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Growing up, I loved to celebrate birthdays. I still remember how excited I felt turning 10, my first two-digit birthday, ending my childhood. By 13, at my adult height of 5 foot, five-and-a-half inches, I felt I was on the brink of adulthood— I could hardly wait to get there.
In my 20s, birthdays became less important. My life branched out. I married, I had children, they had birthdays—my husband, my children and I celebrated at lots of birthday parties. Later I got divorced and birthdays became ever less important.
Then only yesterday my children were turning 50, I was an improbably old person, and far from being a joyous occasion, birthdays had become a major trauma.
But my 70's somehow remained manageable; I still felt deep down like me. I wasn’t that near the end quite yet.
Growing up tall for my age —and into my twenties—I’d been happy to look older than I was. Then for more than half a century, I got used to hearing I looked young for my age. At some point, however, I just started celebrating the milestone birthdays—70, 75, 80. I invited my friends to some, to others only my family. These events were no longer harbingers of happy days to come, but signifiers of sad things past—increasingly, they’d morphed into painful reminders of missing friends no longer with me.
But nothing prepared me for the milestone birthday I celebrated last week. Last week I turned 85. Gloria Steinem is 84. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is 85, born in that same long-ago 1933. And yes, they’ll say that 90 is the new 60, but I’m here to say: Don’t you believe it. I turned 85 and I felt I crossed the Rubicon into the land of the really, really old (read: ancient). I say this because in contrast to only yesterday when I turned 80—which I’m proud to say I sailed past with aplomb—I noticed a dramatic change in people’s attitudes towards me.
For years, everybody knew that, thanks to my arthritis, I’ve had a tendency to fall. They were also used to seeing me use a walker for my balance to keep from falling. But suddenly, even with my walker, people swarmed my sides like buzzing insects, in protective droves. They helped me into my coat, they helped me out of my coat, they clung to the edges of my walker, as if to help steer it. They grabbed my arms as if I’d turned into glass and might shatter in front of their eyes and disappear.
Did this outpouring of worry relate to my lately having morphed into The Incredible Shrinking Woman? As 85 came hurtling towards me, I kept shedding inches. I fretted on finding I barely measured five feet, one inch tall. Had I stumbled down into a rabbit hole and, unknowing, sipped from Alice’s magic Drink Me bottle, without waiting to find a nearby magic cake to return me to my long accustomed height of five feet, five-and-one-half inches?
On the night of my birthday, I went to dinner at a friend’s apartment, and the doorman, hearing my name, stopped me in the lobby, and called up my friend—not quite 81—who rode down to meet me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I worried about you taking the elevator alone,” she said.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But I live in an elevator building. I ride up and down in an elevator at least once, almost every day.”
“But mine is a complicated building!” my friend retorted.
Two nights later, my daughter flew in from Chicago to celebrate with me. Of my four children, she seemed the most struck by my age. She kept saying, “But Mom, you’re 85. I wanted to celebrate with you!”
She took me out to dinner and a play and she said I should have chosen better seats, “because you’re only 85 once.”
For a time, she and I had had a prickly relationship. But now, I was the remaining parent with my head—or my brain—still intact. I’d suddenly become value-added, but way too late to undo my many cringe-making maternal missteps.
It’s not just turning 85, however, that can be traumatic. A widowed friend told me she’d begun to feel really old the day she turned 80. She said it’s worse than that: She says she sometimes feels, when her children and grandchildren are sitting around talking with each other, and basically ignoring her, invisible: “It feels like a rehearsal for being dead,” she told me.
Several weeks ago, watching the funeral of George H.W. Bush, who died a few days before my birthday, at 94, I first kept beating myself up for not keeping myself fit enough to jump out of airplanes the way he did at 85 and 90. Then I got depressed, realizing that both he and his wife Barbara had spent most of their years after 85 in and out of hospitals. It reminded me that my remaining years of relative health may be limited in number.
On the other hand, my sister, recently widowed, has found new love at the age of 81. Her friends, who are mostly the same age, are having a terrible time with my sister’s new romance. They want her to get them boyfriends, too. No matter that the boyfriend has a pacemaker, and recently suffered more than just a minor heart attack.
Love among the ruins: Her women friends are jealous nonetheless. She’s already had three husbands! How many men does she get to have?
Meanwhile, my family celebrated my turning 85 for what seemed like most of a year. At the restaurant where we held my last celebration (a brunch) people pushed my chair up to the table, pushed it away from the table (despite my objections), insisted on holding my purse—fussing over me as if I was a baby. My daughter even wanted to help me order.
At the end of the brunch, I left the restaurant with my oldest son and others in my family. I bowed my head, stepped outside with my walker into a drenching rain, and into my new life in the land of the very, very old.
