SIXTY

On occasion, someone tells me I don’t look my age. At first I’m thrilled and don’t even stop to consider if the comment is sincere. All such “you can’t be – fill-in-the-blank, fifty, fifty-five, fifty-eight” remarks are meant to be compliments, because everybody knows a woman in her fifties or beyond, a woman of sixty, has passed her sell-by date.
Messages scream across computer and television screens and leap out of mobile devices; a woman’s value lies in her beauty and her beauty lies in her youth. To be able to pop out babies is to be fuckable and to be fuckable is to matter. So I stand in front of my mirror (glasses on so I can see) and waver, a jar of Supreme Polypeptide Cream in one hand and a fistful of vitamins in the other. I am about to turn sixty.
Do I really want to resent every sign of the trip that’s brought me here?
Decades have written stories on me and I on them. If I attempt to erase the furrows appearing between my eyes or the dark spot on my left cheek, or smooth out forehead wrinkles and eye crinkles and a mildly sagging jaw line, I’ll erase brilliant parts of myself. Surviving parts. Thriving parts. Daring, wounded, courageous parts. Scathed, scarred, limping parts. I’d give up the lines and the droops, but not for a minute what I’ve gained in the process of getting them.
Can I have one and not the other?
I pop the vitamins in my mouth, but set the polypeptide cream down unopened.
The I’m-not-actually-an-old-lady-yet raft of my fifties is quickly sinking. In December I will turn sixty. Still, I have more reason for glee than for sorrow. After all, In December, I will turn sixty. Not everyone makes it.
Cancer has burned through a swath of friends and acquaintances; I had to face it down myself. I’ve lost people when an air current suddenly dropped a hang-glider or whitewater rapids overturned rafts and kayaks and sharp curves in roads outsmarted fast cars. I lost a baby brother to the mystery of SIDS and a father to less mysterious heart failure. Sitting with my sister while she died of breast cancer, I took a call at her bedside and excused myself to learn that a fit, non-smoking friend kicked it unexpectedly from a heart attack. And then? Then a soft round man knocked on the door and I stood on my front porch while he told me my missing nineteen-year old son had been found hanging in a tree an hour away.
After the whats and the hows and the are-you-sures, after driving numbly to the sheriff’s office and then to the funeral home, after beginning to comprehend that my son killed himself, I am left where I’ve always been left by the dead, with only this.
I am still alive.
The lines of joy and heartbreak on my face, the long white scar down my abdomen, the remnants of a gash on my leg, the razor thin line at the base of my neck; the whitening hair at my temples, the zing in my knee, the flesh-colored plastic pouch affixed like a bandaid to cover the cancer-caused colostomy on my belly; each of these records the ravages and triumphs of sixty years.
An old silver mine, up the road from the country home in Montana where I grew up, laced our drinking water with lead and cadmium and arsenic, a possible cause of the cancer that came at age forty. My thyroid gave out, perhaps due to the large amounts of soy I ate as a vegetarian and vegan, or the radiation treatment for cancer, or the contaminated water of childhood. A cascade of injuries and illnesses have plagued me; cancer in my intestines, the goiter in my thyroid, mistakenly removed parathyroid glands, a detached retina, shattered ribs, a punctured lung.
Yet I go on.
There’s been work and taxes, male and female lovers, two long-term partners. With my second partner I have parented two adopted children and cared for many rescued animals, mostly dogs. I’ve climbed two fourteen-thousand foot peaks, kayaked rivers and lakes and ocean bays. I’ve eaten tofu and beans and elk and grass-fed beef. Atop Long’s Peak in Colorado, I watched clouds form right in front of my eyes. In Kaikora Bay, New Zealand, my face pinched in distress when I realized the small sleek seal sunning on a rock had a plastic six-pack ring stuck around its neck, slowly choking the life out of it.
“Can’t we do something?” I begged our whale-watch tour guide.
“What should we do,” he shot back with a roll of his eyes, “scare it to death with the approach of our boat?”
“Go back to shore, get a tranquilizer dart …”
“And what of the others?” His tone spewed exasperation; for all he knew, I threw plastic rings in the trash every day. “The ones we don’t see?”
Our boat sputtered past the choking seal, blazing the image onto brain cells.
Some scars live in memory, some snake along flesh as fading white lines, one or two still rage in the blood. My body bears the marks of all I’ve endured and accomplished so far. One day, I’m going to join the kayakers, the hang gliders and the drivers who didn’t make it. I’m going to follow those who have gone – by accident or illness, by mayhem or suicide. One way or another, I’m going too. But not yet, not now. Instead, I am getting old.
In a month I’ll turn sixty.
A combination of fortitude, courage, smart choices, and pure dumb luck has brought me this far. In honor of all that is good and bad, stupid and brilliant, shameful and honorable in the last six decades, I reject sixty-is-the-new-forty. In honor of each beloved who has died, I bow with gratitude because I. Am. Still. Here. I want to do good with the time I’m given, not battle the inevitable changes of this biological vehicle that carries me along.
I’m going to take my vitamins and trot up staircases for exercise. I’m going to sleep eight hours and take a nap when I can. I’m going to climb a few more mountains and see a few more whales and snorkel the coral reefs while they’re still here. One son has died but another still lives. I plan to be here for him in all my scarred, beautiful, wrinkled, fit, thriving, sixty-and-beyond glory.
And if I see another seal choking in a plastic six-pack ring? I’ll use the formidable power of my paleo-vegan, cancer-surviving, vitamin-sucking, mother-rocking, old-woman self.
I’ll take the damned thing off.