Category: old age literature

Old Men, Old Authors, Phantom Limbs, and Dying Wishes

I like books about old characters, and I especially like it if the authors are also old.  I guess I want to compare notes about how aging feels, what it means.  Recently I read a book by an old man about an old man (Paul Auster’s Baumgartner), a book about an old man written by a middle-aged woman (Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck), and a book by a very old and great writer which should never have been published.

Erpenbeck was middle-aged (40s) when this book was released, but she writes about a recently retired Princeton classics professor (Richard) who is feeling his age and his loneliness.  There are wonderful descriptions about the challenge of what it means to be “old,” like these thoughts about what an old man should wear:

Maybe a cardigan is more appropriate to his new condition. More comfortable, at any rate. And seeing that he no longer goes out in human society on a daily basis, it’s surely no longer necessary for him to shave every single morning. Let grow what will. Just stop putting up resistance — or is that how dying begins? Could dying begin with this kind of growth? No, that can’t be right, he thinks.

Richard is somewhat lost in his old age and retirement, but his chance interaction with some Libyan immigrants ends up turning his life in a new direction.  And, incredibly, he finds parallels between the immigrant experience of wandering from one country to another (hoping for acceptance and work) and with the journey of Odysseus in The Odyssey.  Richard also finds that the oral history/story traditions of his new friends make him think of the way that Homeric epics evolved over the centuries.  And he thinks about what it means to be human but to be thought of as less than human – something experienced by the immigrants but also, at times, by the elderly.

(Spoilers coming!) Erpenbeck’s book ends with a party including Richard, and his academic and immigrant friends – and everyone seems to be having a fine time.  Richard gets into a deep conversation with the immigrants about an incident in which he talked his wife into an abortion that ended rather disastrously.

Why were you ashamed of your wife? asks Ali.

That she might die, says Richard.  Yes, he says, at that moment I hated her because she might die.

I can understand that, says Detlef.

I think that’s when I realized, says Richard, that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.

Like the surface of the sea? asks Ali.

Actually, yes, exactly like the surface of the sea.

Richard might be facing old age and death and things that “can’t be endured,” but he has learned something.  Like Odysseus, he made it home to Ithaca only to find that even homecomings are difficult, and the answer is not about slipping into an old life but forging a new one with the full recognition of the horrors that are under the sea.

Auster’s Sy Baumgartner is also trying to work out what an old life means, what he can make of it.  Baumgartner monitors himself for signs of aging.  For example, he counts the number of times that he realizes he has not fully zipped up his pants, “four times in the last two weeks!” and uses that as a measure of his decline.  He considers marrying again, but the woman turns him down.  He invites a young scholar to work on his late wife’s poetry and papers, but by the end of the book, she has not arrived.  And so it goes.

One of the most interesting metaphors in Auster’s book is that of the phantom limb, that thing that – although gone – can still cause us pain. Set to thinking about this phenomenon when his housekeeper’s husband saws off two fingers, Baumgartner considers writing a book about how things that do not even exist anymore can cause us such angst.  We all know this is so, but can’t really absorb the implications.  I had a therapist tell me once that guilt and regret are two of the most worthless emotions.  This might be true, but that knowledge did not make the regret and guilt go away. (One might think of that golden couplet of Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Pity me that the heart is slow to learn/ What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”)

These things are worth thinking about and the phantom limb metaphor helps.  Unfortunately, Baumgartner never finishes his book, nor his train of thought.

Auster’s book ends with a confused Sy Baumgartner, who, after having gotten lost on a ride to get some liquor, swerves to miss a deer and then takes his bleeding body on foot down the road to look for help.  The book ends with this ambiguous statement: “And so, with the wind in his face and blood still trickling from the wound in his forehead, our hero goes off in search of help, and when he comes to the first house and knocks on the door, the final chapter in the saga of S.T. Baumgartner begins.”  Not much to look forward to here.  This is an Odysseus who probably isn’t going to make it home.

The two books above I recommend to any serious reader.  I also recently read Garcia Marquez’s Until August – not really a book about old age, but a book that was written when the author was in his late seventies and revised in his eighties, and which he asked his heirs not to publish.   In his later life, when dementia prevented Garcia from “following the plot,” he abandoned the text and prohibited its issuance.  The great author died in 2014, but this year (2024) his heirs decided to subvert his wishes and publish the unfinished manuscript.  Such a shame.  Garcia has given us many wonderful portraits of the elderly – if you haven’t read Love in the Time of Cholera, do it soon! – but there was no need for the publication of a rough draft that this Nobel laureate left behind with instructions that it be destroyed.  In the end, reading the slim book made me uncomfortable, and it certainly will do little to further Marquez’s wonderful reputation and standing.

