~a column by Colleen O’Brien
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This is the final line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The older I get, the backwarder I go, and these words, in their elegant way, come to mind with ease more and more often.
A dear friend of mine died. She lived far away, and I was not around to hold her hand or see her go. I continue to think of her. We were the same age.
I look back now a great deal of the time in order not to look forward.
Forward is the end, and what’s behind me beats all that’s ahead of me.
I have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of memories more benign than anything in old age with its stiff joints and annoying insomnia leading lamely to some form of final exit. The present puts up with hopelessness flitting around the edges, and so the future from this great scope of years carries a tinge of irksomeness; I’m counting on it not getting downright awful.
As a large overhang of snow thunders from the roof to the porch, a single, briefly sad fact plops itself into my consciousness. It is our first snow of the year, and all I want to do is look at it, not walk through it as soon as I get my boots on.
I’ve known for a long time that my youth has given up its ghost, and today I accepted it.
In this vast age I never dreamed I’d reach, I find that guiding myself purposefully into contentment behooves me when I can make it happen. However, like a child stamping her foot at her parents, many a day I resist any goodwill daring to bubble up.
I can get through what remains of my days and months and years if my memory remains. Sometimes I have to coax it along, but that in itself can be funny. I don’t want to jump in a high snow pile and slide on my belly down the other side. I just want to look at large piles of snow and remember sliding down with my friend Margo when we were eight.
And I suppose that when – if – that memory goes, it won’t matter much because I’ve had friends who disappeared into LaLa Land . . . no thoughts at all. Thinking of those friends, it was at first hard on me when the word I wanted eluded me. Now that I’ve forgotten half my vocabulary, I just have to laugh – such a word person she is! Hah. Words, names, places flit away from me like butterflies in the garden, and I realize that life is an accumulation of pain, both acute and vague, interrupting good times. I am fortunate that my memories, if not the precise words describing them, lean toward the good times.
I recall being incapable of grasping the decade in whose bumper sticker advised me: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” That hippy era informed my first decade of maturity and meant that I grew to adulthood resisting the scary age of 30. Ancient age – 60-70-80 – was never even a niggling thought. But once through the gate, I lived happily on to 45, 50, 60. And at 64, my life seemed to leap into a nether world of old age with lethal diseases and deaths and increasing loss of handling with grace and self-esteem one’s own body, the body being always in charge, no matter how brilliant we think we are.
And here I am, older than all my forebears but one (a grandfather who lived to be 93). I loll randomly through a slightly less accommodating brain back to my youth and teenagedom and married w/ baby – and even the fast track to here, so far away from my beginning.
It is a phenomenal thing for this human who gets to live a long life, toward the end beating ceaselessly into the past – and so far, arrives each morning into a world of just enough words and good memories to make my dotage a pleasant trip to wherever I’m destined.
I’ve looked up a word for old lady that would be similar to calling an old man a “geezer” or “codger” but find only “crone,” “hag” and ‘biddy,” none of which I can cozy up to. So, I’ll be a “woman of a certain age.” Has a certain ring to it of maneuvering through Fitzgerald’s apt line, that we are “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” not a fearful thing, more like a good way to proceed.
