By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
I hesitate to tell you this, but we are all getting old, though each of us started in a different place. Some of us started at a rather more impressive distance from the onset of the new millennium.
When I was a child, I had several relatives in their 80s and 90s, and they seemed to be having a pretty good time. I remember my great-grandfather George playing lively tunes on his fiddle. His wife, tiny great-grandmother Grace, gave large family parties at their house on Halloween and Christmas night. For gifts, she made aprons for all the women and flannel nightgowns for us little girls.
I can still hear my other great-grandmother, Marcie, laugh gaily when one of her sisters said or did something silly. Her husband, my other great-grandfather, was an old grump. Marcie turned her laughter on him. I can still hear her chuckle, “Why, Walter!” as if he had just intentionally said something very funny.
I remember being scared on a visit with Grace’s two sisters when one of them (was it Evie or Emmy?) walked into the living room in a black mackintosh, giggling, dripping wet, but not with water. She had been milking the cow who somehow managed to kick the milk bucket and soaked her.
George died at 77 in 1949, when the average age at death of American men was about 65; Walter died at 82; Marcie just short of her 100th birthday; Grace at 101.
As a child, I didn’t think of the old age realm as something to be afraid of. It never occurred to me that someday I might live there myself.
A couple of years ago, my hairdresser observed, “You have a lot of gray hair for such a young person.” When I told her my age, she said, “You don’t have much gray hair for such an old person.”
I had already outlived the life expectancy of a baby girl when I was born.
There are a few advantages to being old. For one thing, it’s too late to die young. For another, we don’t have to worry too much about the long-term effects of anything. If something might affect us in thirty years – who cares? And for women, there are some physical elements we had to think about for about 40 years that no longer concern us.
Of course there are serious disadvantages, in that our body parts start to wear out and make us subject to various maladies, some more serious than others. I am convinced that body parts do not all age at the same rate. Mine don’t. My one remaining youthful attribute is my speaking voice. If you talk with my on the phone, you might think I’m a young person. (On the other hand, if you’re a telemarketer, I can sound very old, very tired, and a bit confused.)
While it can be difficult to get old, we might recall that it wasn’t easy being young, either, it was just a different set of challenges. When I’m tempted to grumble about getting old, I say, “Look back over your life. At what age do you wish you had died?” Most of us wouldn’t know how to answer that. And though we might dislike getting old, if we get sick, we try very hard to get well so that we can keep getting old.
I do know someone who decided when enough was enough. A healthy woman, my great-aunt Evelyn, Grace’s daughter, decided she had become old enough, and she stopped eating. She was 102.
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