We were talking yesterday, my cancer buddies (who are also writing buddies) and I, about the way most people seem to fear or even hate old age, and how some, who are fighting to make another birthday, see every extra year as a tremendous gift.
I'm somewhere in the middle. I am grateful I am still alive, but I do fear the lack of independence that many of us, especially those with no money, face as age or infirmities increase. I think that, even more, I fear dying before I have managed to polish off my roughest edges and be the kind of person I know myself to be underneath the crust. Someone who can really embrace life.
So this is what I wrote.
Another
Birthday
I don’t
want one more birthday
I want a
thousand
ten thousand
I want to
live so long and so well
that all my
fears die of old age
and I wait
my stiffness out
outlast all
infirmity
lose
interest in whether I’m
remembering
right or not
tire my
fatigue
bore my
hesitation
give flight
to every
impulse
toward life I ever have
and spend
my days protecting insects
nurturing
plants
feeding giving
water
giving shelter
and a sense that is
the absence
of all panic
to
birds and rats and dogs
I want to
live so long my crusts
crack and
split and fall away
till I respond
with tenderness to those
as brittle
as that near-forgotten me
Image: "A woman's 78th birthday on 4th December 2005. Ardencraig Care Home (Glasgow)" by I Craig from Glasgow, Scotland. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
