Literature: Elderhood and Mary Ruefle on the Freedom of Age

 

Alamogordo Balloon Invitational. New Mexico. September 2013.

In her book, Elderhood, Louise Aronson quotes poet Mary Ruefle on the joys of becoming old: 

"You should never fear aging because you have absolutely no idea the absolute freedom in aging; it's astounding and mind-blowing. You no longer care what people think. As soon as you become invisible - which happens much more quickly to women than men - there is a freedom that's astounding. And all your authority figures drift away. Your parents die. And yes, of course, it's heartbreaking but it's also wonderfully freeing." 

Mary Ruefle is not all butterflies and birdsong about aging, of course. Getting to the sunny meadow, for many of us, requires a walk through a dark, Brothers Grimm forest. But once we make it through, she states in her 2015 essay, Pause, published in Granta: 

You are a woman, the ten years [in the dark forest] have passed, you love your children, you love your lover, but there are no longer any persons on earth who can stop you from being yourself, you have put your parents in the earth, you have buried the past. Of course in the meantime you have destroyed your life and it has to be completely remade and there is a great deal of grief and regret and nostalgia and all of that, but even so you are free, free to sit on the bank and throw stones and feel thankful for the few years or one or two decades left to you in which you can be yourself, even if a great many other women ended their lives, even if the reason they ended their lives is reported as having been for reasons having nothing to do with menopause, which is thankfully behind you as you would never want to be a girl again for any reason at all, you have discovered that being invisible is the biggest secret on earth, the most wondrous gift anyone could ever have given you.

Aronson nests her Ruefle quote in her larger essay on how happy, as a group,  the old are: 

"... Sixty- to sixty-four-year-olds were happier and more satisfied with their lives than people aged twenty to fifty-nine, but not nearly as happy as those aged sixty-five and over. Even those over age ninety were happier than the middle-aged." 

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The reason Aronson talks about the relative happiness of age is not as a reassurance to the younger demographics who fear aging. It's not an affirmation for legislators and policy makers who might like to congratulate themselves for jobs well done on behalf of their so-called Greatest Generation. 

No. It's the opposite. 

Aronson tells us about the relative happiness of the old in order to say: The quality of life - in spirit, mind, and body - for old people is worth a thoughtful, mission-based investment of our finite national resources of time, money, and holistic policies. 

Focusing on a quality-of-life mission will demand that healthcare providers think beyond their knee-jerk go-to's of drugs, invasive or expensive testing, and surgeries. 

It will demand that Big Pharma include a significant number of young-old, middle-old, and old-old people in its clinical trials. 

It will demand that Big Medicine educate itself on how to address the complexity of co-morbidities in the old, and to, at least, do no harm through laziness, contempt, or ignorance about, for instance, the way drugs behave in the elderly differently than they do in younger people.