* * *
Question from a journalist to the Dalai Lama: Can you remember your past lives?
Answer: At my age it’s hard to remember what happened yesterday.
* * *
Uncle Ramón, my stepfather, was a very active and brilliant man until he left his job as director of the Diplomatic Academy in Chile; that’s when his decline started. He was very sociable and had dozens of friends, but one by one they became senile or passed away. In addition, his siblings and one of his daughters died. In his last years—he reached the venerable age of 102—he had only the company of Panchita, who by then was quite tired of his bad temper and would have preferred to be a widow. A team of kind women took care of him as if he were a greenhouse orchid.
“My biggest mistake was to retire. I was eighty but that’s just a number. I could have gone on working another ten years,” he told me once. I didn’t find it in me to remind him that at eighty he needed help to tie his shoes, but I agree that his slow downward slope began when he retired.
This has strengthened my decision to be active forever and use every brain cell and soul spark so there will be nothing left when I go. I am not going to retire, I am going to renovate. I am not willing to be cautious. According to Julia Child, the celebrity chef, the secret of her longevity was red meat and gin. My excesses are different but, like Julia, I will not give them up. My mother used to say that the only regrets in our old age are the sins we didn’t commit and the things we didn’t buy.
Unless dementia defeats me, which has not yet happened among my long-lived relatives, I don’t intend to become a passive old woman with only a dog or two for company. That’s a very scary proposition, but as Jampolsky says, we shouldn’t live in fear. I am preparing for the future. With age, defects and virtues are exacerbated; we become more of what we always were. If we were nasty at forty, we will not be kind at eighty, we will probably be detestable. It is not true that as we age we become wiser, quite the opposite; usually old people are a little mad. If we aspire to wisdom, we have to start training at a young age, as my mother used to say. For as long as possible I will crawl up the stairs to the attic where I write and spend my days entertained by telling stories. If I can achieve that, old age is none of my business.
* * *
Society determines the threshold of old age—when we can legally retire and collect a pension. At that age most people retire, women let their hair go gray (don’t do it yet!), and men use Viagra to pursue their fantasies (how awful!). In reality, aging starts at birth and each person experiences it differently. Culture has a lot to do with this. At fifty a woman in Las Vegas might be invisible, but in Paris she might still be very attractive. At seventy a man might be ancient in some remote village, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, one can see gangs of grandfathers on bikes, which would be praiseworthy if they didn’t wear tight shorts in fluorescent colors.
They tell us that exercise and diet are essential if we are to age in good shape. That might be so, but we shouldn’t generalize. I was never athletic so I see no reason to kill myself exercising this late in life. I keep myself fit walking the dogs to the closest coffee shop for my daily cappuccino. My parents lived quite healthily for a century and I never saw them sweating in a gym or limiting their food intake. They had a glass or two of wine at mealtimes and a cocktail in the evening. They consumed cream, butter, red meat, eggs, coffee, dessert, and all sorts of prohibited carbohydrates. All in moderation. They were not overweight and had never heard of cholesterol.
My parents had love and care up until the last days of their splendid lives. That’s very rare. The last stage of life is usually tragic because society is not prepared to deal with longevity. No matter how carefully laid out our plans might be, generally our resources don’t last until the end. The last six years of our lives are usually the most expensive, painful, and lonely; these are years of dependency, and with terrible frequency they are years of poverty. The family—more specifically, the women in the family—took care of the elderly in the past, but in this part of the world that’s not the case anymore. Houses are small, money is short, work and the rhythms of life are demanding, and to top it off, grandparents live too long.
Those of us who have reached our seventh decade are terrified of ending our days in a nursing home, in diapers, drugged, and tied to a wheelchair. I want to die before I need help to take a shower. My women friends and I dream of creating a community. (I just got married and don’t want to think about widowhood; it’s depressing, but we are assuming, of course, that one day we will be widows because men die earlier.) For example, we could buy a plot somewhere not too far from a hospital and build individual cabins with common services, a place where we could have our pets, a garden, and some fun. We talk about it often but we keep postponing it, not only because it’s a costly proposition but also because deep inside we believe we will always be independent. Magical thinking.
* * *
Unless we can avoid the symptoms of aging and remain healthy until we are a hundred and twenty, as Professor Sinclair proposes, we have to deal with the tricky subject of longevity. It’s foolish to keep avoiding it. Society needs to find a way to care for the elderly and to help them die if they so desire. Assisted death should be a viable option everywhere, not only in a few enlightened places on earth. Death with dignity is a human right, but the law and the medical establishment often force us to live way beyond dignity. As Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years.”
