WaPo Op-Ed: The Dressing Room Encounter That Made Me Get Real About Aging

Washington Post Op-Ed:  The Dressing-Room Encounter That Made Me Get Real About Aging, by Anne Lamott (Author, Somehow: Thoughts on Love (2024)):

The game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt.

I ache for the world but naturally I’m mostly watching the Me Movie, where balance and strength are beginning to ebb and, on the surface, things are descending into grandma pudding. ...

What can we do as the creaking elevators of age slowly descend? The main solution is not to Google new symptoms late at night. But I also try to get outside every day, ideally with friends. Old friends — even thoughts of them — are my ballast; all that love and loyalty, those delicious memories, the gossip.

When I can no longer walk, I will sit outside with them, gaze into their faces, and look up. That is the perennial instruction: Look up! Looking up gives us freedom and causes the shadows to slip right down our backs.

Recently I was walking along the cliffs above the Pacific with one of these old friends, named Neshama. We go back 50 years. She is 84, short and sturdy with fuzzy hair like mine. ...

We walked slowly past the reef below, foamy waves lapping at the shore with the indigo ocean beyond. So much has happened in our 50 years together; we have ridden the rapids. Her husband’s early death, her grown son’s and, just last month, her sister’s; my father’s death, my mother’s and a lifelong best friend’s. This last is when my friendship with Neshama deepened, during the two years when Pammy was dying, when it truly felt as if the sky were falling.

Pammy and I went shopping a few weeks before she died. I needed a new dress for a concert with a new boyfriend. At the time, she was in a wheelchair and a wig. I came out of the dressing room wearing a short dress, tighter than normal, and asked if it made me look big in the hips.

She looked me in the eyes, calmly. “Annie,” she said, “you don’t have that kind of time.”

That sentence shocked me into getting real about how I was spending my life. We know by a certain age the great palace lies of the culture — if you buy or do or achieve this or that, you will be happy and rich. Nope. Love and service make us rich. My mom did this with her closest friends when I was growing up, taking modest bouquets and baked goods to comrades in decline. Some were sunk into cranky dementia, alcoholism and random disorders — one with a piercing laugh that, to borrow from P.G. Wodehouse, could open an oyster at 50 paces. But my mom showed up for her. She taught me that service makes me happy. So I try to do that every day, and to get outside. ...

[W]e came around a curve of dense forest and reached the lake, dark near the shore beneath jutting tree branches, then emerald. [Neshama] had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t as the water is too cold for me, and she took off all her clothes, right there and then. “Do you feel shy?” I asked as she walked to the bank.

“Nope. This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now.”

She scooched her butt over a tree trunk, like the world’s most graceful Komodo dragon, lifting one leg over and then the other, and then slipped into the water.

“Don’t you go drown now, because I am not getting into that freezing cold water,” I called to her, although we both knew I would. Then she dipped down to her shoulders and swam a few breaststrokes forward, as if gliding into the arms of a sweater of cold water. She paddled slowly out from underneath the dark porte cochere of trees at the shore, turned over onto her back and floated awhile with her face turned up to the sky.

Other op-eds by Anne Lamott:

• Lifelong Lessons In Coping With Fear And Humiliation (May 19, 2024)
• It’s Not So ‘Terribly Strange To Be 70’ (Apr. 21, 2024)
• The Two Best Gifts Of Aging? Softness And Illumination.  (Mar. 17, 2024)
• A Superpower of Older Age: Powerlessness (Mar. 3, 2024)
• Age Makes The Miracles Easier To See (Jan. 28, 2024)
• At 33, I Knew Everything. At 69, I Know Something Much More Important (Nov. 26, 2023)
• It’s Good to Remember: We Are All On Borrowed Time (Nov. 3, 2023)
• I Pray. But I Don’t Want To See A High School Football Coach Praying At The 50-Yard Line. (July 10, 2022)

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