Aging

Every writing group is unique.  Sometimes everyone is in a jovial mood, other times more mellow.  Each person brings a certain energy, then it all gels in some unpredictable way. I don't often write about that, but I always notice it and love the alchemy of different people turning a few hours into gold.

Last night's meeting was very meaningful for me.  A theme emerged in the timed writings, then continued in the writing each person had already written--as if we were already on the same wave length before we all showed up. (Or did I superimpose a theme after the fact?  I don't know.)

It's as if Aging and Death were characters in the wings last night, and each of us poked at or pulled back the curtain in a different way.

For a timed writing prompt, I asked the question, "What age are you in your mind?"  The range of answers (all of us between sixty and sixty-six) varied from 25 to 95!  That was a surprise, so we followed that trail, talked about why.

Hearing their candid answers and saying my own, it occurred to me that we are all bearing witness to what it feels like to grow older.  Don't we all wonder what will happen to our journals when we die?  Aren't we at an age when that could happen, hard as it is to imagine the world going on without us?

One is re-reading her  many journals and typing a few pages for each writing group--which gives us a glimpse into her life and voice of the year in which those pages were written.  While ostensibly an exercise in mining old journals to decide what to keep and what to destroy,  it seems to me that taking the time to re-read and listen to what her former selves have to say to her (and us) right now is a kind of life review, standing back and listening to what insight the younger self might impart.

Sometimes, what one writer describes what we all have felt but never put into words.  When one wrote about aphasia (her frustrating inability to think of the word she's after), we all knew exactly what she was talking about.  After a certain age, reaching for a word and not finding it sets off an alarm: "What if this is the beginning of Alzheimer's?"

When one person writes about the fall-down-gut-punch of a heart break, it's like hearing a piece of music we all know.   One of us (not me) said, "I feel ageless." I do, too--sometimes.  Maybe that's because we carry all the younger parts around inside these sixty-something selves.

And then there's the unmentionable character lurking in the wings: Death.  It once was a hypothetical figure in the distance; now it's closer, even if decades away.

One of us--not present last night--is a grief counselor.  One is a hospice social worker who asks her dying patients to tell her their love stories.  One has been to four family funerals in a little over a year.  One is a drug rehab counselor; recently, two of her patients were in a terrible crash and one of them died. As for me--I just returned from my Uncle David's memorial service in Atlanta and came back to San Antonio to realize all over again that my friend Julianne is gone, absolutely gone, even though a text from her is still on my phone.

Janet--what a great kindness!--went to Julianne's funeral for me, since I couldn't be here.  At the end of writing group, I listened to Julianne's eulogy on Janet's cell phone.  Her son said exactly what she would have liked.  He loved and admired his mother.  Even though he's a Baptist preacher, he didn't make it "too religious"--and she would have liked that.

I had an eerie thought at the end: "I want to call Julianne and tell her what a perfect memorial it was."

Death may bring its own lessons for those who are dying.  But to the living, the lessons keep showing up, too. We wish we had done more, said more, been more attentive, more present.  It was at the moment of saying that very thing that her son showed most emotion: "There are so many things we wish we'd said that we never said."