by Susan Moon
The physical damage was insignificant—some colorful bruises that faded away in a week. I got a lot of kind attention and many offers of arnica. But it was scary to hit the deck like that, face first.
I’ve taken some other falls since turning sixty, and so I decided to do some Internet research about falling. I found lots of useful bits of advice, like, “Don’t stand on chairs, tables, or boxes,” from the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Division of Aging and Seniors. Another good suggestion: “Try to land on your buttocks to prevent more serious injuries.” From the Centers for Disease Control came the advice I should have heeded to prevent that last fall: “Wear shoes that give good support and have non-slip soles.”
I learned that about thirteen thousand people age sixty-five and over die every year in the United States as the result of a fall—that’s thirty-five a day. Many more are injured and their health is compromised.
Preventing falls in seniors turns out to be an entire field of medicine unto itself. And I was astonished to learn that for several years in a row, a bill was introduced to Congress called the Keeping Seniors Safe from Falls Act, though it was never passed. Who would vote against such a bill? It must have been too expensive.
In addition to just plain falling, the fear of falling is bad for the health, keeping people in their chairs, where their muscles get weaker and weaker. Again, from the Canadian Division of Aging, “Do not let the fear of falling prevent you from being active. Inactivity creates an even greater risk of falling.”
The first of what I think of as my age-related falls happened because I was engaging in behavior that was not age-appropriate. It was a gorgeous summer day, and I was riding on a narrow bike path behind my ten-year-old niece, who was out of sight. I’m not too old to ride a bike, but I felt suddenly compelled to ride “no hands” as I used to do when I was a girl of ten. You’re only as old as you feel! Aren’t they always telling you that? The carefree breeze caressed my hair and the warblers seemed to be singing my praises from the bushes, until my wheel slipped on some gravel at a curve in the path and down I went, skinning my knees, hands, and elbows. Wheeling my bike, I limped to where my niece waited for me at a fork in the path. “My God! What happened to you?” she exclaimed.
“Pride goeth before a fall,” I told her. I have given up riding “no hands” for the rest of my life—one more age-related loss. At least this one is easy to live with.
The truth is, my balance is bad. In my yoga class, I stand near the wall for the crane pose and surreptitiously touch it with a knee or an elbow, as no self-respecting crane would ever do. My yoga teacher has told me you can improve your balance with practice. So I’ve adopted a daily practice. Every morning, while I use my electric toothbrush, which turns itself off after exactly two minutes, I stand on one foot. On the even dates I stand on the right foot and on the odd dates I stand on the left. The calf muscles of the standing foot burn. At first I couldn’t make it through two minutes, but now I can.
As I get older the ground seems to get farther and farther away, and it takes longer for my brain to get the signals to my feet, and vice versa. Sometimes when I first get out of bed in the morning I stumble against the door frame on my way to the bathroom. My body used to take care of ordinary things like walking on its own, without adult supervision; now I have to think about picking up my feet.
I realize that a cane is not just to support weak joints and muscles—it helps you balance. I’m not there yet, though I do use hiking poles, and there’s no loss of pride in that because even young and athletic people use them. I have a cane of my grandfather’s in the attic, waiting for me. It’s made of some kind of bone. And after canes come walkers.
Speaking of walkers, I’ve been watching a friend’s ten-month-old learn to walk. She holds onto the coffee table and walks herself along its edge, and then she takes the great plunge, lets go, and steps out across space, two full steps to the edge of the sofa! Triumph! As for me, I’m moving in the opposite direction. Someday the people in the room may clap for me, too, as I let go of the edge of the kitchen table and take the bold step across space to the kitchen counter.
My friend’s daughter falls down frequently in the process of learning to walk, and she bounces back up on her rubber skeleton. Sometimes she cries, but it never lasts long. When you are over sixty and the ground spins up into your face, it’s a different story, especially when your bones are getting porous, as mine are.
While staying in a friend’s rustic cabin, I got up in the middle of the night to use the outhouse. Returning to bed in the moonless, nightlight-less dark, I tripped and fell against a wooden platform and, as I later learned, broke two ribs. The crash awoke the young woman sleeping at the other end of the loft, who kindly asked what she could do to help, but I could think of nothing, and I since I had had the good fortune to fall after visiting the outhouse, I went back to bed, took an aspirin, and slept until morning.
If you’re going to break bones, ribs are the best bones to break. For a few weeks, it hurt to cough or laugh, but it’s amazing how well the body works. I just went on with my life, trying not to cough, and after a while my ribs weren’t broken anymore. How do they know how to fix themselves? When my car gets a dent, it keeps a dent.
After my mother’s death, my siblings and I packed up her belongings in her apartment in Chicago. When we were done, I said good-bye to my sister, who waited for the movers among boxes in the empty, echoing living room, and I left the apartment for the last time, to head back home to California. It was a bitter winter day as I trundled my way along the sidewalk with suitcase and tote bag. When I was half a block from the bus stop, I saw a bus approaching and I began to run. I slipped and fell on the icy sidewalk and papers and books went flying out of my tote bag. My hands were badly scraped and bloody, and one knee was skinned under my torn pants. As I struggled to my feet, I saw the bus pull away.
