WaPo Op-Ed: Do Not Mess With The Very Old

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Do Not Mess With the Very Old, by Anne Lamott (Author, Somehow: Thoughts on Love (2024)):

Many elderly friends have what I call the chime. It is a vibrating energy that certain artistic and spiritual people exude, as do people with a basic spirit of generosity. Almost silent, the chime rings like a tiny triangle off in the expanse. The chime is life and is in all of us, but it tends to be muffled until much of the clamor and hustle of existence quiets down. I hear it most often in the elderly, whose days are quieter, who gladly ruminate and gaze out windows a lot. They may appear frail, but there is strength in this fragility.

Do not mess with the very old and their gangs. I see them live with grace and (sometimes cranky) humor, along with infirmity, pain, wobbly brains and the scar tissue of decades enduring the blows and losses splattered through human life. They laugh gently at me when they hear me once again in do-or-die mode: They’ve seen over and over that most things will be okay as long as we’re tender with each other. They are whom I want to be in 10 years, if I am alive and can remember this one thing. ...

Twelve years ago, seven older women and I formed a gang when we discovered in a recovery group that we had all tried and failed to rescue our grown kids from addiction. We had excellent ideas for our adult progeny! We just wanted to help, but help is the sunny side of control, and our kids often ran from us. Of course, they came back because they needed us to babysit. ...

Ursula Le Guin said, “We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out.” The oldest person I knew, a grande dame of theater from New Zealand named Ann Brebner, died a few years ago at 93. By 90, she was on her way out, with worsening AFib and mild dementia, but she loved being alive, here, on this side of things.

She was a beauty, with fine white hair she wore up and a beaky nose, a combination of delicate, refined and steely. Her salvation, her higher power, was art, music, books, movies, theater — her source of comfort that had showed her the way as a young girl, until the end. ...

The last months of her life contained hardship, blessing, laughter, misery, grace and limbo, just like all life. Her strength and cognition ebbed and flowed. It felt as if she were being subsumed by the all-encompassing ocean, the all-holding waters. Here I am, it says, deep today; here I am now, medium, in organized waves; here I am now shallow and lacy, and coming in fast — better step back and wait while I roll in, until I roll all the way out again.

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Other op-eds by Anne Lamott:

• Gentle Is The Joy That Comes With Age (July 7, 2024)
• Invisible And Exposed — But Adaptable, As Only The Old Can Be (June 9, 2024)
• The Dressing Room Encounter That Made Me Get Real About Aging (June 2, 2024)
• 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)