ON AGING — 4,5,6,7
digital outtake from original painting of botanical cycle © 2016
The journey by seed of life from seed to tree and then to earth, to tree, to earth, to tree.
FORGETFULNESS — -the separate journey.
And aging person experiences increasing separation from much which is comforting and beloved — among them people, places and things.
Where is that name? The name, the name of that…person….they lived at the end of that street… It was the M..?? Next to the Longs. Just at the bottom of the hill where our no-outlet road met Possum Hollow Road. (actual history).
Well, I spent a few minutes fussing about what that name was last night in the middle of the night, and forced myself to give it up, realizing that it didn’t really matter that much EXCEPT it was part of what I could still remember so clearly from my growing up years. I could remember some 22 years of neighbors on that road, their names and their houses and whether they were outgoing or more quiet families. Today I remember. It was the Mifflins. I suppose they are having a reunion with my parents and other who have entered the next reality.
But this happens! More and more my very story-full memory hides out and taunts me, reminding me that nothing is forever. And I ask ‘the boys in the back room’ of my brain to go through the files and let me know when they find something. And they DO! It’s such a kindness. Oddly, they remember more about the distant past than they do about the recent past.
It is actually okay to forget the Mifflin’s name and other proper nouns — there will not be a test on it, after all! But it would be very helpful to improve memory of yesterday and last week.
I chuckle at my memory loss. I remember the memory loss as it crept up on my parents. They did not have Alzheimer’s Disease, but their brains got tired in mild ways, and they realized it.
My daughter does not chuckle. She tells me what I should do to improve my memory — especially my short term memory. “There are audio therapies, Mom.”
My “boys in the back room“ whisper to me: “Don’t worry…we’re here if you need us.” I call the brain cells that archive information somewhere in my cranium my boys in the back room. They seem to do most of their work at night, I find. Strange and interesting to me.
The transition between NOW and RECENT and PAST: here is a graphic that suggests three different layers of memory to me.
One doesn’t notice where the change begins. It sneaks in as naturally as warmth on a spring day.
Grief may take us through the now, and the recent, and the increasingly remote past more more overtly. The grief experience begins with specific trauma and pain. It is severe enough to make its presence known. And when we stop weeping and mourning we are relieved to take off the widow’s weeds. Then, sometime in the years afterward, we realize that we don’t have ghosts any more. The ghost is in the graveyard, and in the photo album. But we are living in an animated world again — not in a stop-frame place on a strip of moments. We can look on our past grief as past history. A written story, in a way. That is over.
I think we age this way. Sometimes there are sudden sorrows — moments of realization that a certain possibility is GONE. Utterly gone. The absence is palpable, like a loss of a limb, or the failure of an organ. And we are palpably no longer what we were! Nor will we ever be! Some things like wrinkles appear so gradually they seem sudden. Others see them before we do.
Do I respect my new person of the new now? I see someone in the mirror who reminds me of myself but also reminds me of my parents as they aged. And I am sorry to see that my past person is no longer there. And will not be. And I have a new self to accept and decide to welcome.
I inspect my real eyes in the mirror.
It is today, and there I am.
And I am still full of life.
And history!
This is as it should be! And I can respect this.
What things those eyes have seen and loved! What sadness and what joys. They are the eyes of a lucky woman.
STUFF — Heirlooms and Decorative “treasures”:
My “stuff” falls into very different categories. The heirlooms and decorative treasures (good stuff) have found other homes where they are remembered by my children and have a meaningful extra patina on them because they come from our family history. And the new stuff (some of it good stuff)I keep making in my art studio.
These things are getting in my way, now, and I am genuinely happy to see them being used elsewhere. The “good stuff” has been distributed in appropriate directions and, in fact, I was so pleased to see my grandmother’s silver appear on the Thanksgiving table at my daughter’s house. But I didn’t long for it. It is sent off to my daughter’s house, like a ship to sea, and God knows where it will go next. It is not something I want or need any more. But I want someone to want it.
THE PROGENY — The separations happen at a slow rate, thank goodness.
Children are harder than “Stuff”. We parents call them “our kids”, and think we have certain “rights” to them. But as a person gets older separation from the closest ones becomes a familiar pang, beginning the child’s “tweens”. Their autonomy is the first of a necessary separation.