I had an agreement with a male friend, who at eighty-five is still the seductive stud that he always was, to commit suicide together when we deemed it appropriate. He was going to fly his plane—a tin mosquito—toward the horizon until we had no more fuel and then we would plunge into the Pacific Ocean, a clean ending that would spare our families the cost of two funerals. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, my friend’s pilot license expired and he could not renew it. He had to sell his mosquito. Now he is thinking of buying a motorcycle. That’s what I wish for myself, a quick death, because I am not Olga Murray and don’t have my own village of kind people to take care of me at the end.
By the way, as the birth rate continues to drop and the population gets older in the United States and Europe, immigrants should be welcomed with open arms. They are young—the elderly don’t emigrate—and their work helps support retirees. Also, it is female immigrants who traditionally take care of children and old people. They are the patient and kind nannies of those we love most.
The elderly are treated not as a priority but as a nuisance. The government doesn’t assign them enough resources; the healthcare system is unfair and inadequate; living quarters in most cases consist of warehousing old people away from the public eye. The country should support, in a decent manner, those who contributed to society for forty or fifty years. But that’s not the case, unless we are talking about some exceptionally civilized country, one of those where we would all like to live. The terrible fate of most old people is to end up dependent, poor, and rejected.
* * *
Maybe my plan to remain active and die with my boots on will fail. Maybe there will be a moment when I will have to abdicate bit by bit what I now consider important. I hope the last things to go will be writing and sensuality.
If I live too long I will lose my capacity to pay attention. If I am not able to remember and focus I will not be able to write, and then everybody around me will suffer. For them, the ideal situation is for me to be absent and, if possible, isolated in a closed room. If I lose my mind I won’t even notice, but if I lose independence while totally lucid, as happened to my mother, it will be rather disagreeable.
I still have total mobility, but the day will come when I will not be able to drive anymore. I have always been a lousy driver and now I am worse. I crash into trees that suddenly appear where there was
nothing before. I avoid driving at night because I cannot read the street signs and I end up irrevocably lost. Driving is not the only challenge. I refuse to update my computer, replace my cellphone, exchange my old car, or learn to use our TV’s five remote controls. I can’t open bottles, chairs have become heavier, buttonholes smaller, and shoes tighter.
Sensuality changes as we age. My friend Grace Damman, one of the six Sisters of Perpetual Disorder, my intimate spiritual practice circle, has spent many years in a wheelchair following a terrible head-on collision on the Golden Gate Bridge. She was very athletic and was training to climb Mount Everest before the accident, which pulverized her bones and left her semi-paralyzed. It took her years to accept her physical condition; in her mind she was still waterskiing in Hawaii and running marathons.
Grace is in a residence for older people because she needs assistance; she is by far the youngest person there. The help she gets is not much, just five minutes in the morning to dress her, five minutes in the evening to put her to bed, and two showers a week. For her, the greatest pleasure is that shower. She says that every drop of water on her skin is a blessing; she enjoys the soap and shampoo foam in her hair. I often think of Grace when I shower; I don’t want to take that privilege for granted.
* * *
While my body deteriorates, my soul rejuvenates. I suppose my defects and virtues are also more visible. I spend and waste too much and am more distracted than before, but I also have become less angry; my character has softened a little. My passion for the causes I have always embraced and for those few people I love has increased. I do not fear my vulnerability because I no longer confuse it with weakness. I can live with my arms, doors, and heart open. This is another good reason to celebrate my age and my gender: I don’t have to prove my masculinity, as Gloria Steinem said. That is, I don’t have to cultivate the image of fortitude instilled by my grandfather, which was very useful earlier in my life but not anymore; now I can ask for help and be sentimental.
Since my daughter died I am perfectly aware of death’s proximity; and now, in my seventies, death is my friend. It’s not true that she looks like a skeleton armed with a scythe and trailed by a rotten odor; she is a mature and elegant lady who smells of gardenias. At first she was lurking in the neighborhood, then in the house next door, and now she is waiting patiently in my garden. Sometimes, when I pass in front of her, we greet each other and she reminds me that I should enjoy this day as if it were my last.
In brief, I am in a splendid moment of my destiny. This is good news for women in general: Life gets easier once we get through menopause and are done with raising kids, but only if we minimize our expectations, give up resentment, and relax in the knowledge that no one, except those closest to us, gives a damn about who we are or what we do. Stop pretending, faking it, lamenting, and flagellating ourselves about silly stuff. We have to love ourselves a lot and love others without calculating how much we are loved in return. This is the stage of kindness.
The extraordinary women I have met in my life nurtured the vision I had when I was fifteen years old of a world where feminine values carry the same weight as masculine ones, just as I used to preach to my grandfather, who listened with pursed lips and white knuckles. “I don’t know what world you live in, Isabel. You talk about stuff that has nothing to do with us,” he would argue. He repeated that years later when the military coup put an end to our democracy in just a few hours, and the country was subjected to a long dictatorship.
