#10 Growing old
about Otto and imagining a life well lived
I've always had a relatively calm relationship to the idea of death. I'm not sure if it's my avoidance of how difficult and non-linear grief is, or the sheer luck I've had in losing loved ones by the time they are wrinkly, bones brittle and voices deep with wisdom, or because I may have had the kind of past life that routinely faced loss and the end of life (maybe a doctor? a surgeon? a wartime nurse?)
I do see how that will eventually change. The more I age, the more people around me grow older, and the miracle of being here isn't lost on me either. It's enough with reading headlines and news notifications every so often to understand that loss permeates everything, constantly. Being alive is a trade-off. There is immense joy and there is immense grief in equal measure. Love that had to go somewhere else. Love that left us too early. Love that left in a nonsensical, illogical and deeply visceral way. Nature takes people we love. Disaster faces us constantly. It's really, really not lost on me that the time I have here is more brief than not.
In the grand scheme of things, we're really only here for such a tiny little while. I don't think of it in the everyday but more like every few weeks, or when a new month settles in, regardless of whether it's a January or a December. I've become more interested lately in what my elders have to say. I cry listening to my oldest cousin at his birthday party this year — a year we weren't sure he would be alive to see. Lit up like a Christmas tree on his scan, illness coming back into his body, then leaving him again. In those fractured moments of piercing sadness, joy has a space, too. It's lodged in our ribcages when we hear him say that he's happy to be alive. That there is so much ahead of this. His wife holds him, his teenage daughter and toddler are itching to go back to the playground, maybe a little bit unaware of just how special something like this is. It'll be one of those moments, decades later, that feels more significant because it's already passed. The weight of it will feel different. Illness, decay, the end of a life, feeling cyclical in so many ways but devastatingly sudden in so many others. It's all around us and it can become really suffocating.
I recently watched A Man Called Otto expecting a few heart-warming moments and maybe a couple of tears. My flatmate cried almost the whole way through, we held each other's hands through the more difficult parts of it. Otto is reaching older age and he doesn't want to live anymore — he's recently widowed, has no children, and spends his newly retired mornings making the rounds in his neighborhood, checking for permits in the driveway, meticulously shovels the snow outside of his front door. Yet he tries to find ways to stop living and then, with a sudden jolt of color, new neighbors move in and his life is changed. For the remaining years of his life, he finds joy again; watching his honorary grandchildren grow up, supporting his neighbor, Marisol, helping them with fixing up things in their house and teaching her how to drive. It's in the little things, isn't it? You'd never think I'd cry hearing him tell Marisol that she's not an idiot, even after spending the entire movie huffing and puffing and calling everyone else one. But so it goes with all kinds of things in life. It's a finite, really weird thing. And one day I'll be some other age and think of the small things I did today and notice they were big in their own little rights. Their own joys. Their own losses. Because to lose is to live, too.
At the end of my life, I'd hope that my habit for not wanting to want something for the fear of not getting it has finally been broken. I want to want something and grab it with both hands and squeeze it in my insides and enjoy how much I want it, without the fear that it'll be over or somehow taken away. At the end of my life, I want to have said no more often and saved myself the imagined duty of having to say yes to things I don't really want. I also want to have tried more spicy food, because it turns out I can tolerate it much more than I thought I would. And I want to have felt uncomfortable for a lot of the time that I've been alive, for all the right reasons. At the end of my life I hope I'd be okay with not getting certain things or achieving some goals, not feel guilty for some nebulous idea of wasted potential that was somehow lost on me and never quite fulfilled.
Maybe I can even dream that, at the end of my life, the demons of internalized capitalism are NO MORE! And I have had the kind of life where I sleep a lot and eat everything I want and enjoy everything I taste. At twenty six I already hate restrictions and hearing the word no and being told that something is too much. At the end of my life I want to be too much and be happy about it. I want no shrinking, and no compromising that would require me to feel small. That's not what compromising is, it's a straitjacket. I hate straitjackets. I already harbor a small hatred towards clothes and having to war them even in my sleep.
I really want to want what I want and not be sorry about it. Or feel iffy or insecure or weird about it. I imagine getting older to be one of the ways I become more self-possessed, really self-possessed, in the quietly confident way that doesn't need to shout or scream to make itself known, it just is. I can't imagine anything more intimidating than a woman who knows who she is, and so maybe then I'm okay with being a little frightening. At the end of my life I want to exude with no subtlety that I am not to be fucked with. To never be cheap about kindness but to never sell it to people who aren't willing to pay the price for it. And I want to do it all with the calmness that people have when they're in a temperature controlled room and stretching and then stilling for one, two, three long breaths: the focus and the discomfort of knowing that sometimes you have to be very very very still before you expand.
I think that's why I insist on doing things like that with my body or in practicing things like touching my toes or lifting my hips. At the end of my life I hope I can touch my toes and have the kind of body that unequivocally belongs to itself, free from tight jeans and panty hoses and high socks and all the other ways clothes try to contain a body. I want to be like one of the ladies I saw at the sauna last Spring, long hair and present, fully in their body, unashamed of age.
At the end of my life I really hope I'm nearing somewhere in my 80s. I'd hope I get to see what kind of world is possible. I hope I have the kind of life that feels full. That I built relationships that helped me breathe and grow and be. And that I feel okay with all the ways in which I could've maybe been better but simply wasn't. I keep thinking that the mark of a good life is knowing when to stop self-analyzing and probing and just continuing to live. From being a little anxious child who didn't want to make a single mistake, or didn't try to do cartwheels because she was afraid she'd snap her neck, I hope the end of my life looks more free. That I don't sweat the little things and don't complain too much about them either.
Mostly I guess that's what I'd like to be at the end of my life — fully embracing of the things I like and don't like about myself. Loving means accepting all the parts in us and other people, not just taking the parts that make us proud or look beautiful. It also means those dejected parts, the ones I'd rather hide from the world (or from myself) need to be seen, too. At the end of my life I hope I even learn to love them. I think that's another mark of a good life.
I hope I get to grow old somewhere near my friends and that my family is nearby. I hope I'll be with some man like Otto in how he loved his wife — just quiet devotion and color and even a bit boring. Boring is good. Boring is stable and mundane and it's almost everything once the highs and lows subside and it's time to go home. Peace can feel a lot like boring. Boring can be a lot of peace. And I want to love someone who feels like peace.
If anything I guess I do a lot of what I do now so that I'll meet someone like her when I'm older and I catch myself in the mirror in between all the other things in life. I like to think she'll be happy for me now and I also like to imagine her gently scolding me for thinking about things too much that really won't matter in a few days or months or years. It's how I sometimes shake off the acute self-awareness and anxiety of a first date or get the courage to ask a new friend for coffee or make a move on a dude at a party or apply for a new job. I can almost hear her, the me that's nearing eighty and has lived a life. She speaks into my ear: don't worry about it, darling. Just go ahead. Just be here. Just go.