Last week, I idiotically announced on social media I wasn’t going to write about my mother’s death anymore. I thought I could decide to be done.
I’m very silly, and I never learn. I may be done with the topic, but the topic isn’t done with me. One day, something I write won’t be about my mother. That’s about all I can promise.
I’ve been thinking about a realization I had during the reception after her funeral. It was in her house…
My house, now? Or our house? My brother’s and my house?
The last time a will was as complicated as my mother’s the year was 1060 in feudal England. Welcome to our world. I knew she’d figure out a way to make mischief after she’d gone.
I’m not going to write about the will today. It takes up too much of my time lately, and this is exactly what I’m thinking about. My time left on earth, and how I want to spend it.
Back to the moment in question: my age landed on me like an Acme anvil.
I was mingling with guests, including my young (one might be turning 40 this year) cousins, my niece and nephew, my stepson and his fiancée, our neighbors in college who were in diapers only yesterday.
Suddenly, I could see myself. I had a kind of out of body experience, floating near the ceiling.
I looked smart in a new blazer from Talbot’s.
I don’t shop at Talbot’s. It was the last thing my mother bought me. She was the one who always purchased grown-up clothes for me to wear. I still prefer play clothes, not school clothes, and don’t get me started on those articles asking what’s age-appropriate for women to wear. If I could never hear another word again, it’s appropriate.
I could see the crowd and how I was moving in it. I was hostess. I was laughing. I was dealing with death the way in which I’d hoped—enjoying the company of people who loved her, not bogged down in grief.
Suddenly, I realized…I was the old lady. My mother’s generation is almost completely gone. Only her friend Florence remains. In our family, my generation is now the oldest.
GTFOOH. How did this happen?
I both experienced and witnessed The Changing of the Guard. I let it seep in. It’s the first time in my life I’ve felt my age.
When I was a teenager, most of my friends were adults. I was always the youngest in the room. And because I never gave birth to a child, I avoided being a mother. I think of my stepsons as my darling pals more than anything else. They have their own mother.
I know I’m a bit of an anomaly. Most women my age have children and grandchildren, although most of my friends do not. I’ve naturally gravitated toward women who are childless. But I do understand it’s laughable to be 58 years old and just waking up to my own mortality.
Because I haven’t matured much since I was seventeen years old, I’ve pretty much evaded the passage of time.
Until now. Now I understand I’m going to die. It’s a wee jarring, but not the first time I’ve realized it.
Years ago, I was with my mom on her first night back from the hospital. She was recovering from pneumonia.
I grabbed a bite of a croissant during a midnight run to the kitchen and was chewing it as I walked past her room on the way back to bed. She said something, so I swallowed to respond.
The croissant promptly lodged in my throat. I started to choke.
I knew I was actually dying, and considered how ridiculous it was: death by stale pastry. Then I realized I was doing so in front of my mom. Not cool.
But I wasn’t afraid. It was more like, huh, death is real, I can’t breathe.
My mother could tell something was wrong. She started to jump out of bed but wasn’t moving too quickly. She looked so tiny that night. Later, she insisted she would have saved me.
In the nick of time, I got it out of my throat. I was hoarse for days after.
This experience was different, although interestingly, in the same room. This wasn’t,
“Oh, Death, there you are...”
This was,
“I’m the old lady now. Time is limited.”
So I’m considering how I want to spend the rest of my days.
I hope I’m done surviving life. I want to live it, instead. But being a survivor is a hard cloak to shake. I’ve been very attached to this identity.
When I was in rehab in 2015, we had to write our life story and read it aloud. After I finished, the oldest of my fellow clients looked at me and said,
“They could drop you into the desert in Australia with nothing and you’d find a way to reinvent the boomerang.”
I’m still not sure it’s a compliment. But it’s true I have a lot of practice at withstanding trauma, getting out of scrapes, and responding to disasters with a huge smile on my face. A mess has always been my happy place. I like knowing I’m going to figure out how to get out of it.
Issues like inner peace, serenity, mindfulness, and all that crap seemed like the kiss of death. I don’t want to be in the moment, patiently weeding a garden I planted.
But something has changed. I still don’t want to weed a garden. But I do want to honor my time and be in the moment.
And it’s all wrapped up with my mother and how she lived.
My mother liked to struggle. She struggled until 24 hours before she died, when she announced she was done. True to her word, she died on schedule.
But most of her other days were spent brawling with life. She did everything the hardest way possible, and invariably found ways to complicate the simplest of matters.
The last huge sticking point between us was my refusal to keep the books by double-entry bookkeeping, written by hand and kept in a ledger.
