Tomorrow I turn 54. One more year and I can slide into an “active adult” community to play shuffleboard and lust after that one widower who still has most of his hair and can drive at night.
I kid. I’m never doing that. Probably.
Hitting 50 felt weird but somehow creeping up on 55 is terrifying.
And yet.
It’s a privilege, isn’t it? Growing older. One not everyone gets to experience. And I wonder if those are the biggest changes I see on the outside: the marks left from grief, from missing people whose love filled me up and filled me out. Is this sagging skin my body attempting to fill in the void left by those I’ve lost? My face still looks youngish, but my eyes give away the depth of my experience, the color fading a little more with each loss, each mountain climbed, each disaster averted or survived.
Getting older, it seems to me, is a process of letting go. Letting go of ridiculous expectations, letting go of shoulds and shouldn’ts, casting off things that no longer matter (or probably never did), and saying goodbye to the person you thought you were when you were young and the road of life disappeared into an unseen horizon. But it also means letting go of the people you love, letting go of the face that looked back at you in the mirror for so many years. It means learning to accept that things will change regardless of how hard you fight.
No matter how many hours you spend in the gym, no matter how much sunscreen you apply, no matter how well you take care of yourself, time and gravity will win. It’s a horrifying process, watching your body do what it’s going to do in spite of you. Sometimes I feel like a failure for not aging better, which is ridiculous. Once a clerk in a store had to ask for my ID for something and when he returned it to me he noted my age and commented that I was “doing really well.” I thanked him because I didn’t really know how to respond. It’s not an accomplishment, it’s a mix of genetics and sheer luck.
Then again, I am here. I am healthy. I’m strong and flexible and my butt is still mostly in it’s proper place and years of eschewing the sun have kept wrinkles to a minimum and there’s a chance that I could still, possibly, take your man. I am blessed beyond measure.
There’s a balance to be struck, I think, between letting go and hanging on. But sometimes it’s hard to know and sometimes you don’t have a choice in what or who you must let go of.
And this is where I am this birthday, in the space between letting go and hanging on, learning a new way of moving through a world that has tilted on its axis. Tempus fugit, my loves, and we hang on for as long as we can and try to enjoy the ride.
I wouldn’t have guessed you were even that old. I wouldn’t have guessed you were slightly older than me. You don’t look it. You have truly lived and experienced. All the things that happened to you and for you made you what you are now, so I like it all.… Read more »
Thank you. I appreciate your perspective.