On Growing Old

 

Pisan 14th Century, The Archangel Gabriel

Imagine this statue crumbling and, flake by flake, falling to the ground. It is hard, isn't it? Let me tell you how I did it. 

I once heard a woman saying that growing old is beautiful. She was chit-chatting casually while bagging her shopping at the registered cash wrap in a bookstore in Minnesota. And I was the cashier. Her white hair was tied up in a bun above a round, happy face with rosy cheeks, smiling as she said it, her eyes darting from me to my colleague at the next register while her hands were stuffing books into a large canvas tote as if driven by an unseen mechanical force.

The next person in line, a younger gal about 40, frowned in annoyance, looking at me as if she expected me to set the record straight. I kept my mouth shut, but my colleague muttered a curse, her lower voice coming to me like a wave of despair, "What the fuck is beautiful about it?" We were the same age, past our prime, and a few years into menopause. We looked at each other and grinned short of laughing, then kept ringing up the people in line, making small talk with the customers, nonsense you say to be polite. In the end, neither she nor I commented on that woman's remark, but a question floated in my mind, unanswered: is there anything beautiful about growing old?

For years, I didn't concern myself with aging. Only when I grew out of size zero, then fast past the size two to settle on a size four within one year, did I suspect what was happening to me. At first, I embraced the slightly larger waste line; clothes size zero are hard to find and not always flattering, as the length of pants or sleeves is not up to a taller frame. Gaining a size seemed justified hence my saying that I graduated to a size two instead of flat-out recognizing that I got some pounds around my middle. But I panicked when my size two squeezed the belly fat onto a mushroom top. I looked in the mirror, but I didn't see anything different age-related: same grayish hair, same slightly puffy eyes, still no wrinkles, and no saggy skin. But one thing was out of order: my eyebrows. Some hairs were too long,  reminding me of one of my college professors back in Bucharest, Romania, in the 1990s, just after the revolution.

This professor was a heavy-set man, as tall as he was heavy, with a round face topped with white hair on which a pair of square black glasses framed his tired eyes. Above, like growing from underneath the frame, sprung his bushy eyebrows, some vigorous hairs reaching up to his middle forehead. He was a good professor and a gentle man who taught modern and contemporary Romanian history and the history of the Romanian diaspora. His lectures were didactic, sermon-like, and a bit too patriotic to our young taste. He'd been a professor under the communists as well, and some of his colleagues and students labeled him as an old schooler and communist sympathizer. Still, to us, he was the teacher who sometimes walked with us to the bus stop because his class was the last. On one of those trips, a young, talkative female colleague asked him why his eyebrows were so long. The question, which floated in all our minds, was totally inappropriate from where I stood. But I was much older than the other 20-year-olds in our group. As we walked and talked, like always, the discussion drifted from history to much more mundane subjects, and her question ultimately didn't raise any eyebrows (pun intended) from anyone else, including the professor whose eyebrows were in query. He must have regarded her like you regard a five-year-old climbing on Grandpa's knees to look at the hair in his nose, awkward and slightly annoying. But he didn't flinch. "Oh, that… that's how your eyebrows look when you grow old." Aha, I told myself, thirty-some years later, looking in the mirror at my own eyebrows. What a revelation, such a simple thing explained! Your hair grows all the time, so why won't your eyebrows?

Still, in retrospect, I realize there were other signs like random pains through my body, the weakness of the knees after climbing a short flight of stairs, or simply wanting peace and quiet. I chose to ignore them because I didn't feel old. But I felt no young, either, just stuck between here and there. I felt like a popsicle drifting atop an iceberg. Frozen from the inside out, the heat of the youth gone, exhausted by the urgency of the working mother's life. Was there no spark left? I didn't acknowledge what was happening to me, and consequently, I did not care. The eyebrows thing was just a tease. But the real insight about aging came when, after losing his wife of over fifty years, my father-in-law said he felt suddenly old. He was 85.  