This action of Marquez’s executors evokes the whole issue of what we owe the dead – if the dying leave specific requests, should their wishes be sacrosanct?  What if they had dementia?  What if they were a public figure or a literary treasure???  I know, I know.  We might know little of Kafka if Max Bord had not ignored his dying wishes to have all destroyed.  We all face this problem at one time or another.  I keep thinking about the decades of journals in my closet; I could leave instructions that they be taken out with my body to be cremated, but maybe I’d better do it myself.  I’d like to hang onto them as long as possible though, so the timing is tricky!  My guess is that all of our closets are full of such things.

This Old House

In trying to find a house in the right location in a tight market, my husband and I ended up buying an old house – one that is close in age to ourselves, a 1950’s house with a lot of character and a lot of problems.  It was not the wisest of decisions, but we have always made our housing decisions with our heart and not our brains, and, in the past, we have been able to make things work.  This time, however, we are old and tired, and I am not so sure.  The house has charm, but it is the charm of an old flirt in a wheelchair.

This is not the oldest house we have owned; that prize goes to a beauty we bought in 1999, which had been given to the couple we bought it from as a wedding present from her father.  It was immaculately kept up – not modernized, just kept up.  It had the original cherry kitchen cabinets with a built-in flour sifter.  That house was like people who take care of themselves their whole lives, and do not succumb to either bad habits or cosmetic surgery.  The old house we are in now was not kept up, and all too often, modern “updates” were grafted onto deeper problems.  It has gracious bones but needs both detox and some reconstructive surgery.

Obsolete appliances and rotting wood have got me thinking about the analogies between old houses and old people – a very popular analogy.  I recently ran into this by Frederick Buechner (from Whistling in the Dark):

Old age is not, as the saying goes, for sissies.  There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it’s like living in a house that’s in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn’t work right anymore.  There are bats in the attic.  Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there’s a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather.  The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on.

Buechner’s analogy, of course, reminded me of the old revival song, “This Old House,” by Stuart Hamblen, written about the time that my house was built:

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer, ain’t a-gonna need this house no more.

Ain’t got time to fix the shingles, ain’t got time to fix the floor.

Ain’t got time to oil the hinges or to mend the window pane,

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer I’m getting ready to meet the saints.

Rosemary Clooney had the first hit with the song, but everyone from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson has recorded it.  It was supposedly inspired when Hamblen, while out on a hunting expedition with John Wayne (who else would you go hunting with in the Sierras?), came across a broken-down house where an old dog was guarding his dead master.  Believe that if you want.  The song has a catchy tune and great rhythm, but I think the song mostly resonates because it tells a great truth.  Hamblen reminds us that as the body deteriorates, we are getting closer and closer to not needing it anymore, and that is just how life is – so we might as well sing about it.

I need my body now, however, and partly I need it to make this house livable.  I need it to build a new life one more time.  But I also need to stop hearing my husband moan as he unearths (literally) some new problem.  (Though he denies it, the man is a saint.)

So, we try to cope with this old house in our old age.  Probably a mistake.  Surely feels like a mistake many days.  But maybe the process has some redeeming lessons about accepting what old is.  You can paint it, prop it up, make it over, but it is still an old house.  In the end, one can only enjoy its charms, but that is only possible if you can contain the angst and come to a kind of peace about aging, senescence.  In the Prologue to his Rule, the great St. Benedict tells us that if we grow old it is by way of a truce with God, so that we may have time to “amend our misdeeds” and “to safeguard love.” (See my earlier post, “The Truce of Saint Benedict and Rules of the Road.”) A truce, not a war.  We will fix the house the house as we are able and as we try to “safeguard love.”  We will try to remember that we are fortunate – to grow old, to have a roof, to be busy with meaningful chores.  And we came here to be near family, and there are no regrets in that regard.  As I look at our teenage grandchildren, I wonder how they see us.  And then I think of this old house again.  I hope they think that we have some charm.

