Three images of aging

A burial, a circle of crones, a comedy routine

A week ago, or so, we buried Deloris.

Fifty of us, or so, answered Allan’s call to join him at the Woodsman cemetery, just up the hill from my house, to witness his wife being returned to the earth. I didn’t know Deloris before her strokes, but Allan is a friend who took care of Deloris at home until he couldn’t and then wrote lovely reflections each week he visited her in a memory care facility. All of us gathered had taken this long journey with him.

Looking around the circle, I saw dear friends, and one-of-a-kind community members, the sort who act in a play or volunteer at the food bank or document our parades and festivals on Facebook. One couple is successful as online teachers. Another is a bedrock of climate change activism. The Bedside Singers shared several of the songs they bring to people as life drains out.

We are all aging as a cohort

We don’t notice until gathered to bury one who was pretty much our age.

I’ve only been to one other burial in that cemetery, a beautiful man who’d been taken, nerve by nerve, by ALS. People carried him in a woven basket to his green burial site at the back of the cemetery.

Here, Deloris was wrapped in a heavy duck cloth shroud with 3 long straps sewn on it so 6 people could lower her down. “Ah, so that’s how I’ll be wrapped” I thought. I’d never quite imagined my own body being lowered into this same ground by 6 sturdy friends, with a few dozen or so friends circled up as we were that day.

This is the wholeness of village life, a circle of humans being born, taking our places in the work of the world, and being lowered by friends into common ground. It gave me such a peace to know I would be buried here, and probably in such a shroud if I don’t get my act together soon enough to make something fancy.

Deloris by now was very small and very light, but you could see her weight by how much effort the 6 men put into lowering her slowly. Some time in the future, hopefully a long time from now, we’ll lower Allan in next to her. And lower so many around that circle as well, unless families whisk their bodies back to family plots.

We all are as unique as clouds and as common as sky.

A circle of crones

Every month or so women friends gather around my dining table. We start a conversation somewhere and then let it flow into the waterways of our lives at the moment. This week, the younger women were all busy with kids, farms, families so we were in our late 60s to 70s.

The conversation wandered to each one’s unique sense of getting older.

For one, being a crone is so welcome. She is happy to don nondescript clothes, live alone, intensely track and pray for the world, be a mother to her son and his wife.

For me, as I’ve said before, I’ve needed this Queen stage between about 60 to somewhere past 80 (coming soon). Coming of Aging chronicles this bumpy ride, now with inklings of something glorious in the years to come. I’m still in the dancing, writing, trouble-making part of my life, and who knows for how long.

Another, an artist, doesn’t think about aging. None of anybody’s business what she thinks, feels and does.

Another looked for words to describe the state of grace she is starting to feel, in herself and in friends who are closer to the end. Another offered the word “mystical”. Yes. Something like that. Emerging out of the constraint of identity.

Yes, I thought, all the way from my creative drive to write a book, a play, or whatever, to my dear friend whose prayers encircle us quietly. All the way from a mutual friend in later stages of dementia to a college professor who is semi-retired but fully engaged in projects.

All represent this time in life - croning, if you will, in the ways to which we have become accustomed. None of us shriveling with age but becoming more glorious in ways befitting who we’ve always been.

“Crone” doesn’t have a costume or a way of speaking or hooked nose or a scrawny bottom or even a new career as an artist or a weightlifter. It’s WYSIWYG. What you see is what you got.

The undertow

There are set ideas of what Crones should look and talk like. It’s like an undertow we swim against. Old women should be neither seen nor heard. We should be presentable enough to not remind the rest that we are all sliding towards the grave. This society doesn’t like “old women.” We are still a bit cartoonish in the minds of younger people. I’m sure this is the undertow I’ve been swimming against to find myself in this time of life, which is nothing like a curse or any caricature.

What a gift to have this time in life with the opportunity to truly know oneself in all the nooks and crannies, to bring forth your final gifts to the outer world as eternity seeps in around the edges. As it did that day we circled up to lower Deloris into mother earth, realizing that each one in that circle will join her in the not too distant future.

This is no “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”.

This is the miracle of all that comes between birth and death, the incredible variety of how we live and what we give and the garments of understanding we’ve woven, whether we die too soon in a war or have the privilege of living long in a peaceful village in a still safe part of this world.

A comedy routine

I usher for a local black box theater and on closing night of a sold-out run, the videographer got stuck in ferry traffic. He would be at least a half an hour late.

The director went out to make this announcement, filling, at most, 5 minutes. There I was in the wings. There the audience was, waiting. I had the thought I could go out and do some comedy with my alter ego, Phyllis Wertzl, from New York. She always has something to say, but scripted. My mind said no, my feet said yes, and out I went as Phyllis to talk about the problems with “senior-ing” in a youth addicted society. Nobody, me included, knew what hit them.

Seniors R Not Us

I told stories, invited questions, and riffed with the audience. No one likes the word senior. Yuk. One said, “I associate ‘Seniors’ with ancient people in diapers who live in rest homes.” How Boomer of us. Center stage and then drop dead, no aging in there anywhere. Another person talked about how hard it is to get up from the floor. If you have arthritis in your knees, it’s impossible to even imagine how to get aaaalll the way down to the floor, only to be stuck like a turtle on its back. I took the cue, got down to my knees, and, egged on further, to flat on my back. I got back up (thank you dance), and we all cheered the great victory of verticality.

Coming of Aging as a context

Having taken on this inquiry, I see I have given meaning to this part of my life. I am not just stumbling into it, unprepared. Everything happens within the embrace of awareness and this delicious process of putting words on experiences as varied as a burial, a circle of crones and a comedy shtick.

Maybe I should be buried with a print copy of these posts on my chest, my final words.