Later, I came to have a new appreciation for my body as it struggled to maintain its vigor. It feels hard to speak about it because it is the most intimate part of myself, more intimate than my thoughts. Even now that I know better, I still 'don't listen to my body as I should. I grew up with the wrong idea that the body was nothing to worry about, that in the best case, it is a vehicle to get you from here to there, and in the worst case, a baggage that hurts and 'doesn't let you enjoy your life. In some fleeting moments, I may have had the insight that my body is me, and my thoughts, mind, and I would no longer be without my body. But if I had those moments of truth, I passed by them faster than the light. I was living in my mind, and sometimes I wasn't even living in my own mind but rather fleeing from idea to idea in search of something to hold me and hold on—a genie in search of a bottle. And my body was right there all of the time. The only thing I paid attention to was how I looked. But not as an appreciation of the body itself; instead, the figure was a hanger on which I displayed my style. I thought my face, which I painted with cosmetics, was only a declaration, exposing my attractiveness. And even when I passed that stage, because it 'didn't work, evidently, I 'didn't think to take care of my physic for its own sake. I only did it when it hurt, as a means to stop the pain, but not to understand why it hurt and maybe do something about that.

Now that I feel the weight of years on my mind, I become aware that it tells me I'm aging. I won't go into details about where and how I feel the pain and the weakness; I would fill up too many pages with dull details if I did. I just want to say that I have acquired gratitude that this body, entitled as it may have been, hasn't given up on me yet.

I've seen bodies failing. My sister's, my mother's, and countless other people I barely paid attention to. I've also seen minds failing; my father's, my father's in-law—a scary thing. I tell myself that it can happen to me at any moment, more likely as I age. So then, going back to the question that needs to be answered: is there anything beautiful about growing old?

If the beauty she felt was on the inside, on the self, could it have been only in the eyes of the beholder, as the eyes mirror the soul? And the soul, instead of seeing the being in which it resides as old, degrading, decaying, sees it as an experienced, wiser bundle of cells, able to give and receive values that are not understood when one is younger or even acknowledged as being a thing.

But maybe I am not looking at it right. I looked inside, but maybe ' 'that's not where I should search. What if beauty 'isn't what happens inside the body or the mind, but outside it and how one sees it or experiences it? Self aside, one goes through life like a bundle of animated cells among other bundles. Isn't that miraculous enough? A beautiful miracle? And age is no more than the transformation of the matter into something else (take your pick here.)

And further, maybe the beauty is in passing the stage of fighting for the future, accepting the present, and seeing it for what it is, moment by moment, without promises but with deliverance. That which can only be when you accept the fact of being mortal, start living the life you still have, and see how wonderful every moment is.  

But if I 'don't feel that way, does it mean I am not there yet? For sure, I am getting older; every day is screaming at me, "less one," as in a game when you have a finite number of lives to pass the level, and each failure brings the dreaded sign of minus one. It seems that every day I have a minus one.

That woman managed to reverse polarity somehow. At what point did she start counting plus one? And did she do it by herself? Or did she get help, divine or mundane, like a flash of enlightenment or a book she read (since being in a bookstore, haha), like that book with the title that promises you'll be younger each year? I'll never know.

There is no cure for growing old. Everybody goes through this process from birth, and we, ironically, celebrate it every year. Yeah, another year had passed, but look! Now I'm in high school, then college, and then out to live my life; that's just what I was waiting for. How fun is that! Happy to see ourselves adults at last, to find ourselves in this most wanted adulthood. Little did we know that once in motion, the ball doesn't stop rolling until the end. So there we are: adults, adulting for the rest of our lives, along with the loved ones we have either collected or attached to on our way through this world. We were rushing towards it as if it were our final destination. A place in time, and a time in place, where we will be forever still, unmoving, while the world is spinning, generating nights and days, months, and years, finally all strung into decades, until we realize, again, oh fuck, when did I get to be sixty?

And so it goes.

My parents and sister have passed, so from our dysfunctional family of four, I'm the only one left to tell the story. And for how long? I better hurry up.