Six Things I Stopped Caring About After 65

I turned sixty-five in a booth at a diner in Corvallis, and somewhere in my sixty-sixth year, without any single morning I can point to, a whole shelf of worries I'd been carrying since I was a girl quietly slid off and broke on the floor, and I have never once tried to sweep them back up.

Nobody warns you about the good side of getting older. They tell you about the knees and the pill organizer with the little days of the week on it, and those are real. But nobody sat me down at forty and said, honey, hold on, because a day is coming when you will simply stop caring about six or seven things that have been quietly eating you alive since you were nineteen, and it is going to feel like taking off a coat you forgot you had on. So I'm going to be the one who tells you. Here are the six that fell off my shelf. The first three gave me back a lightness I can feel in my actual shoulders. The fifth one my sister Diane argued with me about for a solid hour over the phone, and I'll tell you how that went.

I should say, before I start, that this didn't come as a single revelation. It came the way dusk comes, so gradually you can't name the moment it happened, only that at some point you look up and the light is different. I'd catch myself not doing something I'd always done — not flinching, not apologizing, not keeping score — and I'd think, huh, when did that stop? I never decided any of it. That's the strangest and best part. It's less like a choice I made and more like a set of keys I'd been gripping so long my hand had cramped around them, and one day I noticed my fingers had simply, on their own, let go.

One: whether the house is ready for company

For forty years I kept my house in a state of readiness for a guest who almost never came. The good towels stayed folded and untouched. I'd wipe the counters at ten at night in case someone dropped by at eight the next morning, which nobody in the history of Benton County has ever done. I lived braced for a knock. And one afternoon last spring my neighbor Paula did drop by, unannounced, and there were three coffee cups in my sink and yesterday's paper on the couch and I simply moved the paper and we sat down. She didn't notice. She had come to talk about her son. Nobody, it turns out, was ever coming to inspect the counters. I made that inspector up when I was a young wife, and I fired her at sixty-five, and my house is a home now instead of a showroom that I happen to sleep in.

Two: apologizing for what I eat

I spent most of my life narrating my own appetite out loud, as if I owed the table an explanation. "Ooh, I really shouldn't." "Just a sliver." "I'll regret this." A little confession before every second helping, every dessert, every warm roll. Somewhere after sixty-five I did the math and realized I have eaten roughly seventy thousand meals apologizing for about four hundred of them, and for what? For whom? I take the second helping now. I take the good corner piece with the most frosting. I do not say "I shouldn't." I have shoulded my whole life. I'm having the pie.

Three: who calls first

This one I'm almost ashamed of, it was so small and cost me so much. I kept a ledger in my head of who had called me last and therefore whose "turn" it was, and I would let weeks go by, lonely, waiting for a friend to call so I wouldn't seem like the needy one. My whole generation of women was raised to fear seeming eager, as if wanting your friends was undignified. I threw the ledger out. Now if I think of you, I call you. If we spoke yesterday and I think of you again today, I call you again today. Nobody has ever once been offended that I wanted to talk to them. Not once. All those years of rationing.

Those first three, honestly, gave me back my shoulders. I stand differently. But there are three more, and they go deeper.

Four: what strangers think of how I look

I let my hair go gray at sixty-two and it came in the color of pewter and I love it. I wear the same three comfortable things in rotation and I have not owned a pair of shoes that hurt since 2021. I used to hold my stomach in at the grocery store — at the grocery store, for the benefit of people I will never see again, who were not looking, who were holding their own stomachs in. The amount of my one wild precious life I spent being decorative for strangers would break your heart. I got it back. I push the cart. I let my stomach be a stomach.

I remember the exact afternoon I noticed it was gone. I was at the Fred Meyer on Ninth, reaching for the good coffee on the top shelf, and I caught my own reflection in the freezer glass — gray hair every direction, an old fleece the color of a dishrag, no makeup, a face with sixty-six years in it — and I waited for the old flinch, the little internal apology I'd been making to mirrors my whole life. And it just didn't come. I looked like exactly what I was, a healthy old woman buying coffee, and I thought, plainly, well, there you are, and I put the coffee in my cart and went home. Forty years I'd been at war with freezer glass. The war just ended one Tuesday, no treaty, no parade, and I hadn't even fired the last shot.

Five: the one my sister and I argued about

This is the one Diane and I went around about for an hour. There was a woman I'd been friends with since we were young mothers together, nearly forty years, and for maybe thirty-five of those years the friendship had run entirely one direction. She called to talk about herself and hung up before I finished a sentence. Every visit left me a little smaller. And I finally understood, at sixty-six, that "we've been friends for forty years" is a reason to grieve a friendship, not a reason to keep bleeding into one. So I let it go quiet. I didn't have a scene. I just stopped reaching, and she didn't notice I'd stopped, which told me everything.

Diane thinks that's cold. "You don't throw away forty years of history," she said, and she said it more than once, and she is a warmer and more forgiving woman than I am and I love her for it. But here is what I told her, and here is where we finally landed after an hour: I said, Diane, I'm not throwing away the history. The history happened. Those forty years are real and some of them were good. I'm just not signing up for forty more out of respect for a museum. There's a difference between honoring the past and being imprisoned by it. She got quiet, and then she said, "I have one of those too," and named a name, and we were both quiet, and I think that hour was one of the most honest conversations my sister and I have ever had.

Six: needing to be right about the past

This is the last one and the deepest and it's the one that surprised me. All my life I kept careful books on old arguments — who said the cruel thing at the wedding in 1994, who was really at fault when the family broke into camps, the exact words. I could have argued any of those cases in court. And I noticed, this past year, that I had simply put the books down. Not forgiven, exactly, and not forgotten — just no longer interested in being the winner of a case that ended thirty years ago. Being right, it turns out, is a very expensive thing to be, and I couldn't afford it anymore, and the relief of setting it down was enormous.

My cousin Ruth is the clearest example. She and I did not speak, really speak, for almost twenty years over a matter of our grandmother's things and some words said in a hot kitchen after the funeral — words I had memorized, could recite, had polished like a stone. And last autumn her husband got sick and she called me, out of nowhere, because that's what you do when you're frightened, you call the people who knew you when you were young. And I noticed, holding the phone, that I had a choice: I could lead with the stone I'd been carrying for twenty years, or I could ask how she was holding up. And for the first time in my life the stone just seemed heavy and stupid, a thing I was tired of carrying, and I set it down and I said, "Ruthie. Tell me what the doctors are saying." We don't discuss 1994. We discuss her garden and her grief and the grandchildren. Twenty years I defended a case that had no prize at the end of it but loneliness. It's a better use of what's left.

It isn't wisdom — it's arithmetic

So those are the six. And I want to be careful here, because I don't want to make it sound like I got wise. I don't think it's wisdom, exactly. I think it's arithmetic. You reach a certain age and you can suddenly, plainly, see the far edge of the table, and once you can see how much is actually left, you get very, very unwilling to spend any of it on wiping counters for an inspector who isn't coming, or apologizing to a roll, or bleeding into a friendship that runs one way. The caring didn't take effort to release. It just stopped being worth its own weight.

If you are younger than I am and you're reading this waiting for your real life to start once you finally get thin enough or tidy enough or well-liked enough — I want to reach through and tell you that the day you stop caring about most of it is coming, and it is the lightest and freest I have ever felt, and the only thing I would change is that I'd have started dropping things off the shelf a great deal sooner. You don't have to wait until sixty-five. You can put the second helping on your plate tonight, and not say a word about it, and just eat.