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I just read a lovely essay by Emily Fox Gordon called "At Sixty-Five," part of this year's Best American Essays collection. Gordon captured a lot of what I've been feeling, too, at age sixty-one, and I was totally with her as she catalogued all the ways in which her body is failing -- tiny things, really; a little more hobble to her step when she gets out of the car, some teariness that drips out of her left eye. In my case, it's arthritis in my right knee that leaves me with a Spaldeen-sized swelling if I walk too far or too fast or, apparently, ride a bike at all.
One section I really loved was Gordon's reflection on losing her looks, since, like me, she feels like she never was especially beautiful and therefore didn't really have all that many looks to lose. Her thoughts on looking in the mirror these days are a lot like mine -- especially after looking in the mirror just this very morning and noticing not just a tiny dark hair on my upper lip, which I got rid of with the razor I've been forced to haul out with ever-greater frequency in the past couple of years, but a tiny dark hair emerging FROM MY NOSE; but I digress -- and are captured in this wonderful paragraph:
When I was 30, I felt sure that a paradoxical reward awaited me at 60, if I made it that far. Having never had any beauty to lose, I reasoned, I’d be exempted from mourning its loss. But as I’ve grown older, this proposition has turned inside out. I see now that I did have at least some beauty—not much, but some—and exactly because I had so little, I could hardly afford to lose it. Now, at this inconvenient moment, I realize that I do care about my looks. I find myself spending more energy compensating for my inadequacies than I used to. I search for becoming clothes. I color my hair. I experiment, in a gingerly way, with makeup. I suspect these efforts don’t do a lot for me, though they do make some difference, if only in letting people know I’m trying.
I also appreciated Gordon's reflections on what kind of decline awaits her over the next 10 or 20 years, and how unknowable that seems, yet how essential it feels to be able to know it. LIke me, she hopes to just be able to continue "to write, to take walks and cook and travel and drink (moderately) and have lunch with friends and talk to my husband." Simple hopes, really, but who knows whether, amidst the "avalanche of contingency" that constitutes one's final decades, she'll actually be able to accomplish even that much.
But here's where Gordon and I diverge: she seems to think that this is a good time in her life, a better time, really, than any other phase. Even her increasing proximity to illness, dying, and death -- even her confession that she's always been a bit of a depressive and continues to be -- don't keep her from feeling that at the age of sixty-five, that "I’ve finally worked free of the agitation and misery of youth, which in my case extended well into middle age. I’ve learned better how to live, to do my part in maintaining my marriage, to master impulse and cultivate self-respect."
Not me. Not yet. But Emily Fox Gordon has about a few years on me, so maybe I'm on my way to reaching a point where I can say that I, too, have "learned better how to live." Check this space in October 2018.
