Romance chooses no occasion—especially not for us old fogies. We neither wait for it nor worry about it; it happens when it happens. In fact, this Valentine’s Day we had resigned ourselves, quite happily, to waking up with my five-year-old granddaughter Mona asleep between us.
I don’t remember exactly when the denial—or, if you like, the cheating—began. Was it as early as in my 40s, when I started dyeing my hair? Or as late as in my 60s, when I invested in my first body shaper?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
