Barbara Cawthorne Crafton - The Courage to Grow Old

The Courage
to Grow Old

The Courage
to Grow Old

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Copyright 2014 by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Cover design by Laurie Klein Westhafer

Typeset by Rose Design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8192-2910-6 (pbk.)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8192-2911-3 (ebook)

For Q,

Younger than springtime.

T his amuses me: the first edition of my first book, published twenty years ago, had my picture on the coverin my early forties, big hair. Ten years later, so did another one: me in my garden, my hair blonde, now, and less of it. I was holding a tray of freshly-baked bread (it was a cookbook). And now here I am again, an old cover girl with jowls, crows feet at the corners of my eyes, a modest wattle adorning my throat. Several years ago I decided it was okay to get old and grey now, instead of old and blonde, and that process is well underway. If I havent gone home to Jesus ten years from now, maybe we can do another book cover. Notes From the Nursing Home, maybe, or One Foot in the Grave.

And if I have gone to Jesus? Spoiler Alert: How It Ends. Thats a great title.

Except that I dont believe that it does end. This life schools us for our opening up to a reality of which hardly any of us are equipped even to dream. Interestingly, it is physicists who seem to be leading us in its direction. Makes me wish Id taken Physics in school. But I am excited about it. Interesting: excited about dying, but eager to live. Dont want to leave, but cant wait to see whats out there when I do. So stay tuned: Ill let you know if I can.

Meanwhile, time marches on here. What everyone exclaims about is so true: life is really, really short. We dont have time to wastehowever long you may live, today is the only today you will ever have. When it is over, it will be over, and it will not come again. Dont blow it off! Dont waste a moment of it wishing you were younger than you are, or that you looked like you used to look, or had done something other than what you did in life. Theres no time for that now. Take whatever you have to work with and make today as sweet as you can make it. Nobody can do it for you, and nobody will. It is yours alone.

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The Geranium Farm

2014

I ll be sixty-five, my friend said, leaning across the table and dropping her voice to a whisper on the last three syllables, as if shed just told me she had a venereal disease. I remember her face as she said it, her trapped look, a mixture of panic and shame. I was younger than she and much younger than I am now. I stifled a feeling of annoyance and tried to look sympathetic. I did not intend to call the funeral home when I reached my sixties. Now Im solidly there, and I still dont. Come to think of it, though, prearrangement is a good ideamaybe I will give them a call. But I digress.

Whats good about getting old? somebody asked a movie star whose name I cannot recall. Nothing, she snapped. I was sorry to hear it. I could think of many good things about getting old. Again, I was much younger than she. But Im not now, and I still can.

My friend Frank cries into his beer most evenings about not being young anymore. A song from the fifties, the death of a matinee idolit doesnt take much to send him into the depths. He longs for his lost youth the way a thirsty man longs for water. Nothing in the present holds any delight for him at all, not that I can see. What future there is looks like a prison sentence. With time served, he wonders, how much longer does he have?

I know a lot more about physical vulnerability than I did when I was young. I know that things cant stay the same, not everif your well-being depends on never losing anything you currently have, youre in deep trouble. But I also know that people dont have to be full of despair about the incontrovertible fact of their aging, and that the way to continue in peace for the duration is to accept the reality of what is happening to your body and your brain. Hiding from it makes it larger in your imagination than it really is. It fills you with fear of the future, and prevents you from enjoying the world you actually live in right now.

Im not old! a beautiful woman at a party tells us all defiantly. By that she means that she is not any of the negative things we think old people are: useless, weak, unlovely, alone. But she is oldshes eighty-one. Why does she accept a stereotypeone which clearly does not fit heras the only way there is of being old? Why should anyone? Isnt that a little like saying Im not a woman, when what you mean is Im not fragile, overly emotional, unintelligent or timid? And why, in accepting such stereotypes, should she deny herself the honor of being esteemed for what she is: beautiful, experienced and wise? She has lived much more of her life on earth than she has yet to livewhy should she let the negative categories of aging be the only categories that count?

And I am not talking about the freaks of nature you see in vitamin ads, about old people who look like young people. The physical characteristics of an aging body are not the same as those of a young one: does it follow that the word beautiful can only apply to the second, never to the first? I have loved my husbands gnarly hands for many yearsnow my own hands are getting to be that way, tendons and blue veins standing in high relief against new declivities in the backs of them. My eyelids are pleated nowI think they make me look a little sly, as if I knew something most people dont know. Small wrinkles have appeared around my lips, and two larger ones lead from my nose to the corners of my mouth. When I smile, a dozen lines appear around my eyes and a few more crinkle my cheeks. They remain for a bit after the smile has disappeared, the afterglow of my laugh. Every time I catch sight of them, I see both my present and my future: the lines will multiply and deepen. Soon, they will become a permanent part of my facial topography, whether I am smiling or not! What I do not see is the uneventful landscape of my girlhood face, the face before decades of smiles layered themselves upon it. I have photographs of that young faceits pretty enough, I suppose. It looks a little blank to me from here, though.

There are other lines. The two vertical ones between my eyebrows that really make me look like I know something, and the horizontal parallels on my forehead. They are from furrowing my brow. From thinking hard. Probably also from yelling at people, or at least from wishing I could yell at someone. From tilting my head and raising my eyebrows inquiringly because of something I have not understood, or from being told something whose veracity I have doubted. You can get this stuff Botoxed out of your life for a few months if you want to, but you must be willing to bet that nothing will come up during that time that will require you to look quizzical or wise, and life is just not like that.