The dressing-room encounter that made me get real about aging

Contributing columnist

December 20, 2023 at 5:45 a.m. EST

(Video: Andrea Levy for The Washington Publish)

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Do I believe the sky is falling? Kind of.

My husband and I had been just lately in Egypt, the place the temperature reached 113 levels, a bit heat for my tiny princess self. Medic, medic! We left Egypt sooner or later earlier than the battle broke out in Israel and Gaza. Again house, my dearest associates struggled with well being stuff, with household craziness, with broken kids each younger and grown.

The recreation of life is difficult, and plenty of us are taking part in harm.

I ache for the world however naturally I’m largely watching the Me Film, the place stability and energy are starting to ebb and, on the floor, issues are descending into grandma pudding. (One morning 10 years in the past, my younger grandchild requested, “Nana, can I take a bathe with you, if I promise to not chortle?” I repeat: 10 gravity-dragging years in the past.)

What can we do because the creaking elevators of age slowly descend? The most important answer is to not Google new signs late at night time. However I additionally attempt to get outdoors every single day, ideally with associates. Outdated associates — even ideas of them — are my ballast; all that love and loyalty, these scrumptious reminiscences, the gossip.

Once I can now not stroll, I’ll sit outdoors with them, gaze into their faces, and search for. That’s the perennial instruction: Lookup! Trying up offers us freedom and causes the shadows to slide proper down our backs.

Not too long ago I used to be strolling alongside the cliffs above the Pacific with certainly one of these previous associates, named Neshama. We return 50 years. She is 84, brief and durable with fuzzy hair like mine. On occasion, she bent down considerably tentatively and picked up small objects that she’d then tuck right into a small material pouch that dangled from her belt.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m choosing up micro litter, bottle caps and bits of wrappers. I attempt to assist the place I can.”

I reminded her of an previous story alongside these traces, of a sparrow and a horse. An incredible warhorse comes upon a tiny sparrow mendacity on its again with its toes within the air, eyes squinched tightly shut with effort. The horse asks it what it’s doing.

“I’m making an attempt to assist maintain again the darkness.”

The horse roars with laughter. “That’s so pathetic. What do you weigh, about an oz.?”

And the sparrow replies, “One does what one can.”

That is what older age means; we do what we are able to. We choose up smaller issues and transfer extra tentatively. We’ve unwillingly grow to be characters from the film “Cocoon.”

Particularly Neshama. Boy, is she previous.

We walked slowly previous the reef beneath, foamy waves lapping on the shore with the indigo ocean past. A lot has occurred in our 50 years collectively; we now have ridden the rapids. Her husband’s early loss of life, her grown son’s and, simply final month, her sister’s; my father’s loss of life, my mom’s and a lifelong finest good friend’s. This final is when my friendship with Neshama deepened, throughout the two years when Pammy was dying, when it actually felt as if the sky had been falling.

Pammy and I went purchasing a couple of weeks earlier than she died. I wanted a brand new costume for a live performance with a brand new boyfriend. On the time, she was in a wheelchair and a wig. I got here out of the dressing room sporting a brief costume, tighter than regular, and requested if it made me look huge within the hips.

She appeared me within the eyes, calmly. “Annie,” she mentioned, “you don’t have that sort of time.”

That sentence shocked me into getting real about how I used to be spending my life. We all know by a sure age the good palace lies of the tradition — in case you purchase or do or obtain this or that, you may be joyful and wealthy. Nope. Love and repair make us wealthy. My mother did this along with her closest associates after I was rising up, taking modest bouquets and baked items to comrades in decline. Some had been sunk into cranky dementia, alcoholism and random problems — one with a piercing chortle that, to borrow from P.G. Wodehouse, may open an oyster at 50 paces. However my mother confirmed up for her. She taught me that service makes me joyful. So I attempt to do that every single day, and to get outdoors.

The reef beneath was sculptural, a bas-relief. Neshama identified how the surf received lacy after it hit the reef and rolled onto the sand. “A bit of like my mind,” I mentioned. She nodded in settlement, poked herself within the chest: similar.

We handed 1000’s of bushes and loopy patches of overgrowth, after which a stretch of eucalyptus, by some means towering and delicate. You possibly can’t assist however search for. The bushes are tall and straight, exquisitely spaced, with humorous Dr. Seuss tufts of leaves on the prime, redolent of mint, earth and turpentine. I inform you, whoever is answerable for these types of issues actually nailed eucalyptuses.

Neshama needed to take the shortcut to the lake. We didn’t used to. There have been eucalyptus pods underfoot, moist from dew, and we trod fastidiously. She bent tentatively to select up a few of her bits of litter and began to slide, however I caught her and we laughed. We’re so bodily susceptible in older age. We’ve caught one another loads, have come by some durations of darkness and unsurvivable losses, however friendship makes all of it a rowing machine for the soul. We are able to take it, so long as we really feel and provides love, and chortle gently at ourselves as we collapse.

We noticed some rabbits, and small lizards the precise coloration of the earth.

After which we got here round a curve of dense forest and reached the lake, darkish close to the shore beneath jutting tree branches, then emerald.

She had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t because the water is simply too chilly for me, and she or he took off all her garments, proper there after which. “Do you’re feeling shy?” I requested as she walked to the financial institution.

“Nope. This here’s what I performed received. That is what me being alive appears like now.”

She scooched her butt over a tree trunk, just like the world’s most swish Komodo dragon, lifting one leg over after which the opposite, after which slipped into the water.

“Don’t you go drown now, as a result of I’m not entering into that freezing chilly water,” I known as to her, though we each knew I’d. Then she dipped all the way down to her shoulders and swam a couple of breaststrokes ahead, as if gliding into the arms of a sweater of chilly water. She paddled slowly out from beneath the darkish porte cochere of bushes on the shore, turned over onto her again and floated awhile along with her face turned as much as the sky.

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