Ozgurdonmaz
the possibility of irrelevance
My mum, Pauline, having a conversation with me and Audrey, spoke with the wisdom of someone who was truly done with worrying about getting older.
First, she let us know that she herself had no plans of becoming invisible with age (to know my mum is to understand that such a thing would be impossible). She also reminded us that in certain cultures in the East, age is held with a kind of reverence, not embarrassment—where the accretion of years is something that garners respect. If you’ve reached a certain age, you know a thing or two, and should be listened to.
But there was one particular thing she said that hasn’t left my mind since. She recalled how her own mum passed around the age she is now (mid-60s, which she wouldn’t mind me telling you).
She expressed how lucky she feels to have every extra day her own mother never had. When she sees another wrinkle on her own face or body, my mum can’t help but be grateful for what that wrinkle represents: the fact that she’s still here.
This idea struck me precisely because it indicates the profound way in which our insecurities have us getting it totally backward. We lament the parenthetical lines appearing around our eyes, the hair that frustratingly seems to have better places to be than atop our head, the body that seems to be adding padding as though, unbeknownst to us, we are imminently moving to a colder climate where we will need it.
But what if each of these unwelcome additions or subtractions were simply a reminder of how lucky we are to still be at the party at all?
The writer Christopher Hitchens, in his days fighting terminal cancer, comically described what he believed most upset people about the predicament of dying:
“It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on—but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you.”
The real point for our purposes today is that if we haven’t been tapped on the shoulder and told we have to leave, shouldn’t that be the headline and not the bodily degradation that is stoking our insecurity?
In other words, we are very much still lucky enough to be at the party. Through this lens, even physical difficulties can be considered a reminder that we are still here.
I’ve been around long enough to need a hip replacement? Hooray!
The next time you bemoan your aging looks, remind yourself how many people would have given anything to live long enough to have etched an extra few grooves on their forehead.
My mum’s framing around aging wasn’t a framing at all, but a deep sense of gratitude for her life. This gratitude I saw in her had a secondary effect.
It revealed the superficial and limited nature of being afraid to age in the context of being less attractive to other people—the absurd subtext being: the whole point of living is to remain attractive to those we hope to date. That can’t be right, can it?
As I listened to my mum speaking, I watched in awe of this powerful woman, filled with a deep gratitude for life, not clinging to anything—certainly not an earlier version of herself, nor the attraction of those she once would have been attractive to. That couldn’t have mattered less. Her mind was on the trees she had seen that morning on our walk along the beach, the breeze she was enjoying, the fact that she had the opportunity at all to be in this majestic place that, as she acknowledged, “so many people will never get to see in their entire lifetime.”
She had captured a fundamental truth: that the point of getting older was not to obsess to an unhealthy degree about remaining attractive, but to become ever more grateful for the years one was given, and to put that gratitude to work in the living one does.
As I watched my mum moving through these days, I saw the exquisite presence with which she approached everything. I saw an enchanted child, in the vessel of a wise, mature woman, and it struck me that this is the form of staying young we should all aspire to.
Far from a regression, it is a recapturing of wonder.
To say childlike wonder would be to do it a disservice. When a child looks up at a bird, or a tree, they may experience awe, but not the deep gratitude my mum was feeling. And yet, through that fusion of increasing awe and gratitude, a powerful new iteration of my mother was born.
I don’t need to tell you how attractive that makes her; you already know. But that’s not the point.
When the wonder of the world becomes more and more visible to you, there’s no time to waste caring about who you’ve become invisible to.
Matthew Hussey
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