Dame Judi has no intention of going quietly into that dark night... “I’m tired of being told I’m too old to try something,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I should be able to decide for myself if I can’t do things and not have someone tell me I’ll forget my lines, or I’ll trip and fall on the set."
Ingmar Bergman said "Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons."
Entering her seventies, Anne Truitt, American artist, sculpter and writer, was in crisis. Her art wasn't selling and she found herself anxious about her final years and death. Equally disturbing, she found that she was powerless to protect her children from the pain life inflicted on them - illness, early death, divorce and suicide.
"Her journal [Prospect] becomes the catalyst through which she reconciles her past and future. By the time she has finished her book, at 72, Truitt has learned transforming lessons: that living with insecurity 'is critical to psychological growth' . . . that character changes little over time; that a life, like a sculpture, cannot be brought to a tidy end... that aging is 'the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.'”
Sometimes I am ensnared by insecurity.
Recently a 80-year-old friend came to visit with her daughter who hovered over her, had insisted she move into an old-age home, and treated her as if she is feeble and incapable. Her mother smiled and said nothing but when the daughter was out of the room, she acted and talked as a woman clearly capable physically and mentally of knowing her strengths and limitations. I told the daughter (perhaps not wise of me) about my father who was 90 at the time when my five siblings and I arrived at our parents' home for an intervention. He was furious, said his children would not tell him how to live. (Really we were more concerned about our mother but he was involved in that he was taking care of her and didn't have the strength or energy to be her main caregiver.) I felt for him. He was ancient yes but not incapable of making decisions about his final years.
My neighbour, Madame Rogier is twenty years older than I am and has been living alone for over forty years. She looks after herself with a little help from her family, sweeps outside the front of her house every day, walks down the hill to tend her garden, and drives into Gaillac every week for groceries. She told me that she'd rather die than be dependent on anyone.
I feel the same. I have dreams of finding a retreat, somewhere with all the amenities including wifi and where no one will take pity on me or try to direct my days.
“Something strange is happening to me.” So explained Anne Truitt in a letter to her daughter in the fall of 2003, one year before her death at age 83. “Certain ways in which I have made my work ever since 1961 have simply—very simply, silently and without saying goodbye—departed from me.”
Truitt's outlook on old age and death "steadied by fierce intelligence, adaptability, detachment (learned reluctantly from her mother and keenly from Cicero) and, most strikingly, a passion to cut to the meaning of every experience makes her an optimistic, even exemplary guide through this territory that awaits us all."
I am overwhelmed by everything at the moment, especially when I look in the mirror...
I love George Carlin's ideas about growing old:
Life's journey is not to
arrive at the grave safely
in a well preserved body,
but rather to skid in sideways,
totally worn out, shouting,
".. holy shit ...what a ride!"