Old

I have spent the past few days in the company of a woman born over ninety years ago, and the few days before that in the presence of another. And so I have been thinking quite a bit, in spite of myself, on some level, about what it means to be old.

One of the most useful things I have learned about being a parent is that you are the kind of parent you are a person. Terribly put; what I mean to say is that becoming a mother, say, does not actually change who you are, even as regards your relationship with the previously nonexistent child in your life (although it changes essentially everything about your circumstances). I am exactly the kind of mother I sort of knew, subconsciously, I would be. My friends, too, parent as they are. 

Becoming old is like this, too. It is done in the fashion one does everything else, as one is. Quirks, after years--decades--of wearing in grooves, become amplified, extreme. Traits shriek, habits--fearing extinction--fight hard for survival. In some ways, an old person is an exaggeration. 

There is something exhausting about the elderly, who induce in those of us lucky enough to still be young, an intense feeling of, "There but for the grace of god." Funny: What we should be thinking is, "When?" There is also something beautiful and fierce (in the extroverted and timid alike) in the character's refusal to be subdued, the self's insistence on itself.  

The self's insistence on itself: sad, tragic, even, but beautiful, too.