Before the Fall: Old, Too Old, and the Terrifying, Inevitable Transitions Ahead
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
The end comes for us all; what will we make of the middle?
From the Marginalian:
Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our improbable and finite lives — each yellow burst in the canopy a reminder that everything beautiful is perishable, each falling leaf at once a requiem for our own mortality and a rhapsody for the unbidden gift of having lived at all. That dual awareness, after all, betokens the luckiness of death.
It was just before Halloween. I stood on my neighbor’s front steps, looking across the street at my house. Back then we both lived in houses built in 1964, strong pudgy places with walls that blocked the sound and kept the cold out during Colorado winters.
Our neighborhood had been planted with plenty of deciduous trees. I had aspen, my neighbor had, well, everything. Our trees were tall, even huge, several hundred years old. The developers had left a bit of forest, and whoever had moved in all those years ago had planted. A lot.
At that moment, this was what I was watching:
The bright leaves were swirling in that achingly lovely way that dying leaves do, the dance that speaks of coming cold and the final celebration of life for the year.
Behind me, in the house, my neighbor had laid out the last of all of her things for sale.
Some months before, her husband, then 89, had died of a brain aneurysm. I didn’t know them well; I am not a very good neighbor in that sense. In the other, every time we had a heavy snow, I cleared their big wide driveway and sidewalks so that he didn’t have to. He looked wobbly.
We’d wave, he’d go back inside, smiling. That was enough.
Then suddenly, he was gone.
My neighbor stood in the kitchen, empty but for scattered piles of her life here and there. I walked through her echoing house, empty but for what she absolutely had to have to live until the Big Move.
A bed, a chair, a TV, a coffeemaker. The rest, trinkets and tidbits left over after hundreds of treasure-hunters had combed dispassionately through what remained of her life. Souvenirs, collectibles, those bits and pieces which have deep meaning only to us, passed over as trash.
Years, like the leaves blowing across our lawns and down the street, swirling away.
Where on earth did they all go?
She stood quietly, in a puddle of sadness. I touched her shoulder, sorry that I couldn’t find something to buy to add to what she would take with her. She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. She was 87.
Is this all there is as we inch towards our final moments? Small piles that strangers rummage through, ignoring all the emotions we’ve invested in our trinkets?
I went back to the open door, the wind now cymballing the estate sale signs in her yard. The wind picked up. Overhead the branches rattled like a scene out of The Headless Horseman.
A storm was coming in.
In a few days, a For Sale sign would pop up like a mushroom next to the driveway I used to clear. The house would sell to a big, noisy, happy family who would fill it with their trinkets and memories.
She had friends who had already moved to an elder facility. Their husbands had died, too, and they had formed a posse. That posse would envelop her and take her in, community intact, as she mourned the life lived in this house, the man she lived it with.
They’d all been through it. They knew. The day they packed her in their car, crammed with the last of her things, I would hear their laughter, life’s fix for all that pains us, ring out from across the street.
We’ve got you, it said.
For now, though, I stood watching the leaves lift, swirl and dance while my neighbor dealt with the remnants of the life lived for forty years in that big, now empty, house.
The end of another year.
How on earth do they pass so swiftly?
How are we living our lives as the time ticks away?
There is a time to grieve. Then there is a time to celebrate the time we are given.
Let’s play. While we still can, let’s play.
Heartfelt thoughts to all you who have lost someone recently. My dearest wish for you is that you fill the time you have with great love, great laughter and adventure that appeals to you. If this piece touched you please consider supporting my work so that I can continue to publish for free to everyone
If you know someone who is dealing with sadness this season, please consider
Above all, live while you can.
In 2011, my siblings and I helped our parents slowly divest of those things in that house. Some things, like my old bicycle from the 1980s, we gave away via Freecycle or the equivalent targeted gifting platform. My dad loved peering out from his study window at the people who came to collect the free things: the bicycle, the 3 (!) fertilizer spreaders for his lovely lawn, the super from an apartment building downtown, who coveted the 1950 floor scrubber with all the original attachments still in the box!
Helping them farewell this house brought all of us together from far away. They took their beloved furniture pieces and the most important trinkets with them to an independent living apartment; local dealers drooled over the mid century modern bedroom sets and other carefully-chosen elements of their modest but comfortable life as they readied for the next stage.
Being able to peel away the layers of their history with slow care made it so much easier. I will carry this lesson forward myself, emptying my house as I live here so there is less of a painful exhumation at the end.
Gorgeous. What grace to have a posse at the end.