 

 

Retirement, Death, and The Land of Cockaigne

Younger people dream of retirement – of that rosy day when they have reached the right age for social security or pension payments.  Or banked enough money in retirement accounts to cover their living expenses for the rest of their days.  Middle-agers discuss retirement with others in the office; they fantasize about where they will live and where they will travel; they try to imagine not having to wake up to an alarm every morning or having to turn out the light earlier than they would like.  I had such fantasies, but that was many, many years ago.  Now, I can’t imagine how I ever worked nine- or ten-hour days, put up with the constant aggravation of an office, or made a commute in rush hour traffic.  I don’t miss it, never missed it much.

Here is what I sometimes miss though – the hope for an event which is going to make life easier.  I sabotaged this wish lately by moving to be closer to family and taking on the logistics of a move (will I ever be able to get through the red tape at the DMV or find a primary care doctor?).  In the middle of the move, one of the family members that I was moving to be close to unexpectedly passed away.  He died while the movers were emptying my house in North Carolina, and his funeral was the day the movers arrived with our stuff in New England. 

And then there are the minor losses – routines, habits, a sense of where things are.  Finding further problems with an already imperfect new/old house.  Major and minor problems and aggravations are constant.   Locating a cooking utensil is suddenly a big deal.  Bills have to be carefully monitored during the address change so that payments are not missed.  New telephone numbers and wireless passwords must be noted and memorized.  The view out the windows has changed.  Being close to family means being physically and blessedly closer to their lives – which unfortunately also include their problems.

So, if we can no longer look forward to retirement, what does the elderly one look forward to?  Assisted living, the nursing home?  We decided when we moved that we were not ready for communal living of any kind, and – while it may be necessary someday – it is far from our ideal.  It is not something to hope for.

In medieval Europe, there was the peasant concept of Cockaigne, or pais de cocaigne, which translates to “the land of plenty.”  It was pictured as a kind of heaven with enough to eat, time to rest, the abolition of work, and – of course – free sex.  It was something for poor men and women to dream about, a heaven more to their taste than the Christian one.  As I was going through the trials of the last few weeks, I wondered what my equivalent was.  If I believe in any kind of afterlife, it surely is not the “pie in the sky when you die” sort.  And, yet, I found in the midst of seemingly irresolvable problems, that I was reminding myself over and over again, that I would soon find myself (or more accurately others would find me) dead and all my worries would go with me to the crematorium.  So, is this what old people look forward to – leaving their problems and their bodies (which often are one source of their problems) behind them?  Interesting thought.

Death as something to look forward to?  An alien concept in our culture but not without its believers.  The wonderful poet Stevie Smith wrote “I have a friend/At the end/Of the world.  /His name is a breath/Of fresh air.”  His name, of course, is death.  The poem is “Black March.”

I do not wish myself dead.  I just wish to get settled in and live a more routine existence.  But Jorge Borges found some comfort in imagining his own death – he even wrote a story about it, “August 25, 1983“, in which Borges conjures up an older version of himself on his deathbed.  I once made an exercise of doing the same for myself (see my blog entry “Fantasies to Reject in Old Age” from last May).  It was informative and scary.

I will get used to my new location.  I will unpack my ladle and find a dermatologist and get a new driver’s license.  But none of that happens quickly and all of it is harder than it used to be.  But there is really no alternative, no Cockaigne, without going through it.  I try to tell myself that it is useful to challenge myself in my old age, but it is not easy.  It is worse than I thought it would be; I hope that, when I come to it, I will be able to say the opposite about death.  At least that transition will not require a trip to the DMV.

One More Adventure – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Odysseus, and Me

Daniel Defoe published the first volume of Robinson Crusoe at 59, close to the age of his hero when he finally returns from his island.  When Crusoe rejoins the civilized world, he is 61, and has spent 35 years marooned.  Neither Defoe nor Crusoe was through though; Defoe took the story into Crusoe’s old age in The Farther (sometimes printed Further) Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and subtitled: Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe. 

Crusoe came home with the intention of settling down; he gets married and has children, but he finds it hard to be stable, to stay put.  The Farther Adventures starts with Crusoe’s acknowledgement that “That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz. ‘That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh,’ was never more verified than in the story of my Life.”  He wants to roam some more, he wants to go back to his island, he wants to see new places.  Fortunately (for him) his wife dies and releases him for more adventures. And he has them.  Finally, at the end of the second volume, he is 72 and says he is ready to settle down:

And here, resolving to harass myself no more, I am preparing for a longer journey than all these, having lived 72 years a life of infinite variety, and learnt sufficiently to know the value of retirement, and the blessing of ending our days in peace.

