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June 18 - June 20, 2025
That’s what’s so wonderful about reading, that books and poetry and essays make us feel as though we’re connected, as though the thoughts and feelings we believe are singular and sometimes nutty are shared by others, that we are all more alike than different.
When your own solitude is a beating bruise in your chest, it makes it no better to know that on the other side of the kitchen wall is another kitchen, another cook, another person. It makes it worse, like sitting in the obstetrician’s office surrounded by big-bellied women when your own is flat and empty.
From the time they reach puberty, boys are, let’s be honest, sex bombs who live it 24/7. They tie much of their self-image to their potency and wind up, over their life spans, making an awful lot of remarks in an awful lot of settings about whose is bigger, both literally and metaphorically.
There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.
My memory, too, has become a strange shape-shifter, playing hide-and-seek with the obvious. I lose a number or a name for fifteen or twenty minutes and then it returns, so indelible that I can’t quite understand how it was ever gone. Word retrieval is a bit of a challenge, which would be less important if I didn’t have to build a house of sentences almost every day. Conspicuous. Perfunctory. Malfeasance. They hang in the air somewhere to the left of my conscious brain, where my mind could pick them up if my mind had peripheral vision. I can feel the shape of them, the syllables, usually the
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It’s an essential part of maturing, putting fear aside, because if there’s anything that cripples us it is fear. In some ways I think it’s the essential evil because it is the root of so many others. We don’t take jobs we would love because we are afraid to try something new. We don’t move to another city or end a bad relationship because fear smothers adventure and self-interest. We hate new immigrants, people of different backgrounds and races, those with opposing views, because we are afraid, afraid to find out that we are not special, chosen, dominant, right. All great despots play on the
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fear is almost always the driving force. When we were girls, many of us feared being ourselves.
The learning curve continues, which is just another way of saying you’re alive.
Gloria Steinem coined the term “female impersonators” to describe the uncomfortable way in which we women learned early on to play the role of pleaser, with a practiced smile that did not always extend to our eyes.
Not smart enough, not pretty enough, not a good enough mother, not a good enough professional. An entire Greek chorus chimed in, a Greek chorus made up of magazines, movies, advice books, alleged friends, and family members who insisted they were telling us only for our own good, only wanted to be certain we would be happy and have no regrets. The problem was, the chorus couldn’t make up its mind; the messages ranged from self-sacrifice to self-promotion, abstinence to sexual freedom.
“You’re never too old to have the best day of your life.”
So, once again, do the younger ones benefit from our experiments on the eldest, who got me used to myself.
After Sandra Day O’Connor was chosen to be the first woman on the United States Supreme Court in 1981, one of the letters she received read, “Back to your kitchen and home female! This is a job for a man and only he can make the tough decisions. Take care of your grandchildren and husband.”
Young women, even with their own mothers’ successes, wonder how they will manage job and kids; young men still figure they’ll manage it by marrying.
We are the first generation of women who are intimately involved in the lives of our children and in the lives of our parents while trying to hold down jobs outside the home at the same time. Someone even came up with a name for this: the sandwich generation.
When I came to The New York Times as a reporter in 1978, at age twenty-five, I thought I’d been hired because I was aces at my job. It took me a few months to figure out that a small group of courageous women had sued the paper and that the hiring of a bumper crop of female reporters and editors, what I thought of as the class of 1978, was the result.
Well, that is the question, isn’t it? Is there a certain predestination to our lives from here on in, an existence that is inevitable because of all that has gone before? At what point is the clay set, the mural done and signed? Or does it all depend on whether we see our swan song as a dirge or a ditty?
Aging, dying: both are a challenge to the human imagination. As the carapace of wrinkles and sag develops, we persist in seeing ourselves otherwise, so that when we peer into the mirror it is our own eyes we look into, the ones that have looked back at us since we were children. That child within each of us gives us hope that there will be more to learn, to discover, more to change and understand.
For me, being Catholic is like being Irish or Italian or Caucasian, not a faith but an immutable identifying characteristic with which I was born and with which I will die. Many of the faithful would not consider this so; they would point to the fact that I no longer attend Mass every Sunday and never followed church directives on contraception.
I am a liberal because I was raised Catholic. In a typically thoughtful and searching speech he gave at Notre Dame, former New York governor Mario Cuomo, the most intellectual of nonclerical Catholics, referred to practicing the work of Christ in our life, “practicing it especially where that love is most needed, among the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.” That’s the lesson I took away from the New Testament, the requirement that if you had two cloaks you should give one to the person who had none, that you should love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a lesson that has never left me.
Our Christmases are vast inviolate repositories of custom: the Santa dolls on the mantel, the evergreen garland around the stair rail, the areas of the living room designated for the presents of each child although the children are now adults.
I’ve thought of my faith so often as I’ve grown older, and I admit that I’m not certain what I really believe about any of it anymore. And, frankly, I’m not sure it matters. If the message of Christ led me to try to be a more generous human being, does it matter whether he was the Messiah or a prophet? If people are empathetic and charitable, does it matter whether they believe in a God who somehow began, or engineered, or oversees us all?
I am less sure of what I know than of those things of which I’m doubtful.
At some level I may have lost my religion, despite the deep talons of its traditions and forms within me. But I’ve never lost, and will never lose, my faith. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” it says in the book of Hebrews. I believe in hope and mystery. That belief is just different than it once was.
But one of the best and most dignified opportunities to stay engaged in the world as you grow older is to give a hand to those who come after. Rise up, reach down.
there’s no point in idealizing this. For every dream deferred and then pursued, there’s someone whose dream was to work in perpetuity at a job as out of reach as youth. For every person who gladly continues to work, there is another forced back into a workplace he thought he’d earned the right to leave, dragged out of bed and into the car by a sharp drop in savings or pension. For every person who believes she’s gotten a chance at a third act, there is one who feels cast aside.
Women may provide an alternate model of a more active and involved retirement that is more consonant with the way we live now. Those women trying to balance work and family have been agitating for years for part-time and flex-time work hours; what better arrangement for older workers who carry institutional memory but want less of the load?
There are two ways that kind of hyperdrive kid can go in later life: either her push-push finds no place to put itself and drives her wild, or it finds an object and the object finds her back. I was lucky to go the second way, hectoring an editor into giving me a copy girl’s job, making a world out of words.
Our lifetime has been such a time of change, in the economy, in education, in politics, in the work world. But no one seems eager to change on an individual level, to make way for fresh perspectives and new ideas.
Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
That is ultimately the point of all this, isn’t it? When we talk about aging, we talk about flagging libido, increasing infirmities, being passed over at work, being bored at home. But the elephant in the room is mortality. It’s death, but no one likes to speak his name, as though to acknowledge is to conjure, and to conjure is to invite him into the house.
We do what we can to protect our children from pain, even if it means we shoulder it ourselves.
How often have I attended memorial services for men about whom their friends said that they really began to understand what mattered when they got the diagnosis? There’s simply no excuse for that, no matter what the average life expectancy, no matter how good modern medicine.
It’s not only death that terrifies us when we think about passing through the decades that come next. Maybe it’s not even mainly death. It’s the diminution of choices.
