Uneven Aging: My turn

While the Passage was closed last summer, I took what the French call "a blow of age". Several events—a fractured hand caused by a trip on uneven pavement, and a recurrent issue that required tests—reminded me that you can buy all the new jeans on Earth to feel of indeterminate years, but nature has built in its own fading and fraying.

So, I returned to the Passage an older person than when I left, and somehow more than three months older. My accident narrowed the unevenness between my husband and me, for years the healthier one. 

Those who follow this series have commented on the see-saw nature of a relationship where you're doing better for awhile, then your partner or friend is. I learned that you cannot expect the other person to bear their infirmity the way you would. Le Duc likes his conditions to be mostly ignored (including by him); I was different. I needed a literal helping hand every minute, for many weeks.

He is rarely curt; I am not going to repeat my vocabulary here. I had a lot shorter fuse than I thought, and said that I could run a clinic or hell, the entire hospital better than anyone else if they would just let me, especially when the gleaming new complex sat virtually empty.

Gehry museum or hospital?

When friends visited, I faltered in conversations. At first, I'd rattle on on about my treatment, figural (as psychotherapists say) to me, but enticing as a wet sandbox to them. To counter that, I set a goal of at least an hour's worth of discussion-worthy reading per day and cut my how-are-you report to a succinct sentence.

But I am not alone; this pandemic has stealthily aged the psychology of those already past midlife, because we must now think of our physical selves constantly: scan our environment, plan our exposures, calculate threat.  

In September, I helped a recently-widowed friend to organize a move to her new home. Serving others lifts us from the trough of impatience and irritation built into infirmity.

How often do we not ask anything substantive of the unwell person, whether that's listening to a problem, helping to wrestle a bureaucracy, or planning an outing? There was plenty I could contribute, if broken into manageable tasks.

Years ago, a commenter who signed herself "C." shared a friend's recipe for aging well. I reread that just when I needed it:

"An older, wiser friend said, 'I've decided the way to age well is to live like a peasant: walk a lot, carry heavy objects, eat simple food, be with people'. And I would add to that what she embodies but was too modest to mention: put others first."

I also received a visual reminder, this photo of a cherished Susanfriend, Susan C., a psychotherapist, taken on her birthday, and close to that of her 98-year-old mother Kay's. (Another sister is at bottom right.) The sheer joie de vivre of these remarkable women shines forth. 

Their lives have not been without sorrows and untimely loss, but you can see their spirits in this snapshot. The caption is Susan's.

"The trouble is you think you have time."
—Buddha