What Nobody Tells You About Getting Older

Everyone warned me about the aches and the doctor's appointments and the way the world starts talking a little louder and slower at you once your hair goes white, and every bit of that came true — but nobody, not one single person, warned me about the good things, and at sixty-seven I got ambushed by three of them.

I want to tell you about all three, because I went into my sixties braced. My mother had a hard old age and I'd watched it up close, and I think I'd quietly decided that getting older was just a long subtraction — you lose your waist, then your knees, then your friends, then your nerve — and that the only job left was to be graceful about the losing. That is the whole story our culture tells about growing old. It is a story about decline, told mostly by people who aren't there yet. And I'm here to tell you, from inside it, that it left out the best part. There are things that arrive. The third one changed how I spend every single day I have left, and I'll get to it, but let me take them in order.

The first gift: the fear of being watched wore out

The first gift showed up without any announcement, and I only noticed it after it had already moved in.

For my whole life I had carried a low, constant hum of fear about what other people thought of me. Not a dramatic fear — just the background radiation of it, always on. Did I say the wrong thing at the dinner. Do they think I've let myself go. Was that laugh too loud, that opinion too strong, that dress too young for me. I had performed some version of myself for other people's approval since I was a girl in a Sunday dress being told to sit still and be sweet, and I had assumed, the way you assume about the weather, that this was simply the climate of being a woman and I would live in it forever.

And then one morning — I want to say it was a Tuesday in Bandon, on the beach, with my shoes in my hand — I realized it was gone. Not managed. Not overcome through some hard inner work. Just gone, the way a sound you'd stopped hearing is suddenly, obviously absent. I was walking on the wet sand below Face Rock in a windbreaker that did not flatter me at all, my gray hair doing whatever the wind wanted, and a group of younger people passed me, and I noticed that I had not braced. I hadn't sucked anything in or arranged my face. It genuinely did not occur to me to wonder what they saw. And I stood there on the sand and almost laughed out loud, because I understood that I had been waiting my entire life for permission to stop performing, and it turned out nobody was ever going to give it to me — it just expired on its own, quietly, sometime around sixty-six, like a subscription I forgot I was paying for.

That is the first thing nobody tells you. The fear of being watched wears out. And the freedom on the other side of it is enormous. I say the strong opinion now. I wear the windbreaker. I have opinions about books and I state them at dinner and I do not soften them into questions the way I did for forty years. It is a very late kind of youth, and in some ways it's the realer one.

I'll give you a small example that will sound like nothing and was, to me, everything. I've wanted to learn to paint since I was a girl, and I never signed up for a single class in sixty-seven years, and the reason — the actual, embarrassing reason — was that I was afraid the other people in the class would see that I wasn't any good. That a grown woman would be visibly a beginner, and that this would be humiliating. I finally took the Tuesday watercolor class at the community center in January, and I am indeed terrible at it, cheerfully and completely terrible, and I paint the same lopsided lighthouse every week, and I have never enjoyed anything more. The fear that kept me out of that room for half a century simply wasn't in the room with me anymore. It had wandered off somewhere around sixty-six and left me the paintbrush.

The second gift: anger got too expensive

The second gift is quieter and it took me a while to trust it. My anger got cheap to put down.

I was, for most of my life, a good grudge-holder. I came from grudge-holding people. We remembered. There were slights from decades back that I could still call up whole, the exact wording, the exact tone, and warm my hands at the old fire of them whenever I wanted. And somewhere in my sixties I noticed that the fires had mostly gone out, and — here's the part that surprised me — I didn't relight them. A cousin who'd wronged me badly in a matter of my parents' estate, a wound I'd sworn I'd carry to the grave, called me about something ordinary, and I found that I simply wasn't interested in the grudge anymore. Not that I'd forgiven her in some noble ceremony. It was more that the anger had started to cost more than it was worth, and I'd gotten too aware of the price of things to keep paying it. Being right about 1998 was costing me a cousin in 2026, and I could suddenly see that trade for the bad deal it was.

