The beginning of the end
How I came to love coming to the end of my life
2023 was a doozie
In the before times, the holiday season in my village was one party after another. It was laughing (right in one another’s faces!) and renewing friendships and caroling and gift giving. But not that year. We hadn’t, yet, restarted village life after the pandemic. I felt terribly lonely.
In this absence of the happy continuity of life, I realized I would be 78 this year. I was no longer in the middle of life, one-thing-after-another. Besides having a will and a burial plot, I was unprepared. My imagination was empty about what this part of my life might be. Our society doesn’t make elders. We make young people surprised to be in old bodies and then trying to fix the problem.
I’d survived cancer when I was 60, but that was different. That was an inturruption, not finality.
“What happens,” I wondered, “between someone’s “productive” years and their obituary, maybe decades later?” It can’t just be cruises. Or “spending more time with their family…” Or the ageist projections of the stages of decline, the joint replacements and cataracts and then memory slips and is that dementia?
The question initiated the true tasks of eldering. Facing the past. Letting go of pretense and the exhausting effort to keep a persona going. Making amends. Forgiving others. Forgiving oneself. Letting go. Becoming honest about mortality - and whatever one thinks happens later. And, I’ve discovered, something marvelous may come, a lightness from letting go, a peace from reconciling with mistakes and hurts, an expansion out of the bounds of my own life.
By the end of the year, I’d gone through a wretched depression, but this time I didn’t hide or lie. I’d apologized to some people I had harmed in my mad dash to save the world. I renewed the love with people I’d left behind. I’d let the ghosts out of the basement of my psyche, and embraced them. I’d called home some of my scattered selves. I’d taken time to look into the face of death. I found myself welcoming eldering.
As I said, it was a doozie, and an initiation into whatever “coming of aging” is. This is the journey I’d like to share with you - through writing and through listening. I can imagine, but not yet promise, interviews with other people emerging into their wisdom years. Hosted conversations on juicy topics. Bringing one another quotes and book recommendations. I’d love this to beccome a hub for all of us to inquire, tell stories, share resources, gather quotes, just fill our imagination with who we are becoming now, before we die.
Some may use the freedom of aging for art. Some for activism. Some for travel or learning. Some for inner work. Some for the “I could never…” things. Some to write. I have no recommendations or suggestions or 9-step programs.
We get to ask the question: what might this world be like if more of us were initiatied into eldering, bootstrapping it or being aided by mentors? What would it be like for America to come of aging? What would it be like to mature as a society? What if people no longer had to slam into the awareness that they will soon die and aren’t ready? What if some of us could stop racing around trying to prove ourselves or protect ourselves and just stand steady in the midst of the madness?
We don’t need to fix aging. It’s not a problem, though it will surely have challenges. If we make a thing out of this we’ll lose the thread. We will stay fresh, curious, willing to fail gracefully and laugh. I am just at the lip of this great unknown. Writing is one way I know, so Coming of Aging is just this. Writing my way into wisdom, and doing it in your company, inviting your stories.
Every subscriber can count on one essay or poem or personal reflection a week. Your reflections in comments will be a treat for everyone.
Paid subscribers will have access to mini podcast conversations with people I find with something to say about coming of aging, and to the monthly Zoom campfires.
When I moved to New York from Maine about 5 years ago, when I was 66, I assumed I would “retire” from my work as writer/activist and be a mom and grandmother. After all, isn’t that what most women my age, who are grandmothers, are supposed to want? I was moving to be closer to my sons and their families. The decision to sell the family house was made over several years as I got older and the house got older, and as it got harder for me to do necessary chores, and harder to find people to do them (things like shoveling, mowing, plowing, roof raking, and just all the maintenance an older home needs). The garden kept me there an extra 5 years. That and fighting Nestle’s various designs on the town and on the state of Maine (that are still ongoing). But when I woke up one morning, knowing it was time, and I went down to the garden to find a large crow feather sticking out of the ground, impossible for me not to see - a message from my father telling me he understood and it was okay for me to sell and move - I called the realtor and within a couple of weeks we had a buyer. WAY sooner than I thought, but surely this was a sign from the universe I was on the right track. And it was. I have no doubt.
So in NY, where I knew no one except my kids - and a few months later Covid hit with its forced isolation (even from my kids - the whole reason we had moved!), I realized that, no, I was not “ready” to “just” be a mom and grandmother. I am who I am and just because I’m aging doesn’t mean I’m not the same . . . rebel. You-know-who was president, I felt that I was in an abusive relationship with my country. The anger and frustration I felt were sometimes overwhelming. I had no clue what to do. At just this time, I reconnected with a friend, a bioregional compatriot, soul brother, short-time lover, I hadn’t seen in over 30 years. We kept each other company on the phone (living hundreds of miles apart), reminded each other who we are, and - in a way - were lifelines for each other. I began to see that . . . my life, my work in the world, was not over. I had no clue how to re-invigorate it, but I knew that it would happen. First I had to work through all the anger and frustration and hopelessness I had allowed myself to wallow in. It was very hard work, and I gradually dug myself out.
My passion for making natural perfume, starting around 2010, became my primary “thing”. Focusing on my senses, on the magic of scent, paying attention to my inner processes, learning to understand and breathe through my anxieties, facing and moving through the layers and layers of grief - for Earth, for the death of my son, for all the losses that hurt - one grief touching another and another - there’s such potential growth in grief and in the cyclical process of it. Then the ancestors started appearing, offering their comfort and wisdom and encouragement. Paths appeared that involved both writing and integrating my growing awareness of the importance of our senses into something different that feels powerful, and at the same time gentle and comforting. Not only for me, but for others. I’m groping this path now. Trusting that I will be led, that I will “know it when I see it” . . . Because I generally always have. Why should I be different now that I am elder?
There are many of us now, Vicki. There are circles of us. Some in physical communities where people already come together, like you, others, like me, searching and finding virtual circles that will bring us into physical circles as we expand and meet more women - it is mostly women, though not all. I try not to focus on the impending and continuing myriad crises, and instead feel into the synergistically growing awareness I’m sensing happening everywhere, hidden, percolating up through the layers of fear and inertia. I know we can do this. I know Earth wants us to do this and is doing all she can. I feel it, every day. The Grandmothers, past, present, and future, want us to do this. And we, you and I, are among them.
I already love your exploration and expression of the necessary evolution to this phase.
Just retired and feeling 10 years older than I am, with no idea what I want this phase to be or to mean beyond the healing delights of garden, beach, and couch.
I will step into the water with you and your tribe dear Vicki, even though at first it may feel cold and a bit scary - yet trust is something that I have to give and feel. Looking forward, as I always have, to your flights.