Two women coming along the sidewalk caught up with me—angels of kindness. “Are you all right? Can we help you?” One brushed the leaves off my back, and the other picked up my papers.
“I’m OK,” I said. The part of me that wasn’t OK was invisible—it had to do with leaving my mother’s apartment behind for the last time. It had to do with the fact that she was dead. She’d taken her final fall; we had returned her ashes to the ground.
I thanked the women and walked to the bus stop, just as another bus pulled up. I got on, fumbled for my money with my bloody hands, and sat down in disarray. I must have looked pretty bad to the people on the bus, but once I was settled for the long ride to the airport, I wiped the blood off my hands with a handkerchief I’d taken from my mother’s top dresser drawer.
A happier fall took place on my own front steps. Near the bottom, I unaccountably stepped off into the air when there was still one more step to go, and I fell hard on the concrete sidewalk. I rolled onto my back, feeling a fire burning in my ankle. It was a quiet morning in the neighborhood. No one was around. Nothing seemed to be broken. I lay there, stopped in my tracks on the way to the grocery store, looking up at the clear sky and the diagonal of the roofline jutting into it. I admired the top of the chimney. Time stopped, and I rested like a kindergartener at naptime. I had fallen not just down the steps but through a hole in the earth to a country without grocery stores, beyond the reach of gravity. I couldn’t fall any farther. When the burning in my ankle subsided and I got up, relinquishing the moment of peace, I found that I could walk fine.
But there are other ways to find a peaceful moment. One of the items on all the lists of how to prevent falls is: “Have handrails installed on all staircases,” and after that fall I finally got around to installing a handrail on the front steps. I’d been putting it off—could there really be someone living at my address who needs a handrail?—but now the smooth round wood feels good in my hand. It’s almost as satisfying as sliding down the banister.
Senior Moment, Wonderful Moment
I CALLED MY FRIEND Cornelia, a fellow grandmother,
to ask if I could borrow a crib for my granddaughter’s upcoming visit. When she answered the phone, I said, “Hi, Cornelia—it’s Sue,” and then my mind went blank. I paused, hopefully, but no more words came out of my mouth.
“Morning,” she said. “What’s up?”
She was a good enough friend that I didn’t have to fake it, but still, it was unsettling. “Ummm,” I said, waiting for the old neurons to start firing up again. I asked myself if it had to do with our weekly walking date. No-o-o . . . Was it about her son’s article on stream conservation? No-o-o . . . Out the window a squirrel was running along the porch railing with a walnut in his mouth. “I’m having a senior moment,” I said finally. “Do you happen to know why I called?”
She laughed. “You must have known that I have some plums to give you, from my tree.” The squirrel was now sitting on the railing, peeling the outer shell off the walnut and spitting it on the ground. I’d never noticed before how the long fur of their tails waves back and forth like grass when they flick them.
By the time I went over to Cornelia’s house to pick up the plums, I had remembered about the crib and I got that, too.
The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh helps me appreciate my senior moments. In his book, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment, he writes, “The real miracle is to be awake in the present moment.” I’m confident he would agree that a senior moment, a moment of forgetting what day it is or where you are going, can be a moment of deep understanding.
For example, standing in the kitchen wondering why I have a pair of scissors in my hand, I notice the sunlight glinting off its metal blades and dancing on the wall, and I repeat Nhat Hanh’s sentence to myself: “The real miracle is to be awake in the present moment!” Younger people can also experience such transcendent moments of deep immersion in the infinite present, but they have to go to much greater lengths to do so, meditating for days at a time, for example, or hang gliding. I have only to carry a pair of scissors from one room to another.
I started out on a hike with friends, and when the path turned steeply and unexpectedly upward, I had to send them on without me, knowing my knees would not be able to bring me back down. I sat on a rock before returning to the lodge. This was not what we usually think of as a senior moment, but I speak of it here because it was another occasion when the frailty of age dropped me into a gap in time. I listened to my friends’ voices, to their twig-snapping and leaf-rustling, until I could hear them no longer. I was cross at my knees for making me miss the companionship, though I knew they hadn’t done it on purpose. I watched a yellow leaf twist its way down to the ground, and I heard it land on another leaf. Have you ever heard a leaf land on another leaf? OK—it wasn’t the most exciting moment of my life, but it was good enough, and I wasn’t missing it.
I say, “I’m having a senior moment” when I blow it, hoping to fend off the irritation of others with humor. But the next time the blankness comes over me, I’ll try to be bold and move beyond self-deprecation. I’ll say, “Senior moment, wonderful moment!” in order to remind the people around me of the wisdom that is to be found in these little coffee breaks of the brain.
A friend of mine takes another tack. He tells me he memorizes a stock phrase and keeps it handy to fill the gaps. So, if he’s saying to an acquaintance over lunch, “Have you ever noticed that . . .” and he suddenly forgets the rest of the sentence, he brings out his all-purpose phrase: “It’s incredibly hard to get the wrapper off a new CD.” Or if he sees two old friends who don’t know each other at a party, and their names vanish into the yawning void when the moment comes to introduce them, he shakes hands enthusiastically and says it again: “It’s incredibly hard to get the wrapper off a new CD!” Like a pebble striking bamboo in an old Zen koan, his shocking statement offers his listeners a wake-up call to be here now.
