Margaret Trudeau - North of 49

The rest of your life is here: now is the time to prepare.

I have been many things in my life: wife, mother, advocate for brain health, friend, flower child, outcast. But one thing I have never been is a long-range planner.

There are many reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that I live with bipolar disordera mood disorder that, among other things, affects ones ability to fully understand consequences. When you dont think about consequences, why would you plan for the future? As a result, in many ways Ive lived my life as a perpetual teenagerfully and completely in the moment.

At its best, my passion for the present has given me a joie de vivre and an ability to savour the various phases of my life. But I have sometimes been incredibly, exuberantly happy, and other times, despairingly sad. For better or worse, Ive lived those experiences moment by moment. But at its worst, my attachment to the present has blinded me to forces looming on the horizonaging, for example. Until recently, I never thought about getting older and how it might affect my life. Get old? Thats what other people did. In my mind, you see, I was still a worldly 19-year-oldalbeit with a lovely condo and adorable grandchildren.

Then one day I woke up and I was 65. And in the space of a few short months, three events occurred that would dramatically alter how I saw myself and the precious time I have left.

The first event seemed innocuous enough, at first. It was winter 2012, and I was skiing with my eldest grandson on a bunny hill at Morin-Heights outside Montreal. My sons Justin and Sacha have a chalet in the Laurentians, and I was spending the weekend there with Sacha and his family. I was supremely happy that day. I was doing one of the things I love most in the worldskiingwith one of the people I love most in the worldmy dear little Pierre. We had a few runs under our belts and were just getting off the chairlift for another when I tipped and crashed into the ice, shoulder-first. It wasnt a dramatic skiing accidentIve experienced far worse. But it was enough to dislocate my shoulder, again. (I had suffered a similar injury a few years earlier.) For some months after my fall at Morin-Heights, I was barely able to lift my arm. To this day, the joint aches anytime I get cold or lift something heavy. But the worst part of all is that the injury was enough to bar me from skiing. One small miscalculation and the enduring hobby of my lifean activity that has given me countless years of pleasurewas seemingly lost to me. Fortunately, after two years of healing, I will ski again.

The second event, a few months later, was even more devastating. My mother passed away. Her health had been failing for many years, and my sisters and I had been bracing for her death for some months. But all the preparation in the world cant prevent the aching grief of losing someone who means so much to you. I missed my mother terribly and experienced her death as a great unmooring, as though the strings that attached my 65-year-old body to my childhood self were finally cut. As long as she was around, I was still somebodys child. Now, with both my parents gone, I was not only an orphan, I was suddenly an elder.

For a long time after my mothers death, I found myself reflecting on her final years, and how much the aging process had changed her. Mum was always a bold, strong-willed, independent woman. Years before the womens liberation movement, she had insisted my father pay her for her work as a stay-at-home mother. She diligently invested her earnings in energy stocks, so that at the time of her passing she had a sizable estate. She was comfortable and well cared for to the end. But financial stability couldnt give her what she lost in her last years, when her health failed and her friends disappeared one by one: a zest for life. She told me once, a few years before she died, that she wished her life would just end. You cant mean that, Mum, I chided her. But in my heart I knew she did mean it. For my mother, and for many other women of her generation, aging was an act of gradual disappearance, not a bang but a whimper. And so she faded awayin spirit and in bodyfor years before she finally left us. Her death brought me face to face, for the very first time, with my own mortality.

Soon after came the third event, when one of my best friends was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease. She and I once spent long hours chatting over good coffee, discussing books wed read and places wed visited, fantasizing about adventures that still lay before us. Now I visit her in a nursing home. I do most of the talking. Every once in a while she pipes up and tries to convince me to move in. We could have rooms side by side! And you dont have to worry about a thing here. This is hilarious and sad at the same time.

Taken together, my injury, my mothers death and my friends diagnosis had a powerful effect on me. These experiences convinced me that I did not want to spend the last months or years of my life withering, waiting to die or in any way being less than who I was. But in the wake of so much loss, I wasnt certain how to cope.

I fell into a slump. I allowed my grooming to slip and stayed inside my apartment. Why bother keeping up appearances? I was officially an old woman. One evening, while watching an episode of Game of Thrones, I heard one of the characters describe the three stages of womanhood as maid, mother and crone. I wanted to throw something at the television. Maidenhood, in the Shakespearean sense, was decades behind me, as were my childbearing years. Which left only one option. A crone! How awful, I thought, miserably. What do crones have to look forward to other than mushy food and leather-bound back issues of Readers Digest?

Over the ensuing months, I let myself wallow in a post-midlife melodrama. My family became concerned that I was falling into a depressive state. I loved them for their concern. I have battled interwoven bouts of depression and mania my entire adult life. But it wasnt depression I was suffering from; it was a sense of restlessness. I had a dreadful fear that my best years were behind me and that my most important future contributions to the world could be summed up in two words: free babysitting.

And then one afternoon I had an epiphany. I was sitting on the couch in my living room, looking through old photographs and reliving my blithe, carefree years of maidenhood and motherhood. I saw photographs of myself in designer clothes and expensive furs, travelling the globe as the first lady of Canada. In other photos I saw my unlined face laughing into the camera, surrounded by baskets of produce Id grown at the summer home I once enjoyed at Harrington Lake. In still others I danced with Andy Warhol. The events had happened an eternity ago, and yet I remembered the circumstances of each photograph as vividly as if it were yesterday. A thought passed through my mind: Im never going to have a little bookstore in a country village in England. Followed by another one: I guess Ill never be a great actress.

I shoved the photo albums onto the coffee table and started listing all the things I would probably never do. Its possible that I cried, thinking these things. (I did warn you about my inner teenager.) But as I wrote, a strange thing happened: the longer my list grew, the lighter I felt. Because at some point I realized that, in fact, my chances of becoming an Olympic skier