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Growing Old

Reading this essay about aging and our relationship with it brings thoughts of my mother to mind. For decades she had been one of those people who did not age, in my teens and twenties we were often mistaken for sisters. Once she became a grandmother, something inside her changed and it impacted the way she aged and the pace of change. 

Very slowly at first and small invisible ways and then in a chaotic rush as if to remake herself in the image of an older woman - perhaps that of her beloved grandmother. It is not the person she was in her mind, if anything her mental state reversed to a point where there is equilibrium between the two edges she seems to have pushed herself to. Physically feeling much older than she needs to and mentally going quite the opposite direction. 

It is a terrible lack of harmony that I can't begin to explain to her, there is no longer a way to communicate with her as two women with a lot of life experience might with each other. I have to wonder if she could not keep up the fight against elderhood on two fronts at once - mental and physical. This may be her way to get to a center that will hold, in a way that makes sense to her even if does not to me.

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