Literature: Elderhood: Louise Aronson and Ursula Le Guin

 

Older Woman, Benson Sculpture Garden, Colorado. May 2016

In Elderhood, author Louise Aronson draws on the salt of Ursula Le Guin: 

"There are sayings about aging that everyone likes, and others that people find reassuring when they are young or young-old, and preposterous as they grow older still. You're only as old as you think you are is one of them. 

"Ursula K. Le Guin rebutted this popular falsehood and several others with her usual wit and brilliance: 'If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.' 

"She goes on to note that [when people say You're only as old as you think you are to] 'somebody who actually is old, they don't realize how stupid it is, and how cruel it may be.' 

"Another expression I hear often .... is Old age isn't for sissies. Of that one, Le Guin had to say: 'Old age is for anybody who gets there. Warriors get old; sissies got old ... Old age is for the healthy, the strong, the tough, the intrepid, the sick, the weak, the cowardly, the incompetent.'

"She acknowledged that most people say such things with good intentions but equated telling her in her eighties that she wasn't old with telling the Pope he isn't Catholic. .... 'To tell me my old age doesn't exist is to tell me I don't exist.' 

"In old age, as in so many other parts of life, when our self-delusions are indulged, our reality and true selves, along with all our needs and opportunities, are erased." 

Page 141

I add another annoying bromide: Age is only a number. 

You see that on dating sites a lot. 

It makes me roll my eyes. 

I'm a woman of some age. I've clocked some numbers. I can still do a lot of shit. But there's some shit I probably can't - or don't want to - do like a thirty year-old. And there's some shit I couldn't or wouldn't do as a thirty year-old that I can do now.