As youth recedes into the rearview mirror, and your face slides south in succumbing to time and gravity, and your joints ache from decades of overuse, and your short-term memory becomes a sieve, something curious happens. You get happier. I don’t mean the kind of ecstatic happiness you periodically feel amidst the turbulence of your teens or 20s. I’m talking about a growing contentment, an acceptance of yourself and of life as it is, a grateful appreciation for each moment that you continue to draw breath. As the wise old coots interviewed in our Last Word this week would tell you, it’s not a bad thing to know—really know—that the number of your remaining breaths is finite.
The wisdom of years, of course, is not without its price. My mom, now 88, went into the hospital a few days ago, after falling and suffering a compression fracture of a disk in her lower back. Though clearly in agony, and already wracked with arthritis, she was stubbornly valiant through the whole ordeal. And two days later, she was sitting upright in her hospital bed, chatting and joking with visitors, complaining about the bland, salt-free hospital food. That night, as I spooned some chunks of canned peaches into her mouth, my mom looked up at me with mirth in her eyes. “Remember all those times I shoveled food into you when you were a skinny kid?” she said. “This is how you get even.” Then, a little dopey from painkillers, she settled back on her pillow to sleep. “Don’t worry about me—I’m fine,” she said. “But I can’t wait to go home.” I had no doubt she meant every word.
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