topic/growing-older

What do you do about death - in this case, the death of an old father? If you're a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who's been around, like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. [...]

There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me.

It's the beautiful thing about youth.

There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

IN THE MORNING, Mathilde went whirring off on an eighty-mile bike ride. Lancelot undressed and looked at himself in the mirror. Oh, middle age, how awful. He was used to having to look for his lost beauty in his face, but not in his body that had been so tall and strong all his life. Now, though, the wrinkles in the skin of his scrotum, the swirl of gray in the chest hair, the fetal neck wattle. One chink in the armor and death seeps in. He turned this way and that until he found the angle that made him look the way he’d been before his impromptu flight down the stairs in the spring.

The doctor prescribed a mode of treatment that was short-term sustentative and long-term palliative. Hearing this, I looked to my mother, whose eyes were closed; who her whole life had never changed, until she did change; who since babyhood I had known as the worldly portal for all of life’s other-worldly grace to emerge through; her skin now roughened, turned to rind; her prematurely gaunt face desaturated of colour and cross-hatched with lines. It felt as though too illogically short a period had passed between her initial diagnosis and present state of ill health, as though the full duration of her sickness had been time-lapsed.

But Susan’s seven or eight years younger than Selena. What did she know? Because: People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they’re getting older they look at each other’s face a little ashamed. It’s clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn’t mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn’t want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life. To which, most of the time, the friend’s eyes will courteously reply, My dear, it’s nothing at all. I hardly noticed.

He motioned to me to help him get up, and we walked step by step to the table, his hand resting heavily on my arm. Again, I took in how frail he’d become, and I couldn’t quite believe it, as if his old self were concealed within this approximation of my grandfather. I had the irrational feeling that this was just a phase, and he would soon be restored to vitality.

JULY 4, 1951

Tonight I felt fat, old, I heard my heart and felt mortal as mortal can be. It startled me so, I had a hard time getting to sleep. I was alone, a physical body that one day would run down and die and be buried. So I thought. It was dreadful. And unforgettable. Thirty—what a turning point. I remember Natalia’s saying in Capri: “Thirty? You don’t begin to live until you are 30.” Tonight. My movie opened, I believe.

I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.

[...] Ellen had said, 'You're past thirty,' and now for the second time in my life I felt dizzyingly untethered, but whereas when I first moved to London that sensation was buoyed by the expectation of long-dreamed-of experience and ballasted with the deep resources of youth, now I had learned that you cannot choose what falls away, and every time you start again the possibilities are shockingly reduced. Presumably the last time we experience this is when we give up, so it's unsurprising that the panic is greater with every round. [...]