We don’t believe him.

Defoe himself lived to be about 70, but published a variety of fiction and non-fiction books all through his 60s. Novels like Moll Flanders follow characters into their old age, but Defoe also wrote pamphlets and tracts about the treatment of the elderly; he outlines a system of old age and disability pensions and caretaking facilities (which don’t sound like pleasant places).  However, the interesting thing is that age alone is not a criterion for needing help – one must be old and disabled.  Defoe frames his project as a benefit for those that are “Lame, Aged, Bedrid, or by real Infirmity of the Body (the Pox excepted) are unable to Work;” nowhere is a given age sufficient proof of “inability to work.”

Robinson Crusoe is not disabled, but – at the end of the second set of adventures – he is looking for “the blessings of ending our days in peace.”

Just after Defoe wrote Crusoe, Jonathan Swift published his work about an older man who went on extensive travels and also had a hard time adjusting to home life.  Like Defoe, Swift created a character that was exactly the author’s age and had him embark on adventure after adventure. At the end of the book, Gulliver is fifty-nine, “a Man late in Life,” the same age that Swift was when he completed the work.  The Travels can be seen as a journey through time as well as space. As Gulliver travels and shares his discoveries, he ages.  Gulliver survives it all, but staying home after it was over was the hardest part. He finds human beings, even his family, nothing but a bunch of Yahoos.

One might also think of Odysseus/Ulysses, who comes back to Ithaca after twenty years, slays the suitors, sets out to rule his domain and enjoy his family, only to feel the lure of one last adventure.

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees… (from “Ulysses,” by Tennyson)

According to Tennyson, Ulysses goes to sea.  This is in accordance with Dante’s version of what happens to Ulysses; in Homer we get a prophecy that Ulysses will take a final land journey.  No matter where he goes; he is not content to stay at home in his old age.

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, . . .

I guess I am thinking about old age and adventures because at 75 and 73, my husband and I are headed for one more adventure – one that feels much more difficult than it should be.  We have decided to move closer to family; one last long-distance move – one more house to buy and one to sell.  We’ve done it several times, but it is so much harder now and I have often felt despair about whether we could pull it off.  In the middle of it all we got Covid for the first time, followed by pneumonia in my husband’s case.  And yet, we have plowed ahead.  But I do not have the energy or courage of Crusoe.  I am more than ready for some peace.  Soon.

 

The Nearings, the Yaloms, and Two Great Poets – When Death Comes to Good Marriages

Over the past month or so, I have read three memoirs about long, happy marriages which were visited by the death of one of the partners.  Close couples often joke about hoping that they will both expire at the same moment, but the partners know that this will not happen; one of them will watch and one will die.  How to cope? 

These narratives of death’s visitation are similar in format, while different in tone. All three books alternate the descriptions of the last days of the marriage with memories from earlier times, with tales of falling in love and creating a life.  The rituals of each marriage are carefully documented – rituals which mean so much and are so important and, at the same time, are so hard to cling to when illness and tragedy intercedes.

In A Matter of Death and Life, Irvin Yalom (The Schopenhauer Cure, When Nietzsche Wept) and Marilyn Yalom alternate chapters as they tell of the end of her cancer treatment, and her death surrounded by family and friends.  It is the relationships that are important to the Yaloms.  During her last days, Marilyn stopped treatment and chose death (and it seems like a good choice) – and while she can accept death, she has more trouble about leaving her loved ones:

Still, if I am not afraid of death itself, I feel the continued sadness of departing from my loved ones.  For all the philosophical treatises and for all the assurances of the medical profession, there is no cure for the simple fact that we must leave each other. 

It is these loved ones and their memories that Irvin thinks will be the “afterlife” of himself and Marilynne, but he knows that this too is ephemeral:

I know that I will exist in ethereal form in the minds of those who have known me or read my work but, in a generation or two, anyone who has ever known the flesh-and-blood me will have vanished.

Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon are also separated by cancer.  Donald had just recovered from his own grappling with this disease when his much younger wife is diagnosed with leukemia. For years, the couple assumed Donald would predecease Jane and planned accordingly, but such are the plans of men and women.   The couple follow up on every possible chance of recovery, including spending some miserable months in Seatle for a bone marrow transplant.  Nothing works.  The most moving moment in the book is when Donald and Jane finally are convinced that they must “give up” and accept.  There is a strange joyfulness as they throw out all the noxious medicines and look for a brief respite from treatment before the end comes.  They have only eleven days left.

But like Marilyn Yalom, it is the loss of relationships, of contact with loved ones, that bothers Jane.  “Dying is nothing, but…the separation!” she howls.  Jane and Donald prepare poems for her posthumous volume, compose her obituary, pick a Psalm for her funeral.  Unlike in the Yaloms’ book, there is some notion of a religious afterlife, at least on Jane’s part. 

The Nearings had a different kind of ending.  Scott Nearing is 100 years old and frail, but he decides that he has had enough and stops eating.  In Loving and Leaving the Good Life Helen Nearing, writes:

He would take no pills, no drugs, and hoped to avoid doctors.  He became less and less concerned with continuing to inhabit a weakening body.  When he could no longer carry his part of the load and take care of himself, he was ready to go on.  I was at one with him in this.  The way one dies, it seemed to me, should reflect the way one had lived, and I was glad to help him do it gracefully.

Scott dies peacefully by his wife’s side.  If you have read their earlier book (Living the Good Life – a hippie Bible) about how they consciously set out to live a good and meaningful life in Vermont, you will recognize the intention to do things consciously, and, as Helen puts it, gracefully.

These memoirs clearly served a therapeutic service for the writers.  The act of tracing the roots of the relationship is preparatory to trying to acknowledge what the last separation means.  Reading these books – all highly recommended – should be done long before we are in the position of facing such realities.  Planning for the unknown is impossible, but contemplating the possibilities can be a worthwhile exercise.

These were all good marriages, but we are reminded that even good marriages come to an end.  Irvin Yalom concludes his memoir thus:

I shall end our book with the unforgettable opening words of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”  That image both staggers and calms.  I lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and take comfort.

Good marriages intensify that “brief crack of light,” and while we cannot stop mortality, we can appreciate every good day we are granted.  There are other lessons in these books, but this is the wisdom that remains.

 

 

 

 

Old Folks and the Wisdom of Appreciating Little Things

Younger people sometimes make fun of their elders for the simple pleasure we find in routine – waiting for the mail, afternoon tea, watching our favorite television show, knitting a sock, dead-heading the roses.  Somehow, they think small pleasures are signs of a diminished life.  However, there is every reason to believe that these are the constituents of the good life.  Maybe this is something we learn in our old age.

You may remember that at the end of Voltaire’s Candide, that satire of the optimistic philosophy that all things are for the best, Candide counsels us that we must all simply “cultivate our own garden.”  I have always thought that it was a way of reminding us that the worth of our lives, the joy of our lives, comes from paying attention to the small things that we do every day, the things that truly make up our lives.   As I have aged and the distractions of the outside world are more easily kept at bay, I have realized what good advice this is.

My husband and I have been reading Thomas Hardy lately, and at the end of the Mayor of Casterbridge, I was quite taken by a passage which talks about the “ever-after” of Elizabeth Jane, a central character who has suffered much from the ups and downs of life:

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers.  But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.  And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

While you might not agree with Hardy that life is a “general drama of pain,” we must all agree that it is no Eden either. Hardy’s “solution” was akin to Voltaire’s:

As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt of it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody  not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider  interests cursorily embraced.

This talk of the cultivation and appreciation of “minute forms of satisfaction” is brilliant, I think, – and true.  I think of the little pleasures in our life – watching “Grantchester,” espresso on Saturday night, a good pasta dinner – what would life be without them?  Hardy is skeptical enough to put a caveat in (“to everybody not in positive pain”), but generally he gives us hope.

I wrote some years ago about the wonderful book by Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own.  It was based on a journal this amazing woman kept in an effort to try to ascertain what, really, made her happy:

I could not by direct effort feel love towards someone, or by direct effort make myself happy.  What then was entirely under the control of my will?  It seemed to me that the only thing that was even potentially so controlled was my attention.  I could not control what I saw when I looked in a certain direction, but I could, generally at least, control which direction I should look in.

And mostly, her attention and her joy were on the small moments of life.

