Growing old, I do not miss the rampagings of youth. Let those rest in the memory of other times. Age has its quieter compensations which delight as much and one wishes they would go on forever.
But I dislike the signals age sends to provoke me – how impossible it became to get down to a low backhand; the eyes inexorably dimming; the thickening waist and unsightly slacking muscles; the blotches and freckles appearing on the skin; the frustrating need to limit the intake of beautifully spiced and crisp and fatty food; the inability to leap up stairs two or three at a time for the sheer animal joy of it; the increasing urgency in seeking answers to the big, perennial questions, ‘Why am I here?’ ‘What is it all about?’ which never mattered a jot when I was young; the sudden aches and strains that come out of nowhere as simple, life-long gravity takes its toll and pulls you down from the bright sky where once you had soared so easy and so free.
I remember long ago how sad it made me to witness the signs of aging in my parents. The sadness came not only from the thought that after old age came death and the death of my parents was a fearful and heart-rending event to contemplate. The sadness came also, and with even more immediacy, from comparing the age-signs that had come upon my parents with the shining evidence of youth in them I remembered so well when I was a boy. Then they had the beauty and the confidence and unsullied good health that spoke to me of everlasting happiness. I saw my father on the playing fields lithe and quick and brilliant in his anticipation and timing. I saw my mother dressed for dancing spinning and laughing to show her children before she kissed us and left for the party. Their youthfulness had no blemish and surely it would last forever.
The signs of their ageing threatened my contentment. Rumble of thunder in the far distance. Intellectually I knew they were not immortal but now I saw that it was true. The years pass and the imperfections and the falterings grow. Their health needs more and more attention. Their lives restrict into customary routines. They were so strong and capable and there was nothing bad they could not put right. But now your father’s step slows and one day you visit and he puts out his hand to be helped from his chair. Your mother’s wild red hair thins and greys and sometimes she seems bewildered.
What does not change is the love you have for them. Indeed, it grows the greater because you can measure better all you owe them and the gratitude you feel amplifies the love you have always had. And then again knowing that they are old now and closer to being gone forever mixes anticipatory grief into what you feel and if you sit quiet and do not get on optimistically with life the feeling which is mostly love can become almost too much to bear.
My father died twelve years ago and my mother died ten years ago. I miss them very much. I miss my father’s wisdom which lasted until the end. I miss my mother’s joyfulness which lasted until my father died. What I have written I remember feeling as the years passed. There was so much I should have told them about how I felt but never did. I read a poem by David Woo and it struck me hard as poems often do.
My Mother’s Hands
Now that she’s ashamed of their ancient burls and gibbous
knobs –
“Don’t be ashamed!” I helplessly cry –
I find myself staring at the raw matter of their
decay, nails crumbling to the opalescent grit
of their lunulae, liver spots speckling the blue dorsal vein
with its throbbing blue limbs, as if the leopard,
symbol of lust in Dante, lay panting, enfeebled,
in the dark wood.
I can’t bear that these hands won’t always be here,
though I barely noticed them when they were still dexterous,
commanding me to come here, do this chore, listen to this
sweet story, come here, sweetheart, come here…
Now a scythe like rod planted within the same index finger
gives it an incongruous come-hither look that forces
passersby to point to themselves, thinking
she’s beckoning to them, an optical illusion, of course,
like the Beauty and the Crone.
“This hand is not the crux and matter of you,” I want to say,
but know she’d laugh and ask, “Is it what’s the matter
with you?” or – worse – look away in pain, saying,
“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”
And so I hold on tight as she sits in her wheelchair, as if
to guide her somewhere, anywhere, until I kiss her goodbye,
by the glass paperweight that my father gave her
when they were young: clear, abstract, voluptuous,
with five sparkling air bubbles clutching
a bouquet of clouds.