54 essays on aging yield wide-ranging viewpoints
When Nan Narboe reached her 60s, the ground beneath her shifted unsettlingly.
She had never lied about her age, but now, when people asked how old she was, she experienced a disconnect.
“I had a sense of not knowing what I was talking about when I named my own age,” she said. “I’d never had that experience before, and I didn’t much like it.”
The feeling, echoed in conversations she’d had in 40-plus years of working as a psychotherapist, became the catalyst for “Aging: An Apprenticeship,” an anthology of essays published this year.
A supermodel nearing 50 wonders about the confidence she would have developed “had I relied on wit rather than looks.” A former executive in his 70s recalls when he hit 50 and no one would hire him. A writer in her 90s muses on why exclamation marks disappeared from her writing as she aged.
Some of Narboe’s discomfort about speaking her age lay in the chasm between her experience and the images she saw of aging in the culture, which tended toward depletion and not enrichment.
“Some of the ideas people have about aging are pretty toxic,” she said. “People fixate on the losses and are missing the other half of the story.”
The jumble of emotions that can accompany aging reminded Narboe of the shift from childhood to adulthood, a comparison that’s echoed in several of the essays.
“A child’s body is very easy to live in. An adult’s body isn’t,” writes Ursula Le Guin, who is nearing 90. “It’s such a tremendous change that it’s no wonder a lot of adolescents don’t know who they are. They look in the mirror — that is me? Who’s me? And then it happens again, when you’re 60 or 70.”
Although 12-yearold girls once got a brochure outlining what changes to expect, no such guidebook exists on aging, wrote Jan Slepian (who died in November at 95). “We have to learn about old age on the job.”
The 54 contributors — including Le Guin, Gloria Steinem, William Maxwell and other well-known figures — tackle the horrendous and the sublime, with their takes on aging diverging widely.
In her 60s, Jane Bernstein ponders whether she should throw out the journals she has kept all her life, diaries that, “sporadically kept, are mostly records of despair” and don’t reflect what she would like people to remember of her.
Barbara Neely takes the occasion of her 65th birthday to read through her journals and realize that “the heavy load of fears and foibles I’d once strapped to my back ... had diminished.”
To Narboe, the essays all make sense.
“I think aging tends to refine who the person is,” she said. “So an intellectual becomes more so, a sensualist becomes more so, an adventurer becomes more so.”
The book is divided into decades, from “Nearing 50” to “The 90s and Beyond.” Each essay lists the writer’s birth year along with his or her “subjective age.” For Narboe, now 72, putting the book together helped resolve her disconnect between the two.
“There’s a wonderful veil of denial that I and you and, hopefully, everybody else gets to enjoy, but eventually you realize that ‘ Oh, this era of not questioning my health, my good fortune and everything else not only might come to an end; it will come to an end,’” she said.
“The work I did on the book encountering other people encountering aging somehow took me through a course of study that was useful.
“In a way, immersion is always useful to a person. You come out the other side changed.”
“Aging: An Apprenticeship” (Red Notebook, 298 pages, $22) by Nan Narboe