quickly for me these days.


Also, I am much more sensitive in a number of ways to mortality, and old age, and weakness.  It is not just my own, far away as that may be (or as close as it may be; the fragility of life is painfully close sometimes).   Emotionally I am much more aware.  Funerals affect me much more deeply than in the past; I feel more a sense of being closer to the person dying than  I ever have in the past.   I feel this partially because my mother is somewhere along the path to death.  The idea of losing my mom, either of my parents, is just overwhelming at times.  I know intellectually this is the normal scope of things, but it still feels scary.


Ralph McInerny, one of my personal heroes and author of the excellent memoir ,I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You talks about "standing on the precipice separating time and eternity" when the people he most admires begin to die.  He says it much more eloquently, but I would describe it is as a fundamental vulnerability--there is no more layer of protection between me and the wide world.  That sounds strange; I have been independent of my parents for many years in so many ways, and I act very grown-up, but actually being that grown-up person...wow.


And yet I can remind myself that we are all surrounded by "so great a cloud of witnesses" in the communion of saints.  There is a layer there; we are all connected; perhaps this is God's way of helping me understand some of these theological concepts in a real way.


So I tend to comment on my age a bit lately, and I will continue to comment on my age.  For me, it is not an excuse, or a complaint, or a giving up.  It is a continuing meditation about what it means to grow older, to have life and have it abundantly, at the same time to always keep in mind the last things.    It is not because I feel like an 80-year-old, I promise you, even if I do complain about the aches and pains and grandmother comments.  I am just standing on the precipice of time and eternity, trying to embrace the view.