At sixty-seven you can feel, in a way you cannot at forty, exactly how finite the whole thing is, and that clarity turns almost every grudge into an obvious extravagance. I don't have the years to spend being right about old hurts. Nobody does; the young just can't see the meter running yet. So the anger goes, not because you become a saint, but because you become an accountant, and the numbers stop working. That's the second gift. It looks like grace from the outside. From the inside it's mostly arithmetic and relief.

The third gift: the days got brighter, not dimmer

And now the third, which is the one that actually reorganized my days.

This one I have trouble putting into words without it sounding grim, so please stay with me past the grim part, because it lands somewhere bright. At sixty-seven, I made a real and permanent peace with the fact that I am going to die, and that the number of ordinary mornings I have left is not infinite and is, in fact, countable — and instead of frightening me, it did the strangest thing. It turned the volume of ordinary life all the way up.

I don't mean I got morbid. I mean the opposite. When you finally, truly understand that the mornings are numbered, each individual morning stops being a thing you rush through on the way to some future that you're saving yourself for, and becomes almost unbearably vivid on its own. The first hot mouthful of coffee. The particular gray-gold the light does over the Coquille River in October. A phone call from my daughter where she's just complaining about her boss, nothing special, her voice in my ear. I used to sleepwalk through a hundred mornings like that on my way to some someday. Now I'm awake for them, because I finally believe, all the way down, that they're the actual thing and not the waiting room for the actual thing.

What it changed: I stopped postponing

What it changed, concretely, is that I stopped postponing. My whole life I saved things. The good dishes stayed in the cabinet for a company that came twice a decade. I put off the trip, the phone call, the letting-someone-know-I-loved-them, always for a better time, a rounder occasion, a someday when I'd earned it. Sixty-seven cured me of someday. I use the good dishes on a Wednesday. I say the loving thing the moment I feel it, in the plain middle of an ordinary day, because I have learned that "I'll tell her later" is a bet against a clock you cannot see. When I think of a friend, I don't wait for a reason; the thinking of her is the reason. I drove four hours to Ashland last month to have lunch with an old colleague for no occasion at all, and it was one of the best days of my year, and the old me would have said "we should really do that sometime" and meant it and never done it.

Here is the one that I can't tell without my voice catching, even now. My oldest friend, Bernice, lives up in Hood River, and for years we'd been saying the thing old friends say — we should really get together, it's been too long, let's do it soon — and soon kept not coming, the way soon does, because there was always a reason and always next month. And one morning last spring, in the grip of this new refusal to postpone, I simply got in the car and drove the whole way to Hood River without calling first, and I knocked on her door, and when she opened it and saw me standing there her face did something I will keep for the rest of my life. We had two days. Six weeks later she had a stroke, and she is not herself now, and will not be again. Six weeks. If I had waited for the round occasion, for the someday, for the better time, I would not have those two days, and I would be a woman living with should-have instead of a woman who got in the car. That is what the third gift bought me. That is what it is for.

That's the gift, and it's the one I'd hand you first if I could only give you one. Not the fading of the fear, though that's wonderful. Not the cooling of the grudges, though that's a relief. But the way the nearness of the end, once you stop running from it, makes the middle of an ordinary Tuesday shine. Nobody tells you that. They tell you old age is when the light starts going out. For me it was when the light finally came on.

The part they leave out

So if you are younger than sixty-seven and reading this a little afraid of what's coming — and I was, I was so afraid — I want to be the person who tells you the part they leave out. Yes, some things go. But things also arrive, and they are the good things, the ones you've been waiting your whole life for and assumed you'd have to earn. The fear of being watched wears out. The old angers get too expensive to keep. And the days, the plain ordinary countable days, get brighter, not dimmer, right up until they don't. Use the good dishes. It's later than you think, and that turns out to be the most beautiful news of all.