No one talks about it.
The topic being too close to home.
A guilty secret.
But, I bet, if you’re over 65 you know . . .
That we are racing each other away from the threshold of death.
Backpedaling for all we’re worth.
Subtly. Surreptitiously.
Avoiding garish makeup or bad dye jobs or clothes too young for us.
We’re not denying our age.
Just trying to rebrand ourselves a bit.
If 50 is the new 40, we working hard to make 80 the new 65.
Which is a “cool” age – an “on the cusp” age.
We’re working to flaunt our fitness and tout our trips.
To discount whatever small trauma took us to the emergency room.
Or reduce say, by half, our prescriptions, when asked.
And leave out a fall or two on our Medicare questionnaire—it’s no one’s business anyway.
And fill our vocabulary with verbs that haven’t been relevant for a decade: dash, pop over, whip up, scurry, run by, sprint.
We’re competing in this reverse age contest not for our children or our young friends.
They’ve seen us as old for long time now.
We’re contending with each other.
We’ve exhausted most of the other fields of competition in which we once engaged.
Salaries, titles, travels, children’s achievements, grandchildren’s charms, hobbies, do-gooding – you know.
So here we are (don’t tell me I’m the only one!):
I know I’m old. And you are too.
But grace and vigor, fearlessness, relevance are the qualities to project.
The façade to maintain with our contemporaries.
To be the Homecoming Queens of Aging High.
Old but not decaying.
Old but managing.
Old but graceful.
Fit old. Engaged old.
Purposeful.
And to state the obvious, the game has a conclusion.
You lose when you die.
For all the honest grief we feel when a good friend passes on,
For all the new and real loneliness we experience,
For all the chill that scurries up our spines, knowing we are that much closer.
We feel a furtive, illicit quiver of pleasure: we won. ©
Postscript.
I was home in Kansas to visit my dad a month before he died. We’d called in hospice. He needed to move from assisted living to nursing home care, and he was having none of it. He was scared and angry. He seemed to be considering death honestly, personally, for the first time in his life. And was quite startled and upset that all his years of church work and pious deprivation hadn’t paid off in immortality. But what he said at one point tipped me off to this essay: his lifelong rival, the thorn in his side in Kiwanis, in church, in our small college doings was going to outlive him.