When long-married couples are separated by death or disability, they often talk about missing the little things – the glass of wine after dinner, the game of Scrabble on Sunday afternoons, or the standing joke about who was going to wash the dishes.

Small pleasures should not crowd out the more important things in life (and this can begin to happen if we are not careful), but they should be valued for the fact that they often contribute to those more important things – chances to share love, restore our balance, touch base with who we are.

So, when young folks roll their eyes over our rituals and small attentions, just realize that they have a lot to learn.  And never neglect or take for granted the simple pleasures of life that last into old age.

Old Marriages/Grow Old Along with Me

I have written about long marriages, old marriages, before (see my blog on romance in old age, “Old Folks and True Love“), but I recently ran across this quote worth sharing from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.  They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.  For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Is love more solid the closer it comes to death?  Shakespeare addresses age in Sonnet 73, beginning with a trope comparing age with the coming of autumn and winter:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The bard finishes with a couplet addressed to his lover:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare is assumed to be writing about a relationship between a young person and an old one; I would say that his sentiments are even more true when both participants are old.

And it is not just each other that we old folks love; the marriage itself becomes a valued object.  The marriage contains history (good and bad), a moral code (carefully crafted over the years), and a full set of rituals and traditions.  It even has a liturgy.  My husband, for example, ends every meal by sighing and saying it was “the best meal he ever ate,” (even when he was the cook).  I can be relied on for the morning weather report promptly upon sitting down for breakfast.  And so it goes – you long-married folks doubtless perform your own liturgies on a regular basis.

When we were wed over three decades ago, dear friends gave us a sun dial which has traveled with my husband and me to four different states.  “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be” is inscribed on the top of it.  It is a line from Browning.  We thought we were already “old” when we got married in our forties, and here we are in our seventies.  For us, Browning’s prophecy proved true – the latter years have only gotten better.  Part of it is that the family/stepfamily responsibilities have diminished, but mostly it is that we started with some trust, and worked hard to remain trustworthy to each other in every way.

John Lennon loved the quote from Robert Browning.  In the last year of his life, he used it as a basis for a song.  At the same time Yoko Ono wrote a companion piece based on Elizabeth Browning’s “How Do I Love You, Let Me Count the Ways.”  Before either song could be released, John was gone. John and Yoko were not allowed the chance to see how and if their love matured.  John thought about it in his song, however:

Grow old along with me

Two branches of one tree

Face the setting Sun

When the day is done.

Divorce was common in our generation; there are few of my childhood friends who are still with their first spouse.  And baby boomers are still getting divorced at a high rate. While divorce rates have declined ever so slightly over the past two decades, one cohort has been bucking the trend: baby boomers. “Research shows that boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—are divorcing more than any other generation.”  This is from a generation whose parents – no matter how much they bickered and sulked – rarely got divorced.  In some ways, I envy those of my cohort who were able to stay with their “original spouses.”  But by the time I made the choice for the long haul the second time, I apparently knew what I was doing.  May it be so for you.

I have written many short stories about old marriages.  You might look at “The More Loving One” or “Slip Slidin’ Away” for a couple of examples.

In Praise of Failure

I am thinking about failure these days.  This is partly because I have had a few lately, but mostly because I just finished Costica Bradatan’s very interesting new book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.  Bradatan sees failure as necessary because it grounds us in reality and brings us humility.  He cites Iris Murdoch’s definition of humility as “selfless respect for reality.”  (Murdoch thinks that humility is “the most difficult and central of all virtues.”)

Bradatan says failure begets humility in three phases:

  1. Humility involves acceptance of our cosmic insignificance.
  2. It puts us on firm ground, since we have been “brought down to earth.”
  3. Having lowered our anchor into the world, and regained our existential balance, we can move on to other, bigger things.

Bradatan also notes that “Humility is the opposite of humiliation – that’s the chief lesson…There is nothing demeaning or inglorious about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening.”

I certainly am interested in “regaining my existential balance,” so this got my attention.  I was also interested in the way that we often reference old age as some kind of failure.  We talk about old folks failing to thrive, having failing eyesight, experiencing organ failure.  Much about old age unfolds with small failures, a dripping faucet of losses.  I used to be able to reach that shelf, didn’t I?  Remember that word?  Walk up that hill without pausing for breath?  Bradatan does not reference old age often in his work, but he is reassuring that failure grounds us and serves us in ways that success never can.

