by Susan Moon
Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Horticultural Hall
300 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
www.shambhala.com
© 2010 by Susan Moon
Cover design by Jim Zaccaria
A continuation of the copyright page can be found in Credits and Permissions at the end of the book.
Some of the essays in this book, or earlier versions of them, were previously published in the following places:
“Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl?” and “I Wasn’t My Self” (under the title “The Worst Zen Student That Ever Was”) in Inquiring Mind, “Stain on the Sky” in The Sun, “Leaving the Lotus Position” in Tricycle, “House of Commons” in OnTheCommons.org, “Grandmother Mind” and “The Secret Place” (under the title “If She Can Bear the Longing”) in The Shambhala Sun, “What If I Never Have Sex Again?” in Persimmon Tree, “The Tomboy Returns” in Jo’s Boys, edited by Christian McEwen, and “Alone with Everyone” in Turning Wheel.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Moon, Susan Ichi Su, 1942–
This is getting old: zen thoughts on aging with humor and dignity /
Susan Moon.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN 978-0-8348-2306-8
ISBN 978-1-59030-776-2
1. Older people—Religious life. 2. Aging—
Religious aspects—Zen Buddhism. I. Title.
BQ9286.7.O43M66 2010
294.3′440846—dc22
2010003821
In memory of my mother, Alice,
and for my granddaughter, Paloma.
I never knew Alice when she was a child
and I will never know Paloma when she’s an old woman,
but they both have inspired me with their enthusiasm for life.
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE Cracks in the Mind and Body
Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl?
Stain on the Sky
Leaving the Lotus Position
The Breathing Tube
Old Bones
All Fall Down
Senior Moment, Wonderful Moment
PART TWO Changing Relationships
In the Shade of My Own Tree
Exchanging Self and Other
House of Commons
Getting Good at Staying Still
Grandmother Mind
What If I Never Have Sex Again?
Becoming Invisible
The Tomboy Returns
PART THREE In the Realm of the Spirit
Tea with God
I Wasn’t My Self
You Can’t Take It with You
The Secret Place
Talking to My Dead Mother
For the Time Being
Alone with Everyone
This Vast Life
Acknowledgments
Credits and Permissions
Introduction
IN MY MID-SIXTIES AND IN GOOD HEALTH, I’m still a baby at being old. Now is a good time to investigate the matter and to develop courage, because getting old is hard. Getting old is scary.
I was never planning to get old myself. I was hoping to live through plenty more birthdays, but I wasn’t planning on getting eroded in the process. Not long past sixty, as joints stiffened, as proper names fled, as hairs disappeared from some parts of my body and sprouted in others, I had to admit it was happening to me, too.
My Buddhist practice encourages me not to turn away from what’s difficult. That’s where the good news often hides, right in the middle of the mess. As a writer, too, the investigation of what’s painful is what interests me the most. So I started writing about getting old. I wanted to look right into the face of oldness. What is it?
At first, I made a list of the difficult things that I was experiencing myself, like memory loss, sore knees, and fear of loneliness, and I set out to write an essay about each one. I wanted to teach myself how to get old without getting bitter. Then, as I kept on getting older, other things happened, both wonderful and painful. I became a grandmother, my mother died, and I kept on writing. Not only did I write about the things I didn’t like that were happening to my body and my mind, I also wrote about how my relationships were changing because of age. As I wrote, I noticed mysterious changes, too, new openings into the spirit, new ways of being alive that aging was bringing me.
The book that emerged is personal, and I hope my concerns will connect with yours. I’m also thankful for those who write about the economic stresses of aging, the concerns about health care and housing, faced by so many older people.
Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, shocked the literary world by bringing his personal experience into his intellectual and philosophical writings. He said, “I am myself the matter of my book.” He called his writings “essays,” meaning attempts. I’m grateful to him for leading the way so long ago. These are my tries.
And this book is part of a larger conversation. I am in a generation of people who developed the habit of constantly talking to each other about what we are going through, and we are doing this together, too. I am not getting old alone, even when I’m alone in the house.
I’m part of a group in which five of us, all women over sixty, meet together to talk about our experience with aging, about what’s happening to our hips and our family life. We call ourselves “crones,” claiming the word. The dictionary says a crone is “a withered old woman.” Some of us in the Crones Group are more withered than others, but we all have more withering to do before we die.
I’m reminded of another women’s group I was part of back in the seventies—my “consciousness-raising” group. We met to take the veils away from the sexism that we had grown accustomed to and to help each other resist what was no longer acceptable to us. In the Crones Group, too, we support each other, but this time around we meet not to resist but to accept. I’m not talking about resignation, but: This is how it is. This is what happens. How can we work with it? And sometimes we find ourselves celebrating our age.
It annoys me when people say, “Even if you’re old, you can still be young at heart!” in order to cheer up old people. Hiding inside this well-meaning phrase is a deep cultural assumption that old is bad and young is good. What’s wrong with being old at heart, I’d like to know? “Old at heart”—doesn’t it have a beautiful ring? Wouldn’t you like to be loved by people whose hearts have practiced loving for a long time?
