Beyond Resignation

Two Novembers ago I turned eighty. I still don’t believe it. Three weeks earlier my husband had celebrated—if that’s the correct word—his eightieth birthday. How did we get here? The days of our lives often crawled, while the years have flashed by with unbearable speed. Must we be defined solely by age—as a Senior Citizen, Wrinklie, d.o.t., o.a.p., or l.o.l.* I am still a practicing writer and amateur artist trying to make use of the time that is left to me (thank God I don’t know how much that is). Am I strong enough to accept what comes? Or will I opt out like Carolyn Heilbrun, whose death continues to haunt me?

These days I am rarely touched by “moments of being,” to use Virginia Woolf’s lovely phrase. I’m an observer now—a bystander, not a participant. When I don’t feel like writing, stubbornness rather than inspiration keeps me going. I think often of J. K. Galbraith’s essay on the word still. In an op-ed piece the Sage of Cambridge wrote for the New York Times some years ago, he maintained that the clue to age is answering yes to these questions: “Are you still writing/publishing/traveling?” Which still doesn’t answer the question of how to be old.

Old but still defiantly viable. Florida Scott-Maxwell writes in The Measure of My Days that she has “a duty to all who care for me—not to be a problem. I must carry my age lightly. . . . Oh, that I may to the end. Each day then must be filled with my first duty. I must be ‘all right.’ Disabilities crowd in on the old; real pain is there and if we have to be falsely cheerful, it is part of our isolation.” It’s a matter of pride for me to say, as my husband, Henry, does most mornings, “No complaints.” Perhaps “No worse than usual” is the more honest answer. I am compelled to keep running (or at least keep busy) like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland—to stay in place. I do not enjoy looking my age, either; my skin no longer holds me in.

Consider how Scott-Maxwell puts it: “Another secret we carry is that though drab outside—wreckage to the eye, mirrors a mortification—inside we flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable.” I’m not sure about the wild life part, but I agree with her next statement: “We have reached the place beyond resignation, a place I had no idea existed until I had arrived here. . . . We come to where age is boring, one’s interest in it by-passed. . . . I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery.”

Discovery of what? Perhaps what in this life is really important. And that will be different for each one of us, if we exert ourselves to think about it at all. But most of us don’t call ourselves old; we’re the vigorous exceptions. No canes or walkers for us! Anyway the whole subject is too depressing to contemplate.

The food writer and essayist M. F. K. Fisher thought differently. When she was twenty-eight, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher bought a half-ruined portrait of an implacable old German or Swiss woman—the germ of a book she would write some day on old age. The small damaged oil, painted on leather backed with wood, went everywhere with Mary Frances; I saw it propped up on the floor of her last house in Glen Ellen, California. Almost fifty years after she’d bought it, the picture was replicated on the dust jacket of Sister Age. The essays, stories, and vignettes gathered in her book described encounters with the elderly she had had throughout her life.

“I wish we were more deliberately taught, in early years, to prepare for this condition,” she wrote in the afterword to Sister Age. “The Aging Process is part of most of our lives, and it remains one we try to...