Failure is defined in the dictionary as “unsuccessful at reaching one’s goal.” Is staying young, staying alive, a goal?  It certainly is not within our complete control. We are mortal, and we will age, whether we like it or not.   We may have some control over the rate of decline, but not over the inevitability of it – Silicon Valley notwithstanding.

And how do we handle this sense of failing?  We are bombarded with contradictory messages.  Some say we should try harder, accept new challenges, revolutionize our diets.  Others posit that we should practice a reasonable level of acceptance. David Chernikoff in his Life, Part 2, shares this wonderful quote, a prose-poem really, from Solzhenitsyn:

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own. . .. There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past—just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane. . .. Growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.

Uphill, downhill.  Success, failure. Do these words have any meaning in relation to human existence?  Life is a parabola according to Dante; we go up, we go down.  Almost a millennium after Dante, Joni Mitchell said life is a “game,” not a tragedy, and as the “painted ponies go up and down”:

We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

I think there can be joy in the motion, whichever side of the circle or parabola you are on. Yes, we must “accept” the end of a season, of our youth.  We either have to change our view of failure in relation to age, or start to use another word.  “Growing old serenely,” says Solzhenitsyn, “is not a downhill path but an ascent.”

And, if we are willing, we may find happiness in the falling, the failing, the downhill path. I have listened to many dharma talks about withholding judgment on all changes, including age. Rather than judge, we are to watch, realize.  Serenely.  A good word.  Like equanimity.

One last note: my last two blogs have started with the term “in praise of” – ordinary times, failure.  One cannot neglect mentioning Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly – the most memorable of such encomiums. In it, Erasmus’s discussion of old age almost always puts it into the context of the life cycle.  Lack of decorum in relation to one’s place in the life cycle is a constant source of humor for Folly.  Folly holds up the futile attempts of the elderly to be what they are not: “They cling to life so fiercely, and try so hard to ‘seem young,’ that one old codger will dye his last gray hairs, while another will stick a wig on his pate, and still another will fill his gums with false teeth, borrowed perhaps from a pig’s jaw.”  Erasmus, too, is cautioning a level of acceptance and equanimity.

For more on Dante’s view of life as a parabola, you might look at my blogs, “Dante’s Parabola” or “A Diminished Thing.”

In Praise of Ordinary Times

My husband and I just got back from a week away from home and are slowly getting back to… normal.  As far as I am concerned, ordinary time is a precious commodity.  While the definitions of ordinary or normal sound pretty boring – “usual, typical, expected” –  I think normal life is undervalued, and I would prefer to define it in terms like “comfortable, relaxed, and reassuring.”  We have our rituals (Thursday is shopping and laundry, Tuesday and Saturday are hike days, Saturday is movie night), but the quiet anticipation of known events nurtures me far more than waiting in crowded airports or sleeping in strange beds.

I know that I am in the minority on this.  Advice columns tell us older folks to keep trying new things, exploring unfamiliar places, stretching our wings.  We have friends who spend half their lives on cruise ships, and others who spend as much time visiting one relative or another.  I would remind everyone that if you peeled back the travel industry’s propaganda, you could find documented risks to the elderly from air travel (blood clots, etc.), cruise ships (petri dishes of germs) and relocations of any kind.   How much more likely are we to fall trying to find a strange bathroom in the middle of the night?

There is a wonderful line in the movie, Mrs. Miniver.  Suffering the deprivations, apprehensions, and demands of life in wartime Britain, Mrs. Miniver (played flawlessly by Greer Garson) thinks back to what normal life was like, and promises herself to cherish it when and if it returns.  The movie was based on a series of newspaper columns by Jan Struther, and in one of them, the writer reflects on her feelings about returning home after a holiday:

Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays, but she always felt – and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over.  Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she would find herself unable to get back.

It is true that many old folks have a tendency toward the static, toward ritual, toward constancy.  Our culture works against this and has somewhat tainted what should be one of the major joys of old age.  By now, my readers know that one of my favorite novels is Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  Lady Slane, elderly and retired far from children, grandchildren, and obligations, finds life’s “last, supreme luxury” to be the time to sit and reflect, to live a life of one’s own making, to enjoy one’s own quiet habits.

