How to Age Disgracefully

by Clare Pooley

When you know more about someone than they know about you, it puts you in control. And it makes you safe.

Yet, here she was, utterly alone, stalking her neighbors and talking to her plants. Except for the yucca, which she’d never entirely trusted.

How could you create a future when you had no present you enjoyed and no past you would admit to?

“Where’s the fun in aging gracefully?” said Daphne. “Personally, I intend to age as disgracefully as possible.”

She appeared to have jumped out of the frying pan of sexism and into the fire of ageism. The final frontier of isms.

He wasn’t sure exactly when he’d become irrelevant, or invisible, even—it had crept up on him gradually over the years. He often felt like a ghost. He occupied the same world as ordinary mortals, but most of them appeared to see straight through him. It used to make him angry, but then he’d discovered that invisibility had its advantages.

How lovely it must be to be an age at which you wanted to add quarters rather than subtract decades.

It felt good to rid yourself of things you no longer needed, things that were weighing you down.

Building a life meant making connections, and that meant being visible, which made you vulnerable.

The strange thing about reaching your fifties is that, although your outsides might be gradually falling apart, on the inside you don’t feel any different from the way you did in your twenties. I still don’t feel like a “proper adult,” and I don’t expect that I will at seventy, either.