The Emmeline Papers

What is it to grow old? If anyone can answer that question, a woman about to complete her ninety-second year ought to be able to, even if only for herself. Here is what I know…

First in barely noticeable increments, then with increasing velocity, your life starts to fall away. The names you grew up with, for instance. Film stars, actors, singers, musicians, writers, artists: One after the other, they fade into the ghostly shadow that is their movies and recordings, their books and art, and then, should they be sufficiently celebrated, into insipid biographies and flavorless BBC documentaries. In a few cases, you are aware that they have died. In most others, it takes time until you notice that your life has shrunk through their absence.

It is easy, relatively speaking, to watch an older generation get sick and die. Your grandparents, your parents, your aunts, your uncles: We expect them to pass out of our lives, eventually. We expect it less of our contemporaries. However large that circle has been, it, too, begins to shrink — slowly, then more rapidly — as your friends and lovers, siblings and cousins, also disappear.

It is not merely the people around you who vanish from your life. Things you have grown accustomed to, places you have grown to love: They change, they are torn down, they are replaced. It matters not a whit that the replacement is better, cleaner, faster, bigger, smaller, more convenient or more efficient. What matters is that little of what you have come to know, to recognize, to rely upon, remains. A world that was once so familiar has become alien.

Or perhaps it is you who has become alien, you who no longer belongs, who is now more of a misfit than she has long been. A misfit in the greater world, of course, but within your own body as well, a body that increasingly fails to support your will, your desires and, before you realize it, your most basic needs and requirements. Should we be among the more fortunate, it is only our bodies which decay, not our minds. Should we be among the less fortunate, our minds tune in and out of “reality” much as our hands jiggle a radio dial to avoid the static between stations. Whichever is true for us, the physical and mental container that has served most of us reasonably well through the decades starts to do so with less and less ease and effectiveness.

We are born to die. That is the overarching truth of human existence. At the same time we are born to keep our gaze averted from that inevitable moment of extinction or, should your faith or beliefs support it, of transformation. Our appointment with the Angel of Death is always tomorrow, and there is always another tomorrow and another tomorrow after that. That is the illusion not only of the young but of the not-so-young. Yet as we age beyond our middle years and our world grows increasingly unrecognizable, as our bodies themselves grow increasingly unrecognizable, that Angel of Death becomes less an enemy to be kept at bay, less an intruder to be avoided, or should we be among the more philosophically inclined, less a far-distant acquaintance. The Angel of Death becomes a friend.

I have never feared death, but nor have I been eager for it. Frankly, my life has been too filled with, well, life to spend much time thinking about death. Until now.

I am among the fortunate ones. Even at this age, my body is largely cooperative and I believe my mind to be sharp. Yet the world, as wondrous as it has always been and remains, is no longer my world. Be it a thing, a place or a person, the old must ultimately make way for the new. That is the way of the world. The only way. So it must also be my way.