Save? Whatever for? The ticking of my own body clock tells me that my future is playing right now, and that spending, not saving, is what makes perfect sense. Free from responsibilities except to myself, it’s time to throw caution to the wind and make my remaining time worth it.
I don’t know what it is about us, but we seem to have the knack for turning a perfectly good thing into the worst that it can be, and not, perhaps, for any lack of good intentions, either.
We may have the time, and some resources—but alas, not the energy. Our last trip to the United States seems to have taken as much out of us to prepare for it as to recover from it. But, I suppose, five years is reasonable enough time to start us thinking of intercontinental travel again.
There’s always a time for goodbyes, said or unsaid. Everything and everyone, sooner or later, has got to go. Sometimes, you yourself initiate the parting, which, with spring cleaning, happens in a general way. You sweep and throw away clutter, things that have outlived their time, to let fresh air blow in, in preparation for a new season in your own life.
Well into our senior years, even the healthier among us need not be reminded of our mortality. We certainly don’t look forward to it, but we don’t stop at simply accepting its inevitability, either.
I was curious to find my own place among all the sorts of “Writers’ Wives” described by author and literary critic Malcolm Bradbury in his piece “The Spouse in the House.”
If Dad had had a say in the matter, he’d not have died on April 10, 2010—or he would not have died at all. As young as 70, he had made it clear to me, his first child, that dying was not in his plans, but that he might be open to the idea by his 80th, the age his brother Tuting, older than him by four years, would himself go.
What happened? It is, I guess, the critical question of the age. Looking in the mirror, I’m brought close to despair. When I last looked, I thought I was getting on relatively fine, all things considered. Surely I couldn’t have gone this far so quickly—or did I look seriously enough?
MY WOMEN friends are my Easter eggs. I have found them in the likeliest as well as the unlikeliest of places, and have kept them all these years. They are golden finds, turning up at various stages of my life, not accidentally but, as the writer Stephen King says about everything else, eventually—friends who, though un-searched for, are treasured eternally.
At my book launch last month, relatives and friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen for some time, came out to fulfill their bounden duty. In fact, they actually bought copies and even joined the line for my autograph.
The time has come to “take care of me.” Financial guru Suze Orman used the phrase to set the focus of senior priorities, and I have to admit the idea feels strangely new, and rather daunting—definitely more daunting than all the care-giving I’ve been doing as mother to four children, grandmother to five grandchildren, and an only daughter to parents who lived to 85 and 91. In fact, it’s the last experience that has drawn me to the idea of taking care of me.
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