Being a journalist I knew what was going on in the shadows: concentration camps, torture centers, thousands of desaparecidos—murdered people whose bodies were dynamited in the desert or thrown from helicopters into the sea.
My grandfather didn’t want to know; he insisted that those were just rumors, that none of it was of my concern. He commanded me to stay out of politics, to be quiet at home, to think about my husband and my children. “Remember the story of the parrot who wanted to stop the train by flapping his wings? The train tore it to pieces, not even the feathers remained. Is that what you want?”
That rhetorical question has haunted me for decades. What do I want? What do women want? Allow me to remind you of the ancient story of the caliph.
Once, in the mythical city of Baghdad, a thief was brought in front of the caliph to be judged. The usual punishment was to have his hands cut off, but that day the caliph was in a good mood and he offered the bandit a way out. “Tell me what women want and you will be free,” he said. The man thought for a while, and after invoking Allah and His Prophet, he gave the caliph an astute answer. “Oh, sublime caliph, women want to be heard. Ask them what they want and they will tell you.”
While writing this part of the book I thought I needed to research some more, but instead of going around interrogating women here and there about their wishes, I could save time consulting the Internet. I typed out the caliph’s riddle, “What do women want?” Google responded with self-help manuals with titles like “Find out what women want and fuck them.” I also got advice from men instructing other men how to score. Here’s an example: Women want tough guys, be aggressive and confident, don’t give them any power, order them around, be demanding, your needs have priority, that’s what they like.
Is that so? I doubt it. It’s not true among the women I know, who are many if I count my loyal readers and those I work with at my foundation. I think I might have a better answer to the caliph’s inquiry.
This is what women want: to be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over their bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved. In the next few pages, I will try to explain what this entails.
* * *
The most significant indicator of the level of violence in a nation is its rate of violence against women, which normalizes all other forms of violence. In Mexico, where there is insecurity in the streets, and cartels and organized criminal gangs act with impunity, approximately ten women are murdered daily. This is a conservative estimate. Most of the victims are beaten or killed at the hands of boyfriends, husbands, and other men they know. Since the 1990s hundreds of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, have been killed after being raped and often brutally tortured. The government has responded with indifference. This elicited a massive women’s protest in March 2020. Women declared a general strike: They didn’t go to work, they didn’t do any domestic chores, and hundreds of thousands marched in the streets. We’ll see if this has any impact on the authorities.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has a history of instability and armed conflict, holds the shameful title of “rape capital of the world.” Rape and other forms of systematic aggression against women are weapons of oppression used by armed groups; one in three assaults, however, are inflicted by civilians. The situation in other places in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, and in Asia is also bad. The greater the hypermasculinity and gender polarization, the more violence women suffer, as is the case among terrorist groups.
We want safety for ourselves and our children. We are programmed to defend our kids and we do that with claws and determination. That’s also the case with most animals, although I’m not so sure about reptiles, like snakes and crocodiles. With few exceptions, the mother cares for her offspring, and sometimes she is forced to protect them with her life against a hungry male who might devour them.
When threatened, the male reaction is flight or fight: adrenaline and testosterone. When threatened, the female reaction is to form a circle and put the offspring in the middle: oxytocin and estrogen. Oxytocin, the hormone that drives us to unite, is so amazing that some psychiatrists use it in couples therapy. The partners inhale oxytocin with a nasal spray, hoping to reach agreement instead of murdering each other. Willie and I tried it but it didn’t quite work; maybe we didn’t inhale enough. Eventually we divorced, but the residue of that blessed hormone allowed us t
o remain good friends until his recent death. Proof of our friendship is that Willie left me Perla, his little dog. She is the unfortunate product of several different breeds; she has the face of a bat and the body of a fat rat, but she has a great personality.
* * *
Violence against women is universal and as old as civilization. When talking about human rights, in truth we’re referring to men’s rights. If a man is beaten and deprived of his freedom, it’s called torture. When a woman endures the same, it’s called domestic violence and is still considered a private matter in most of the world. In some places, murdering a woman over a matter of honor is not even reported. The United Nations estimates that every year around five thousand girls and women in the Middle East and Asia are killed to protect a man’s or a family’s honor.
A woman is raped every six minutes in the United States. That’s counting only the cases that are reported; in reality the number is estimated to be at least five times higher. And every nine seconds a woman is beaten. Harassment and intimidation happen at home, in the streets, in the workplace, and on social media where anonymity encourages the worst forms of misogyny. And we are just talking about the United States here; imagine how it is in other countries where women’s rights are still in diapers. Such violence is inherent to the patriarchy; it is not an abnormality. It’s time to call it out for what it is and speak up.
The Soul of a Woman Page 6