On Turning Sixty-Five

Maybe it was the card I got from the government that got me to start telling my age again. I had taken a five-year hiatus from blurting it out, starting when I turned sixty. Before then I'd had no trouble, even been proud to declare I was forty and fifty and fifty-five. But sixty bested me. I found myself smiling and keeping mum when the opportunity arose for me to reveal my age in any conversation.

Without forethought or intention I went into a closet, where I hid an essential part of myself. What some might call discretion--no big deal--felt to me like a lie. I was no age or any age, but I was not my actual age. I left it to others to guess, assuming (hoping) that they would guess I was younger.

I tried to rationalize that a person's age should have nothing to do with shame or pride. Shouldn't those feelings be a result of our actions? But I realized that those "shoulds" meant that my argument had a weak foundation. I needed to focus on what "is" and not what "should be." Just like any other closeted person, I felt ashamed of myself for being, well, for being myself. In this case that meant being over sixty or just plain old.

You'd think I'd have known better. After all, I understood first-hand the alternative to getting old. In a previous five-year span, I'd lived through the deaths of my husband, mother, and father.  But what had been upper-most in my mind then--that life is precious and too, too brief--got buried under the cultural stereotypes of aging.

Despite such exemplary models of aging as Susan Sarandon, who seems immune to type-casting, and Jane Fonda, who exposes her own conflicts for the edification of us all, I let myself be swayed by the voice of television. I had used tv as an escape from the loneliness of bereavement, perceiving it as "white noise." But its constant and consistent message had gotten to me. Whether as "news," drama, talk, or advertisement, it calls anyone over sixty old, elderly, a senior citizen. It sells potions and creams for fine lines and signs of aging to thirty-year-olds, played by twenty-year-old actors. (Notice it's "signs of aging." They don't use the word "wrinkles" any more. The mere mention of "aging" is enough for us to react in fear and reach for our wallets.)

I bought what it was selling and paid for it with my hard-won knowledge. But I'm reclaiming it now. However I look to others, I'm sixty-five years old. Sometimes I feel just that age, and I like it because I have glimpses into what life is about for me. Sometimes I feel much older than my years with my intimate knowledge of cancer and dementia, care taking and the deaths of those closest to me. Sometimes I feel very young with much still to learn about life's mysteries and my own path.

Whatever it was that snapped me out of my cultural enchantment (that Medicare card?), I'm glad to be awake and struggling to be authentic. I suppose that struggle is a funny thing to be happy about, but it means that I'm alive, evolving, and looking forward to the next challenge.