Some Christian churches have periods of what are called “Ordinary Time.”  Generally, they are times that are not special because they are neither just before Christmas and Easter (Advent, Lent) nor just after (Epiphany, Eastertide).  Holy Week is coming up soon, with many churches having a dozen or more services; I’m sure the rectors sometimes long for ordinary time.

Ordinary Time brings me to T.S. Eliot and his poem “Ash Wednesday.”  Eliot seems to rebuff those exhortations that we “stretch” ourselves as we grow older.  Eliot spurns such advice, quoting Shakespeare in the process:

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

I sometimes mourn lost stamina, but I never mourn lost ambition or the impetus of “striving.”  I resist replacing forced imperatives of youth (those of employment and raising children) with self-imposed ones of old age (doing “what is expected of me” or “what is good for me”).  I want to define my own normality.  I want to stay at home and reflect like Lady Slane.  I am accused (often and even by loved ones) of being boring.  However, this agèd eagle is not bored.  And I am not afraid of ordinary times.  I am just happy to be at home among my books and chairs and pots and pans.  And my quiet thoughts.

For the value of ritual, you might try my story about Walden Pond, “Again and Again and Again.”  And, please be assured, if cruises and world tours make you happy, keep at it.  Just don’t expect me to envy you.

Dayspring Mishandled – “Remember Not the Sins of My Youth”

“Dayspring Mishandled” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and is also a phrase in a pseudo-Chaucer poem (“Gertrude’s Prayer”) that Kipling wrote to go with that tale.  The first stanza of that poem is as follows:

That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

Dayspring is an old word for dawn, for the early part of the day, and Kipling’s point is that things we did, mistakes we made, in our early life cannot be corrected and may have consequences for the rest of our life.  This is both a fairly negative attitude and perhaps also a fairly true one.  How unfair it seems that decisions that we made when we were nineteen about marriage or education or conduct should have repercussions for the rest of our lives!  “Remember not the sins of my youth,” cries the 25th Psalm.  The Psalmist is talking to God, but he might as well have been talking to himself.  Who wouldn’t want to forget the transgressions of their youth?  Who can?

There are two kinds of “dayspring mishandled” that bother us, I think, as we look back from our old age.  First, we acknowledge missed chances, like not taking full advantage of our educational opportunities.  Regrets like these are ours alone, and we can usually remediate, atone, or come to peace in some way within ourselves.  Second, there is the guilt of doing things (or not doing them) that affect other people as well as ourselves.  This is a harder kind of remorse – even if we felt that we had no choice (if we wanted to survive) when we did whatever caused the pain.  Nevertheless, parents, children, spouses, friends – suffered.  I have always taken some solace from the words of Mary Oliver:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Of course, Mary Oliver had no children.  Your children live longer than you do, and they never forget.

Literature has often addressed this idea of coming to terms with “dayspring mishandled;” one thinks of Oedipus the King or Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Of special interest in this regard are works written by older authors, who are looking back at a long past. I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, his last major work, written when he was seventy and about six years before his death.  It is all about the mistakes of youth – and how they can destroy the rest of life if left to fester.  Lord Claverton (the elder statesman) laments:

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,

I know this from experience.  When you reach your goal,

 Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,

 You will find your past failure waiting there to greet you.

And yet, Eliot gives us a relatively happy ending.  Old Lord Calverton ends up in a rest home full of people who know the secrets he has tried to keep hidden for so many years.  The secrets come out, the children forgive, and the old man dies in peace: “I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone;/In becoming no one, I begin to live. /It is worth dying, to find out what life is.”  I recommend The Elder Statesman; I think Eliot learned much between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and his last play.

We would like to forget our instances of dayspring mishandled, but we cannot.  Not only are the consequences very real, but as the wonderful Haruki Murakami says, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.” Ah, yes.  Not easy.  But is it at least worth hanging the dirty laundry on the line with the hope that, after all these years, sun and time will bleach out the stains?

Like all of us, I have my share of regrets, of daysprings mishandled.  Besides acceptance (easily said, nearly impossible to live), the thing that helps me is to remember that dayspring is something that happens every morning.  Each day we get a new chance and an older and wiser self with which to face the challenges and the gifts.

I am not going be specific about my regrets here. But I have often written fiction about people who are trying to realize the “ideal” of the poet James Fenton:

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

Since it is Lent, you might look at my story, “Shrove Tuesday.”