My mother and me, both so much younger!
“Don’t grow old,” my mother unhelpfully advised.
Ever since I was diagnosed with cancer at age 57, there has been nothing I’ve wanted more than to grow old. It’s my aspiration, not something to avoid. I relish celebrating one birthday after another.
I just celebrated another one—my 71st. Although now seen as the younger side of old, reaching this age officially counts as having disregarded my mother’s advice.
Seventy-one is also the age she never lived beyond.
My mother smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and was also at least 150 pounds overweight for most of her life. Even when I was a kid, I remember my parents driving around and around the block to find a parking space right in front of wherever we were going because she couldn’t walk far. In my mother’s later years, she could barely cross the living room without stopping several times to catch her breath, and eventually was tethered to an oxygen machine. The aging process she exemplified struck me as an ever-tightening spiral of constriction, oppressed by living but afraid of dying (and nursing homes). As my brother put it, “If you wake up every day for 10 years saying that this will be the day you’re going to die, eventually you’ll be right.” When that day finally came, it wasn’t exactly surprising, but it was mercifully quick and gentle—my mother’s heart gave out and she died instantly in her beloved home, her lovely Jamaican caregiver by her side and my brother downstairs.
My trajectory toward old age bears no resemblance to hers. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, am a normal-ish weight, and walk two or three hours every day. I have had no further cancer scares or really any significant health challenges. Although I feel myself slowing down some and am on the list for cataract surgery, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll die anytime soon. Still, it’s freaky to have reached the milestone of my mother’s final age.
I’ve been thinking of her a lot lately, missing her salty humor, her devotion and love despite her suffering. Longevity is not in my genes—my father died when he was 72, and my brother when he was only 65! Aging quickly and poorly was the model I more or less assumed would be my fate, even though I’ve clearly made different choices to alter the outcome.
And I have succeeded (I hope—my mother made it more than halfway to 72, so I’m not out of the woods yet). Will my aging be a time of expansion or an ever-narrowing constriction as it too soon was for my mother? Luckily, I had some other great models to emulate, such as my in-laws, vital and mostly not caught in a downward spiral until their deaths at almost 97 and almost 90.
Do I have 20 more years left in me? Fifteen? I used to think I’d be lucky to make it to 75, but now I think it’s a reasonable hope that my husband and I will celebrate our golden anniversary when we’re 81. That’s only a decade away.
Dying together at age 85—holding hands in bed as we sleep, of course!—feels like a worthy goal. But 85 is so soon–the closer I get, the more I want to move the goal posts farther away. Will I see my 9-month-old granddaughter graduate from high school and college, or be lucky enough to attend her wedding? What will it be like to have the years my mother missed out on?
I hope to receive them as the gift that they are, and to make the most of them, for my sake and for hers.