In the cluttered Berkeley office of the Gray Panthers group, the walls are covered with posters, portraits of faces of different ages, and under each photo are the words, “The best age to be is the age you are.”
Old age is its own part of life. In thirteenth-century Japan, Zen Master Dogen wrote, “Do not think that the firewood is before and the ash is after. Firewood is a stage unto itself and ash is a stage unto itself.” We are in the stage we are in; let’s not think of ourselves as has-been young people, or as about-to-be-dead people.
But even the venerable Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi, in an interview about being old—he was in his eighties at the time—admitted with a laugh, “I often feel like a young person who has something wrong with me.”
It takes a while for the self-image to catch up with the body. Glimpsing my reflection in a shop window, at first I don’t think it’s me, but someone much older than I am. When I went to my fiftieth grade-school reunion, I thought I had wandered into the wrong room: Who were all those codgers? And then the amazing re
cognition: in the white-haired old man’s face, the boy who used to pull my braids at recess.
My mother, Alice Hayes, a serious poet with a fondness for doggerel, put it this way:
In her old age, a rickety Ms.
Took up learning the isness of is.
Since it’s not what one does,
She just WAS and she WAS . . .
Now she’s gone off to BE in Cadiz.
Just so, Mom. As the Buddhist teacher Wes Nisker reminds us, we are called human beings, not human doings. Laotzu said it, too, long ago: “The way to do is to be.” We older people, forced to slow down in the doing department, have a leg up on being.
My mother is one of two people who surprised me by making a disproportionate appearance in this book. She died just about the time I began to write about getting old, but she didn’t let that stop her from showing up over and over in these essays. I shouldn’t be surprised, since she’s the old person I knew best. Something must have rubbed off on me as I watched her go from young old to old old.
The other person in my family who weaves herself repeatedly through the book is my granddaughter Paloma, born just before my mother died. She helps me understand old by showing me young. I see that we are different: I can’t hang by my knees on the jungle gym, and she can’t tell stories about life in the long-ago twentieth century. I see, too, that the years between us can be not a barrier but an enrichment of our pleasure in being alive together.
“Wabi-sabi” is a Japanese expression for the beauty of impermanence, the imperfection of things that are worn and frayed and chipped through use. Objects that are simple and rustic, like an earthenware tea bowl, and objects that show their age and use, like a wooden banister worn smooth by many hands, are beautiful.
I sew patches on my clothes and I glue broken plates back together. I love mended things. I like to take pictures of old things: the spiderweb of cracks in the windshield of a truck, bright mildew on the wall of an abandoned railroad station.
Teenagers pay good money for shortcuts to wabi-sabi when they buy designer jeans that are pre-faded, pre-frayed, and pre-ripped, but the true wabi-sabi look can’t be made in a factory. It depends on the passage of time.
In ikebana—the Japanese art of flower arranging—flowers that wilt quickly are particularly valued because they demonstrate the beauty of impermanence. The very fact that they fade makes them precious.
I’m turning wabi-sabi. I study the back of my hand with interest: the blossoming brown spots, the blue veins becoming more prominent. With my other hand, I can slide the skin loosely over the bones. Can this be bad?
As I get older I am turning into myself. Job gone, children grown and living far away, parents dead. Can’t backpack, can’t do hip hop. Who am I, really? Now I get to find out.
PART ONE
Cracks in the Mind and Body
Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl?
THE OTHER DAY, as I was filling out a form, I couldn’t remember my social security number. I made a running start at it several times, but I couldn’t get past 0-1-3. I had to look it up on last year’s income tax form. To reassure myself, I recited the books of the Old Testament in order, without a pause. My great aunt paid me two dollars to learn them when I was ten, and they’ve stayed in my head for over fifty years. She said it would come in handy to know them by heart, and so it did, though not in the way she had expected.
Of course, memory loss is a normal part of aging. I bet Buddha sometimes forgot where he put his bowl down in his later years. But normal or not, it’s inconvenient, even disabling. It hurts to forget what you used to remember. More than once I’ve had to enlist a friend to walk the streets with me, looking for where I parked my car. My mind, like my bladder, is shrinking with age so that it doesn’t hold as much at once.
I now put people in my Rolodex by their first name if I think I’m going to forget their last. (This will only work as long as I can remember the alphabet.) Forgetfulness eats away at people’s names starting at the end, so that sometimes I find myself clinging to the first letter of the first name like a person at sea hanging onto a splintered piece of the mast.
Last week I saw a man I know in the checkout line at the grocery store, a man whose name began, I felt sure, with P. Paul? Peter? My mother had a line for such a situation. “Hello! I can still remember my name! Can you remember yours?” But I prefer bluffing, so we chatted about paper versus plastic, and as I wheeled my cart away from the checkout stand I heard myself say, “Nice seeing you, Parker.” It’s a retrieval problem. Sometimes, if I stop worrying about it, the name walks casually out of the attic of my brain. “What’s the big hurry?” the name says. “I was coming.”
