On Aging and Isabel Allende's Garden

When The Body speaks, I listen. That’s what I've told my physical therapist, who has pointed out that maybe I don't always get the message. “When you feel good, you are overly enthusiastic, you do too much — and that has led to some setbacks,” he said earlier this week as he deftly massaged the back of my swollen knee. “Maybe you need to slow down, scale back, take time to reset.” 

This is the same man who dissed my trendy trekking pole the first time I visited him back in March to ask for help with knee pain, especially when manuevering high curbs or stairs. He offered me a cane, which I was reluctant to accept. "I think it would help you," he said. I took it, and as his message sank in, I wondered why I almost rejected help. Who does that serve? Now I'm grateful to have the cane when I need it.  

Overdoing and underdoing are my specialties, but after I left the physical therapist’s office — walking much better now, thanks for asking — The Mind had a question: Why am I like this, so insistent that just three days should be sufficient to heal from any physical or emotional pain when, according to an article I read, I am too old to qualify for an early death? 

Ahem: The CDC says 75 years old as the cutoff, the World Health Organization and the United Nations go with 70 and some scientists tag 65 as "the limit for premature mortality.” 

I blame my self-image. Andy Warhol, who considered his self-image and artfully  constructed persona all that anyone needed to know about him, once said he’d much rather get to know a person’s self-image than the actual person. 

Had we met, I would have presented as strong, smart and comfortable in my own skin; a tall, lanky redhead with long, straight hair. Had we actually met, of course, Warhol may have noticed that last bit was miles off the mark. 

Maybe You Could — But Should You? 

I also blame The Mind, which occasionally insists I am 39, instead of twice that.  Case in point: A year ago, when I suffered a horrid back spasm and banged-up elbow after launching myself from one bucket seat in an SUV across an 18-inch empty gap toward another bucket seat, my doctor asked why I did that. “I do Pilates and I have a core,” I said, ”so I figured I could do it.” 

Aware that The Mind and The Body sometimes disagree, she replied, “In the future, even if you think you could do something like that, stop and ask yourself if you should.”

Yesterday, as I pondered the physical therapist’s advice to slow down, I remembered my doctor’s wise counsel. Then it hit me: I am not adapting well to aging. 

I haven’t hidden from the topic, but I haven’t been open to what I’ve learned, either. I interviewed an 80-year-old poet who has concluded that the three A's of aging are “acknowledgment, accommodation and acceptance." That immediately sounded right to me — for her, but not for me. A literary friend discounts the poet's conclusion as well, noting that he favors Dylan Thomas’ advice to his father to not go “gentle into that good night,” but to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I’m not so angry at the idea of accepting aging, but I am confused about what that looks like for me. I know what I don’t want (bingo at my senior independent living building, having somewhere I must go every day or a “boot camp” class at my gym) but I haven’t fully worked out exactly what I do want at this age and stage, either.

Who Waits in Your Garden?  

One thing I do need to acknowledge, accommodate and accept is that the number of dear friends who are falling ill and passing away has increased exponentially over the past decade, and science now admits that the emotional stress from coping with loss can manifest physically. Sure, death is part of life, the natural order of things —and learning to deal with it is what we do as older adults. 

One of my favorite people in that category is Isabel Allende, a gifted writer and powerful woman who now is 84. When I attended her talk last month to hear about “Story Telling: A Writing Life,” her new memoir, I noticed right away Allende has traded the sexy, strappy heels she had worn at previous lectures for a pair of cute but sensible wedge sandals. 

Though Allende didn’t say a lot about death or dying in her talk, some of her work has spoken directly about both, in intelligent and poignant ways. For example: "Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spirit is reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stage in a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings." In her book “Eva Luna," Allende wrote that “people die only when we forget them.”

In her autobiography "The Soul of a Woman," she wrote “Since my daughter died I am perfectly aware of death's proximity; and now, in my seventies, death is my friend. It's not true that she looks like a skeleton armed with a scythe and trailed by a rotten odor; she is a mature and elegant lady who smells of gardenias. At first she was lurking in the neighborhood, then in the house next door, and now she is waiting patiently in my garden. Sometimes, when I pass in front of her, we greet each other and she reminds me that I should enjoy this day as if it were my last.”

Maybe that reminder is a key to accepting aging, wisdom that The Body and The Mind can agree on and something I can embrace as I slow down, scale back, take time to reset.