How to get old.

The heaviness of life becomes apparent in the features of a person. Its multiple disappointments, those periods of great distress and business, loss and bereavement, financial burdens, health problems and silenced annoyances and betrayals in often life-spanning relationships shrink eyes, fashion and colour skin, nails, teeth and hair, discipline gaits, and model bones and muscle tissue. More often than not, these shapes are recognised as mere effects of ageing, but their quality depends on a lot more than that. We forget to look at people, at the lines on their face and their hands that trace their steps into maturity and beyond (one haunting line from an admittedly soppy film: ‘I want all this marked on my body…’). We forget to show candour towards the personal tragedies, conflicts and duplicities that potentially rest with every person we meet. Everyday statements I encountered in the last few months make me very thoughtful about the kinds of futures that may be in store for me. They are no extraordinary statements, only striking in their commonness. You may know of people who, on the face of it, have had much harder lives, more spectacular fates, in war zones, dictatorships or areas of ecological disaster, for instance. I would argue, however, the scale of sadness, desperation, courage, and moral stance it takes to keep struggling cannot be judged by any Human.

My son is drinking, his wife left him; as a consequence I lost touch with my grandchild, as she emigrated with her mother to Spain. After I had my two girls, I got twins, one of which had a severe disability, and my husband did not assist me in raising the children. My husband died when I was 21, I am 94 and have lost everyone I knew and cared for in the course of time. My wife was taken from me aged only 56, in the space of a few weeks, and has left me with two old women and two children to support. My wife is dying of Alzheimer’s, I take care of her, the house, the animals, the children. My former partner made love to a girl when I was pregnant with his child. My husband comes home late, and I know it is not business that is keeping him, but other women. I am nearing 40 and I have no family, and am too set in my bachelor ways to hope to change. I have had 5 miscarriages, and my only child died of pneumonia. I realised when my partner had a heart attack that I have been depending on him too much, and how will I feed my children if he dies now.

When I look at pictures of me taken recently, I start to see the heaviness. Either it was not there before I left, or I did not know how to read it. Everyone is worried about getting old, but it depends on how you get old. I am including concerns about one’s desirability in relation to others here (and maybe this point is more valid for women), but I am intuitively considering this issue as somewhat tangential, and, possibly, engendered by pure personal refusal, without enough substantial backup. This how to get old, of course, means taking what you get from life with a dose of stoicism and base-happiness in the face of opposition, self-irony, a sense of proportion of one’s own importance or lack thereof, and, on the other hand, struggle, struggle, struggle, to get what you seriously want from life. Cutting away all the pieces of arrogance, inflated senses of self, self-torture, and all kinds of other reasons that make us choose what we do, I believe we can attempt to begin to see ourselves for what we are, and not distorted with all kinds of obsessions, quests for perfection and killing-ourselves-to-fulfil desires resulting from complex forces résultantes of the past. I, for one, was not made for being the lone anthropologist. Being outside of the ties of stability, of family, of friends is shaping my being in slow and painful ways. It makes me long for a family of my own, despite the risks, despite the fallbacks, despite everything. My desires are among the most banal, among the most common, as you realise. What makes us desire this kind of thing in the full knowledge of the drawbacks, I ask you. Normalisation? Truly the best possible thing? Egotism? Altruism? The grass is greener on the other side? What is it that makes us keep our faith in people, and our medium-to-high expectations, having encountered stupidity, recklessness, inconsideration, weakness, domination, abuse and cowardice? Is it true that the kind of person who wishes to subsist on their own, and who finds this desirable, is becoming more common? Why? Why not? Or am I missing the point altogether and this is about something else entirely? I beg you to exclude any strict neo-Darwinian and Foucauldian takes in your responses, for I will refuse to publish them ;-).

24.03.07