Guilt-Free Aging

These days I often think about my grandmothers. I scrutinize my memories of them, trying to discern how they dealt with the problem of growing old. Although the age-defying technologies—cataract surgery, hip replacements, hearing aids—that are easing my own sunset years were not available to them, I believe that, in certain ways, they had it easier than me and my generation.

The key to that greater ease was that they were allowed to grow old. We, on the other hand, are expected to fight—to the death, I was going to write—against the inevitable. Our culture makes it practically a moral duty to struggle against senescence on all fronts, physical, psychological, and intellectual. If only we are disciplined and conscientious enough, and have plenty of financial resources, we can maintain our bodies in fighting trim, our minds sharp as daggers, our emotions placid as a mountain lake—and look terrific while we’re doing it.

After all, no generation before has had such a panoply of weapons against decrepitude. In addition to the above technologies, there is yoga, and aerobic workouts, and weight lifting and balance exercises. There is meditation for equanimity, and crossword puzzles and language-learning apps for the brain. There are protein-rich diets and vegan diets and vitamins and supplements, not to mention the essential daily half-gallon of water to plump up our tissues.

And speaking of tissues, no matter what age we feel, we need not look it. If exercise regimens, excellent nutrition, and lots of good-quality sleep aren’t sufficient to make us look eternally young, hair can be dyed, removed, or supplemented, depending on its location. Teeth can be whitened, wrinkles can be erased, and various anatomical parts can be pumped to plumpness.

None of this was available to my grandmothers, but nobody expected them, at sixty or seventy, to look thirty or forty. How nice that must have been! Not slim, but by no means obese, they had comfortable postmenopausal bellies, and less than perky breasts. Dressed in their eternal black, they daily toddled down the streets of Barcelona to church or to the shops, but they didn’t lift weights or do downface dogs or learn new languages. They had the usual aches and pains, but they weren’t tormented by the compulsion to give up wine, bread, or desserts in the hope of looking fabulous. They were who they were, old ladies, and it would never have occurred to them to try to fool people into thinking they were indefinitely parked in some bizarre middle age.

Thankful though I am for hip replacements, etc. I envy my grandmothers. And I try to emulate my mother, who, although she lived well into the era when eternal youth was supposedly available, managed to maintain her independence. On the subject of appearance, she said “It’s insane, when you’re seventy, to try to look forty. The thing to strive for is to be the best-looking seventy-year-old in the room.” And she did remain attractive into her nineties, with only the aid of a bit of lipstick and the occasional haircut. She had wide hips, which she occasionally bemoaned, but she didn’t let them stop her from eating and drinking whatever she wanted, within the bounds of moderation. She walked every day, again in moderation, but it never occurred to her to lift weights other than the geranium pots on her patio.

The French writer Aurore Dupin, known by the pseudonym George Sand, said to her friend Flaubert that on the day she stopped worrying about being old she instantly shed twenty years. I think she was right. After a certain point, the barrage of health and beauty information and the pressure to be on the constant lookout for signs of aging so that we can counter them is bound to have the opposite effects. Yes, we are the most physically fit, least wrinkled elders in the history of humanity, but if you look deep into our cataract-free eyes you can sometimes glimpse a look of weariness, a wistful longing to simply rest in being old, that no cosmetic or surgical intervention can disguise.