My mother went through a period of time when she said she couldn’t remember ordinary words. She began writing them down—after she did remember them—in a little notebook that she carried around with her. Catalog. Vascular. Pollen. She thought she might be able to look them up when she needed them.
Now it happens to me, too: I know there’s a good word for the thing I want to say and I can’t get hold of it. If somebody else says it, I know what it means, but I can’t seem to get it on the hook and reel it in, to put it in my . . . What do you call those wicker baskets that fishermen use?
And it’s not just words, it’s objects. Going through airport security at Midway Airport in Chicago, I was stopped because of some butter knives in my carry-on bag. (I don’t generally travel with butter knives, but I was delivering these from one relative to another.) When the security officer decided I could take them on board, I heaved a sigh of relief and marched off to my gate, leaving my laptop behind in the gray plastic tray. I didn’t realized what I’d done until the next morning, when I sat down at my desk to do my e-mail. After a few days of frenzied phone calls, I got the laptop mailed back to me. Now my name and contact information is on a sticker on the outside of the laptop.
When I had a particularly bad spate of memory problems last year, I got scared. For a couple of weeks, it seemed as though I forgot something serious every day, like leaving my purse in the shopping cart in the grocery store parking lot. (When I went back to the store an hour later, the cart was right where I’d left it, with my purse still in it.) I forgot simple things, too. I put a tea infuser into a cup and poured in the boiling water, but I forgot to put the tea leaves into the tea infuser first.
I went to see a psychologist about my cognitive functioning. He was over sixty himself, and first we reminisced about the sixties—the sixties, not our sixties—which helped to put me at my ease. Then he had me repeat strings of numbers and words, and he showed me a list of words printed in different colors of ink and had me name the colors as fast as I could. I did very well, he told me, “for my age.” This was reassuring, though for your age has a sad ring to it, like, “You look good for a woman your age.”
He told me to forget about the unimportant things that just clutter up the valuable space in my brain. And he said, “The best thing we can do for our brains at our age is to take a nap for half an hour every afternoon.” It’s a great idea; one of these days I’ll make it a habit.
The visit helped me to accept that some memory loss is normal. It’s what’s happening. I used to think I was pretty smart, and now I am given the opportunity to let go of that identity. I have a different brain now, but as long as I’m grasping for the mind that I had twenty years ago, I suffer.
Then, too, there’s the remembering. I may not remember the last names of lots of people I know, but I remember seeing my father standing in the doorway of our apartment in Chicago, looking like a stranger in his brown army uniform and hat, silhouetted against the light from outside. I must have been about two and a half, and he was going off to the war in the Pacific.
The older you are, the more of your life is in the past, the further back it goes, and the more historical your memories become. It’s part of the job description of an older person to tell stories about the times that are gone—about what it’s like to ha
ve your father disappear into a war, for example. Or about stepping off the Greyhound bus in Biloxi, Mississippi, forty-five years ago, to work on voter registration, and being greeted by the sheriff saying, “Now don’t you be causing any trouble in our town, young lady.” History’s not what really happened—there’s no such thing. It’s what people remember and tell each other. But it’s good if you don’t go on too long.
One of my heroes is the late Studs Terkel, the great oral historian. It was important to him to get people to tell their stories, because, he said, “We live in the United States of Alzheimer’s. People have forgotten their own history.”
Sometimes I tell a story more than once, forgetting that I’ve told it before, especially when I’m talking to my children. I try to remember to say, “Stop me if I’ve already told you this,” because I know from listening to my own mother how annoying it is to sit through a story you’ve heard before, pretending to be surprised at the punch line. Well, actually, it’s only annoying if you remember the story, and this is one reason why old folks should hang out together. When I tell my old friend Bill a story for the second time, it doesn’t matter because he’s completely forgotten the story. This is called “beginner’s mind.”
Needless to say, I also remember terrible things, mistakes I made long ago. I remember throwing a wooden clog across the living room at a man I loved (and missing, fortunately). I remember crouching in the hall closet behind all the coats, with the door closed, so my children wouldn’t hear me weeping.
Memory is plastic. What I remember isn’t necessarily what happened, and how I remember it changes, depending on my changing focus of attention.
The body memories, like how you button a button, seem to be the last to go. A longtime dharma sister has advanced Alzheimer’s and is no longer able to come to the Zen center to practice. But she did come, for a long time after she’d forgotten how to manage her life. Someone from the sangha would pick her up at home and bring her to morning zazen (Zen meditation). She didn’t know where she was going or why, or who was helping her. She had to be guided from the car to the Zen center, and she had to be helped into her priest’s robes. But once she was inside the zendo (meditation hall), the forms of her thirty-five years of practice were held in her body. I was moved to see how, during service, she was right on track, manifesting dignity and devotion. She recited the Heart Sutra from memory along with everyone else, she bowed when it was time to bow, and she exited the zendo when her turn came, greeting the abbot with a gassho on her way out. Outside the zendo she was lost again.