Barbara Beckwith, Age 87
Over my 87 years, I’ve considered myself fit and athletic. But I’m a realist, so I’ve started compiling a list of all the ways that I may, sooner or later, fall apart.
My list is one way of steeling myself for eventual decline, even as I hope to surpass my father’s record of 98 years with hair, teeth, body, and mind all intact.
Recent tests say that I have the heart of a 30-year-old but also bones of my real age. A squash court injury has revealed bone-thinning osteoporosis., So I’ve given up racquet sports, taken up swimming, and added “disabling fall” to my fall-apart possibilities.
I make small adjustments, following behaviorist B. F. Skinner who famously declared: “If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.” I’ve installed banisters on either side of the steps I used to leap up two at a time. I now climb them with attention to balance, groping the wall at the handrail-less corner at the top.
I’m groping for balance as well, when it comes to holding onto what sustains me as I try to pare down what’s on my desk and in the attic. If and when I fall apart, I don’t want to leave my kids an unwanted mess. Alas, the books on my shelves pile up, stacked two deep. I console myself that my continued purchases keep local indie bookstores solvent. And when I begin culling the piles of paper from my teaching and organizing years, and the letters I’ve saved over the decades, I find myself sitting for hours, digging up treasures I can’t bear to throw out.
I’ve so far held onto words, both ordinary and esoteric, that I use in my writing. But I realize that at some point, I may start to draft essays that I fail to finish, tell stories that listeners don’t “get,” and fail to notice friends’ indulgent “hmm” responses. My occasional experience of opening the fridge and forgetting what I’d been looking for, may devolve into something more serious.
So yes, one way or another, I may soon fall apart. Or maybe not. Because I’ve started a second list of How I Won’t Fall Apart, modeled after elders in my life whom I’ve admired.
I can follow my cousin Mar’s lead: she kept her body in shape doing heavy yard work, cutting wood, and fending off black bears. Playing squash once kept me fit: along with swimming, dancing AND tai chi are possible backups.
If standing upright gets hard, I can emulate the activist I once thought of, decades ago, as “the old white woman” who enlisted me to sit for hours in courtrooms as a “court watcher” monitoring the fairness of trials of Black men, especially Black Panther defendants.
Even if my body fails me, I can be like my neighbor, who, though bedridden with cancer, kept her heart engaged. On our visits, she’d prefer to talk not about herself, but to hear about my husband’s latest lab project, how my grandsons were doing at school, or what I was writing.
And once my body begins to fail, I can still use my voice, as my husband’s aunt did in her nineties, stationing her wheelchair on a street corner every week in order to wave her “Stop the War’ sign. Just before she died at age 100, Aunt Erna, a life-long peace and justice activist, was still greeting visitors with a fervent “What shall we do about Iraq?”
Even if my voice fails, I can carry on as my mother, a conversationalist and punster, managed to do when cancer required removal of her larynx. She used fewer – but always apt – words, conveyed through a mechanical voice gadget. Her quips still cracked us up and her brief, always apt, remarks kept making us think.
And if I end up in a nursing home, I will stick to my principles, as my father did when he voted for highway and bridge repair, shocking the election “monitor” who inappropriately warned him that doing so would lead to “more taxes.” He kept his eye on the future while also enjoying each present day. He’d dip a cookie into his drink, and proclaim, with a guffaw: “It sure enhances the taste of water.” He’s passed both his values and guffaw onto me, so I know that I will always be able to laugh at my falling apart ways. Because to laugh is to savor whatever life is left to me.