“No,” I said. “I am not spending four hours doing something which takes ten minutes online.”
She didn’t understand the Cloud. Well, who does, but we know it works because our photos are there when we accidentally flush our phones down the toilet.
She didn’t understand online banking. She perpetually asked about a paper copy, because when the IRS comes, they’ll ask for one.
“If you want a paper copy, fine,” I said. “All I have to do is press print.”
I thought it would mollify her, but as I’ve stated—I’m very silly and never learn. She did not trust the automatic math of Excel, never mind online banking.
The worst waste of my time was trying to reason with her.
“Look,” I said. “I will print out everything and show you every month what the balances are, what money went where. You can see for yourself.”
Which I did. Her response to me was,
“Well. So say you.”
“No,” I said, with the patience of Job, “not so say I. So says the math. See? All these checks have cleared. This is your bank balance.”
“I don’t understand how this is possible,” she responded.
She couldn’t accept she had money in the bank.
I cannot tell you how painful it was to watch her worry about money while she had thousands of dollars. Her distrust was so severe, only double-entry bookkeeping could prove me right.
It was by far the worst poker hand I’ve ever played.
I may not ever win a race, but I can tread water longer than anyone I know. I refused to crumble.
Then irony gave us a happy ending.
Because she didn’t believe she had any money, because she was suspect of my shady bookkeeping, she saved money. It accumulated. And in the last months of her life, she needed it. There was money to pay for some professional care at home.
I’ll take it as a win.
She lived a long time. Watching her these years, I suspect living into my nineties is not something I want to do. She had difficulty accepting there were no more solutions to her physical problems. A point was reached when nothing could be done for her. And still, she lived. Brutal. I give myself thirty more years, max. I don’t want more.
Now, conversely, aging isn’t at all as I imagined. The only thing changed in me so far are my joints, which insist on being troublesome. And gravity. I do fantasize about having a face lift.
Don’t start with me about the facelift. I never thought I’d want one either, but a friend of mine got a lower half facelift and looks like a million bucks and doesn’t look creepy at all. I’m obsessed now.
So some physical things have changed. But not all physical things have changed.
I exercise more regularly than ever. After despairing I’d die overweight, I have a normal BMI. Certain parts of my physical self are in better shape than ever. I lost 65 pounds after menopause, proving every magazine article about losing weight when older wrong. It can be done.
Even my lungs are better. I quit smoking. I still vape, but it’s fine. It’s harm reduction, and I’m doing well. My pulmonologist said so.
I still smoke a cigarette every six months or so. It’s funny, but I didn’t have one during my mom’s illness and death. I did bum one off someone and they gave me the rest of their pack of Marlboro Lights, figuring I’d need them. They just sat there in the hall, looking at me. I looked back.
I didn’t want one.
And I must mention sex, because of all the myths about old age, no sex is the biggest lie out there.
It’s easier to write about sex with my mother gone. No one is going to call her and say,
“She’s writing about her sex life, did you see it?”
There are warring factions in my brain. Part of me has a deep frown on my face, asking myself if it’s really necessary to mention. The other part of me is jumping up and down yelling,
“Write it, write it, let them know they can look forward to hot sex the rest of their lives!”
I swear to you, I know women much older than I who are having the most adventuresome sexual exploits of their lives.
The nicest surprise for me is desire. It’s still there.
All women need is permission to have a good time. We’re still looking for someone to tell us we can. And although you may have a puritanical inner critic, and live in a puritanical area, with puritanical people, please note: we don’t need permission to have fun. If I were in charge, I’d be ordering us to have as much fun as possible.
I think my generation just got bad info on what it’s like to age. So I am both older, and it doesn’t matter. The fun of life is unlimited and still available.
I don’t want a sappy ending to this essay. I loathe them.
I’m someone who likes to live each day as it comes, so it’s impossible for me to detail what I want out of these years. It’s enough just to discover them.
It’s easier for me to say what I don’t want.
I do not want a self-imposed prison. I craft them so well, and I want to stop. Life is tough enough without being a jerk to myself.
I want the inner critic in me to take an overdose of benzos and sleep till I’m dead. I want to write about what interests me, and I want to travel.
I want adventure. I can have it.
So can you. I give us all permission. I wish I’d been able to free my mother of her inner critic, of her commitment to struggle and self-loathing.
When I was a kid, they called feminism “women’s lib.” My greatest desire is to liberate women from all the prisons which come our way; the societal ones, the inhumane laws, and the ones we absorb by osmosis.
I am going to be my own science experiment and see if I can release myself. Thirty years will be gone in a flash.