The Gift of Aging

When I entered my seventies, my body began to betray me with all sorts of unhappy surprises. I took them as a personal affront. My eyesight, my teeth, my hair, even my balance—all mocked their past efficiency. How rude. I continue maintenance under protest.

Of course, I’m certainly not the only person over seventy to begrudge the vagaries of time. I can’t even comprehend the immense quantities of money spent worldwide by those trying to fool Mother Nature. I accept her as I accept the passing seasons. But I forget that wrinkles and drooping (the revenge of flat-chested women) don’t qualify as the major concerns ad companies would have us dread. We who have been seduced into self-centered superficiality have far greater issues swirling like dark storms around us.

This week my husband and I were watching PBS and happened upon an excellent feature documentary called “Resistance: They Fought Back” about people being rescued from the carnage of the Holocaust by the daring and sacrifice of fellow Jews. At the risk of seeming flippant about a topic that inevitably pains my soul, I was struck by one jarring realization about the millions and millions of people whose lives were taken for no reason but empty hate. Photographs from the time showed men and women standing nude, waiting to be murdered and shoveled into pits. Other photographs showed mothers and children in line to go to the gas chambers. And they looked like photographs of my grandmother here in the United States, posing in her flowered dress, or my mother standing shyly as a little girl. They looked very much like aging women of myriad cultures I’ve encountered in the showers of modern community centers, their skin loose and pale. Except no one in those Holocaust lines tried to mask her flab. No one held his breath to make his chest more attractive. No one was thinking about what they looked like. They knew they were about to die and it didn’t matter any longer.

No, I’m not writing about lost vanity. I don’t usually think of growing old as a privilege of peace and prosperity, but I should when I see recent images of war and genocide anywhere in the world—millions more people used as fodder for greed and power. Murder didn’t stop after WWII, of course, but we don’t see the masses of victims lined up in front of pits as we do in those old photographs. We hear horrible statistics, but we pretend we don’t know what the numbers mean to some family somewhere that will never be whole again or a life that might have improved the world but will never have that chance. We refuse to consider lives erased or, more commonly, lives simply pushed out of the frame of the picture to be destroyed away from our sight. We actually try not to realize. We can’t fret about everyone. We’d go mad. We can’t cure all the evil in the world at once any more than we can correct all our past mistakes.

What can we do? We can stop fussing over all that doesn’t matter such as adipose tissue in odd places. We can celebrate that we’re still able to live broadly, loving and reaching out, and caring beyond ourselves. Age gives us freedoms we never felt before, freedoms to take risks. We can take risks to support those whose voices can no longer be heard. We can feel grateful every birthday that we’ve survived one more year. We can look around us to see where we can shine our light to make someone else glad to still be alive, too.