Being very old I Iiken to being very young. At around 70 you’d be like a toddler, and as you grow more ancient after that, it would be just like the toddler becoming younger and younger until the century mark where you reach the helpless state of an infant. The big difference here, of course, is that while you are very young you have your parents to take care of you towards strength. In old age you would most likely be just by yourself, navigating in growing weakness towards humanity’s common end.
May Sarton, famous poet and novelist, wrote this journal from May to August 1994 when she was already 82 years old. She passed away in July 1995, a few months after she turned 83 on 3 May 1995.
She lived in York, Maine in a two-storey house with two flights of stairs, and with her cat named Pierrot who sometimes ignores her. An only child, she was never married and had no children. In one entry she mentioned of her fear of what her former lovers have told her biographer but did not name them. In a much earlier journal she had disclosed that she is a lesbian. One night, as another entry mentioned, she was amazed by an erotic dream: she having sex with some people she knew and some strangers. She found this unpleasant and she expressed dislike of graphic sex in contemporary novels.
She wasn’t alone with her cat all the time. With her fame, she had many friends, fans, admiring acquaintances from nearby communities, volunteer helpers who’d do errands for her, even a writing then writing her biography. Some press people would interview her occasionally mostly about her books. People would send her flowers since they knew she likes to always have bouquets of flowers inside her house, which is by the sea, and she would often wake up with glorious vistas from her window or balcony, or be entertained by birds singing. She also liked music, good films, poems, food and wine. She walks slow, but she could still drive her car. She was, however, old, and getting older every day.
How is it to be old? There many moments of helplessness, fear, rage and frustration. She’d feel mysterious pains and aches all over her body already burdened with a general feeling of weariness. Often she’d just wanted to lie down on her bed. Her muscle and nerve coordination is going, like her memory. Her biographer would know more things about her and her family than what she could recall. She’d often breaks glasses, loses things, and considered one of the nastiest things is to lose a book she is reading, eager to continue, but not finding the damn thing anywhere in the house. When she is downstairs, she’d try very hard to remember what she needs to bring upstairs, and when she is upstairs she fears going downstairs as she might again realize that she forgotten to bring something upstairs which she needed to bring downstairs. Sometimes, with friends, her failing memory would be a source of amusement. But more often than not, it was a hellish torture. She receives a lot of mails from all over, but she would have the energy to write a response to only a few even if she wanted to respond to more of them. There is still a lot which she could work on, or give attention to, but her mind and body would not cooperate anymore (“simply getting to the next day is enormous”). Yet she perseveres heroically:
“And I looked at (the magazines) superficially and began to feel sicker and sicker and wondered how I could get upstairs and whether I could work. By about quarter to ten I thought, ‘I am simply too ill, I have to give up now. I cannot go on any longer.’ But something else in me said, ‘You have got to climb the stairs, those two flights of stairs, and do a little, a very little, and that will be it for the day.’ So I did …
“…it is an extraordinary life I am leading because it is all the time impossible. The effort is staggering. The wish to die is staggering. To give up. Not to have to make the effort any longer. But at the same time there is the marvellous joy of….”
And she’d find something, anything, to make her go on.