LEARNING TO BE ELDERLY

Mary H Steenson

“Just what do you think of us, Mary?” she barked, concluding a contentious telephone exchange.

Exasperated, I tried to drive home my point.

“I think that you and Hughberta are incredibly gifted artists who have lived a remarkable life and now you are elderly and in need of our help and advice.”

“Hah!” a resounding harrumph came over the wire.

“Elderly! She says we’re elderly!” Zora shouted to her nearly deaf sister, Hughberta, before the phone was banged down into the cradle.

That abrupt conversation took place thirty-three years ago. I am now the age that Zora was then: elderly. I try to be less defensive about it than Zora and Hughberta were, but I admit that I can be a bit prickly in response to intimations of my advanced age. The perky young doctor who solicitously inquired if I’d recently fallen received a sharp reply. I do not fall. I am quite limber and agile. Which is a lie. My knees often ache and I must pull myself up from a squat or a kneeling position. I have hearing aids and quite a few of my teeth didn’t show up in my mouth organically. However, I am in better physical shape than Zora was at my age. I don’t denigrate all members of the medical profession as “quacks” and I know for certain that a Tylenol will not lower my blood pressure, so I haven’t denied my arterial system a little pill which might have assisted my venerable aunt.

I am sprier and, perhaps more reasonable than Zora and Hughberta in their dotage, but I am not, never was and never will be as brilliantly creative as they were throughout their long lives. Zora, in particular, painted until she could barely distinguish one color from another and she created magnificent, large collages from strips of wrapping paper, almost by braille. I cannot fathom how she managed that.

My admiration for them is boundless. My gratitude is enormous, for I and my husband, their nephew, own hundreds of their paintings, sketches and drawings. It is my late-in-life mission to share the stories of these two women: sisters who lived their independent lives, making a living one way or another as artists without the support that marriage might have given.

Replaying long past conversations, altercations at times, with the two artists, I hear my impatient voice and it grates on my sensibilities. An unwarranted self-assurance is painfully obvious. Did it never occur to me that if I was fortunate, I would one day be their age? It’s an odd defensive mechanism that brushes off implications of progressive birthdays. When I was fifty, slim and capable, I considered it to be their failing: at eighty years of age, a person should accept the inevitable, suck it up and deal with it.

“How does this happen to a person, Mary? How does this-” she pointed to a swollen calf, scratched in the effort of dismounting from a stationary bike, “just all of a sudden happen?”

The agility, the ease of movement, the automatic muscular response to neural commands had abandoned her and she seemed baffled at its absence. My retort was less than sympathetic.

“Well, Zora, I guess that is the price one pays for the gift of a long, productive life.”

Zora at eighty-two had indeed lived a long and productive life. If the astonishment she expressed wasn’t ironic it might have been evidence that mental decline was accompanying her physical impairments. Zora wasn’t usually ironic; that was one of Hughberta’s favorite figures of speech, and Zora was not losing her mind, either. She was lucid enough to write and illustrate a children’s book titled Grandfather’s Farm.I was allowed a fleeting glimpse of the manuscript and the charming images of children, a skill she had perfected many years earlier as a greeting card artist. Peering over her shoulder, I could only guess that the two little girls sliding down a haystack were Hughberta and herself, children in North Dakota early in the twentieth century. I asked, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps she was annoyed with me over an unrelated issue. Or perhaps the story was a precious memory that she could share in art but not conversationally. At any rate, she quickly covered the leaves with a blank sheet of drawing paper, pushed back her chair and left the table. My offer to send her ms to a friend who worked as an editor for a Chicago publishing house was rebuffed with a huff. She had a publisher. Unfortunately, the one and only copy of her work was sent off to some New York address that she came upon in a magazine. Her beautiful book was not only not published, her submission was neither acknowledged nor returned.

I can’t say that I have never made a poorly researched mistake like that. I have; I do and I don’t chalk it up to senility or mad cow disease. My mistakes reflect a lapse of attention: nothing new in my behavior but I’m not likely to volunteer accounts of my screw-ups. It wasn’t comfortable for her, either, but a year or two later Zora finally admitted that she had not heard from the “publisher.” Probably, she sent the manuscript off surreptitiously- she may not even have told Hughberta- in an effort to save the day, bringing in income that would secure their independence. I ask myself: am I committing the same kind of folly? Well, at least I’m not keeping my efforts a secret.

It’s a tricky business, this aging process. Hughberta was fond of remarking that old age was not for sissies. As one of the first women inducted into the US Marine Corps, a Sergeant First Class during the Second World War, she was definitely not a sissy. Fortitude is required to stay in the game well past the day you received your AARP membership, no doubt about it. However, sheer gutsiness is not enough. A person can find herself self-sabotaged and forsaken, alone, her white plume of toughness unsullied by compromise or alternately, humbled, accepting the help and guidance offered even though it ‘s extended with an officiousness that sticks in her craw.

Of all the gifts I have received from Zora and Hughberta, incalculable really, certainly one of the greatest is a demonstration of how not to confront old age. Father time, I’ve observed, can be cold and merciless. Best to meet him with a friendly demeanor. No matter how angry or in denial one may feel about his intrusion, it would be wise to admit that he holds the upper hand.