It’s not my fault when I have a senior moment any more than it was my fault when my hair turned gray. I’m just a human being, after all. I’ve had a lifetime of junior moments, when one word follows another in logical—and boring—succession, when each action leads to the next appropriate action. For countless years, I have remembered to bring the pencil with me when I go downstairs to use the pencil sharpener. I think I’ve earned the right to break free from the imprisonment of sequential thinking.
A senior moment is a stop sign on the road of life. It could even be a leg up toward enlightenment. So I stay calm, let the engine idle, and enjoy the scenery. What happens next will be revealed in due course.
PART TWO
Changing Relationships
In the Shade of My Own Tree
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, we used to play “Old Maid,” matching up pairs of cards until the loser was left with the only card that had no mate—the old maid card. The old maid’s spectacles perched at the end of a long bony nose, twigs of hair stuck out from her bun, and she had a big mole on her chin. This image, which it didn’t occur to me to question, struck a certain dread in my heart, and now, here I am, an old maid myself. Granted, in the strict sense of the word I’m not a maid, but I’m old and not married.
When I was a teenager, the models I had of older single women—we even used the word spinster back then—were not much more appealing to me than the old maid card. My high school education in a girls’ prep school was delivered to me almost entirely by spinsters. I think of Miss Biddle, Miss Beveridge, Mlle. Casals, and our gym teachers, the Misses Sullivan and Bailey. They all tended to be shaped the same, like boards, with no hips and high shoulders, and I saw them as utterly sexless. They seemed to me to have washed up on the shores of that old-fashioned girls’ school like flotsam. A callow teenage girl, I never wondered if they were lonely on Saturday nights.
Now I think of those teachers of mine with affection and sadness.
It’s hard to be an older woman without a partner. I know from talking to friends that I’m not the only one who occasionally wakes up in the middle of the night alone in her bed and asks herself: Wait a minute! How the hell did this happen? Three in the morning is the loneliest time. What if the Big Earthquake comes right then and I’ve got no one to hold on to?
The world I live in puts people in pairs. We are taught to think in binary terms, to believe Plato’s story that human beings were originally just one sex, and then were divided in two, and ever since, the two halves of one complete being are incomplete until they find each other.
This belief is affirmed by the earnest couples whose faces appear beside each other on book jackets. These experts on finding enlightenment through partnership smile into each other’s eyes, and they declare right there on the back cover that the deepest understanding of what it means to be a human being can only be achieved through intimate partnership. Could it be that that’s only one of the ways?
Even if you put enlightenment aside, there’s still the need for simple animal companionship. When I broke a bone in my left shoulder not so many years ago, I could only sleep on my right side with my injured left arm carefully balanced on my torso like dead weight. When I lay down in bed at night, my good right arm was pinned under me, and it was a miserable moment when I realized that I couldn’t do the simple and comforting thing that came next: I couldn’t pull the covers up over myself. I felt keenly the absence of a person who had promised to stay with me in sickness and in health, who had vowed before witnesses to pull up the covers. I had to learn to hold the covers in my teeth while I lowered myself down on my good arm.
And those teachers of mine—I wonder now if anyone came to help them when they broke a bone. I wonder if any of them had loving friendships. Were they perhaps lesbians? Might any of them have chosen not to marry in order to devote their lives to mentoring young women?
One of them, the tiny Miss Punderson, with her sparkling blue eyes and thick white hair in a bun, made a surprising escape from spinsterhood. She had taught Chaucer and Milton to my mother a generation before and seemed to be an immortal spinster. But she retired at age sixty-five, the same year I graduated from
the school, returned to her native Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and stunned us by marrying her old friend, the widowed painter Norman Rockwell. Could such a thing possibly happen to me? It’s highly unlikely according to statistics; the older a single woman gets the harder it becomes to find a partner.
When my last long-term relationship ended, I was in my mid-fifties. I feared I had passed over a certain invisible threshold and that my marketability was way down. I worried about the critical density of wrinkles on the face, sagginess under the chin, brown spots on the back of the hands. It seemed that this complex arithmetic of signals was registered in a flash by single males of the species, whereupon they would turn away to talk to a younger woman if there was one about. The men my age were getting wattles, too, but I didn’t look away from them.
As I anticipated turning sixty, I felt a new sense of urgency. If I really wanted to have a partner, I figured I’d better get busy, before the wrinkles around my mouth branched into my very lips. Afraid of being alone when I was really and truly old, I wanted to find someone who would have me before I moved on from the stage of gently faded gray to the even less marriageable stage of acrid breath. I wanted to find someone who, later on, could push my wheelchair, if it came to that. (I kept forgetting that if I did manage to hook up with a man my age, it might be just in time for me to start pushing his wheelchair.)
I embarked on a bout of dating, looking, as a friend put it, for “Codger Right.” I called a dating service that advertised on the classical music station on the radio, so it had a veneer of propriety. They used to arrange dinners for three men and three women.