(Would a child survive if it never left the mother’s womb? How long will an individual person develop into an adult under parental protection and control? The loss of his childhood is the person’s gain. Mothers will weep at weddings, but these are intended to be healthy tears.)
Unnatural ripping of child and parent is a severe wound. Any parent who has had a call in the middle of an ordinary day saying that their child or grandchild is in the emergency room confronts this possibility, head-on.
Like Abraham offering up Isaac on the mountain, a parent takes hands off and yields with a numbing realization of powerlessness to what is ahead that is out of his or her control. It is a moment when prayer is automatic. Even atheists have been brought to prayer in such “foxholes.” I feel dizzy just remembering times in my life when this happened with my own dear ones. I find that the giving away of children torn suddenly from one’s life is dizzying and sickening. Sending them off to war is a protracted process of opening one’s hands day in and day out. A gift to a greedy world which consumes mothers’ sons and daughters without sentiment or guilt — a widow’s walk on a house facing the sea. What stress! And very likely the essence of prayer happens there.
And when the child that has been myself — begins to separate from familiar things and places and people, there is a sadness that then turns into prayer and that turns into grace because that is how it is designed.
The leaf holds on and ripens up and holds on…and then floats off the branch and settles somewhere to rest and rejoin the life force that will nourish the future life on the planet. That planet, which, also, is living its cycle out, losing things, forgetting, hurting, grieving, and then giving up to the unknown.
At least that is what it looks like to me, from here, in this NOW.
I realize that we are a sort of waste product! Can we conceive of that without being insulted? We fit a purpose for the NOW we are in. And when that need is over other needs call for fresh energy — and that energy emerges from the same soil that holds our remains. This is not a tragedy! It is the way it all works.
We are in basic training for this reality all our lives. We have to keep learning it over and over by watching things wax and wane. Some of us suspect that this is God being hard on us, not realizing that it is the cycle of natural life and a wonderful gift to the Everything that is for all of us.
Depression — the phantom that can grab from behind.
The worst part of old-age loss, as I am experiencing it, is the wave of emptiness that can well up and make me swoon! It is like a phantom, coming up from behind me, and laying a heavy cloak of tiredness on my back and shoulders.
With it comes a feeling of desperation — can this really be ME, sagging under the weight of an ordinary day? It feels like last breaths, to me. I wonder about specifics of dying when this happens. And my warrior self speaks up, saying “we don’t care any more.” I and my warrior self feel like quitting fighting it. We give up. In time the depression lifts and things come right-side-up again.
Depression is a loss I fight against, even if it doesn’t do any good. Like a rainy day — it just is there until it isn’t.
I think it is for my children that I fight it. My collapse would be their burden — no one else’s. Like damage to the secondary mast and its sail on a two-masted vessel, its collapse would cause a lot of messy sailing with delays and re-rigging of systems until something can be rigged until the kids get the mast repaired or replaced. Not that they always need the small energy I have been contributing, but they show me that they love me being there, doing that. I still have a job. They have been sure to keep me on the family sloop.
And I also fight against it because I don’t get a choice in the matter. There is that impudent and stubborn spirit in me that says “this isn’t fair.” I stride out full of righteous indignation and find that my strides are not solutions but purposeful risks taken in defiance. “Do not go gentle into that good night…”
rings in my ears, having been quoted by a remembered someone close who raged at death.
But I finally have to pay the fine of injury or illness for my efforts to thwart this end of life disintegration. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” says Milton in his blindness.
Depression is a frequent visitor these days when I am aware often that my strength is really sapped, and I am not doing “due diligence” P.T. things to buck up and get healthy. Do I want to do planks? Do I want to go to social things to raise my spirits. No, I do not want to. I have other things I still do with purpose in my art studio. And I have good company thanks to the internet.
What I do want to do is understand what is happening. Pay attention to it all so I can stay in the moments.
Then some days fill up with the joy of activity that reminds me of my younger self, when I am excited about my projects and energized by ideas and experiments in words and art. I find out I can still do it!
Where is that self today? Waiting to come out. Being patient while my body has a moody spell. Willing to accept the long naps that don’t so much refresh as they give an intermission to the tiredness. They relieve me from awareness of the cloak. And I know it is all right to be where I am, exactly!
SGHolland ©2017
(written/edited December 13 2017)
