The Gift of Old Age

The experience of old age is so powerful when you’re a little boy. Your grandmother comes into view holding a tray of black cherries, and trembles lightly while she takes a seat on the sofa. She seems ready to disappear into it, but instead it’s her flesh that becomes so present. The flesh hanging from the back of her arms. The folds in her neck. The purple dot on her forehead. You approach her, you let her hug you and you pick up two cherries.You bring them to your mouth, but she knows better, and hangs them over your right ear. You both laugh, as you pick up in your fingers the scent of old fashioned soap from the fabric of her grey-blue gown. The fleshy nature of her embrace and the sensorial stimulations pose a complex problem of interpretation: there is something deeply contradictory to them. You feel love for your grandma. You feel attraction. You feel repulsion. You feel fear, and gratitude. You feel the bodily presence of old age.

Then you grow up, and your grandparents die. You have children of your own, and as your own life gets closer to death day by day, you move away from the blissful and complicated experience of old age that was so central to your childhood. You may realise you miss those bones, those flesh and those cherries, but you rejoice the embrace of the young, firm, yoghurt-scented arms of your own children. You are slowly starting to die, but this awareness brings with it the loss of the presence of death.

And then you realize your parents are old now, and their flesh is starting to hang from their arms, too. You feel relieved: you were beginning to think that the next blissful encounter with old age would be your own, with the unbearable lightness of your decaying body, and this thought had been draining away your energy.

Your mother comes in, with a tray of apples, and takes a seat. While you bite the pink globe you savour the new opportunity life has given you. You are touching old age again, and once again it brings a chest of treasures from your childhood.