What Am I Going To Do With The End Of My Life?

In the past few months I have come to accept that I am in the last third of my life. Next year I will be seventy. Typing those words makes my stomach heave. As my daughter, who is worried about my living so far away from her and her sister said, “You’re getting old mom.” I laughed, explaining that I knew that, but in truth, it didn’t seem at all funny to me. I really don’t like that fact a whole lot, and don’t like thinking about it. I can avoid the topic because I am in such good health, other than memory loss, which is a real bother, and even frightening at times. That topic will have to be tackled on another day, perhaps in next month’s blog. To get back on task, for now I take Nia four times a week, a dance/exercise form that is really fun and raises a sweat,, walk or swim on the fifth day, and often walk on the wooded trails around my house on the weekends as well. I’ve eaten organic for years, and am weaning myself off sugar. And yet. And yet. None of these things will keep me from aging, and eventually becoming ill, and at some point, dying. We all do. Which brings me to the title of this piece. If I accept all of the above, how do I want to live these final years? Final, even if there are twenty or more of them left to me. One of my Nia friends has just taken a class about dementia. Apparently, an organized form of exercise, like Nia, which utilizes your body and your mind (keeping track of the moves), is the best thing you can do to keep that one at bay. Phew. I know I want to keep writing, because I love the process and it activates my brain. A new novel will be listed on Amazon.com within the next month, and I am already over 300 pages into the next one, called Mishpucha. That means ‘family’ in yiddish. The research has taught me a lot I didn’t know about my own genealogy, which has been both fascinating and exciting. Spending time with my grandsons and my daughters always makes me feel vibrant and alive, even if the girls and I have minor tiffs now and then. We work our way through them – they are their mother’s daughters – and move on. And finally, my partner in life, whom I loved over thirty years ago, and now live with, enriches my life beyond any of my expectations, and says I do the same for him. We laugh together often and hard, and can talk about anything, even the personal stuff between us which is often so difficult to do. Our sex life is alive and well, though I sometimes wonder if the mother who yelled at me when I was four: ‘you are a dirty little girl,’ when she caught her daughter and me looking at one another’s private parts, was right. Only now I’m a dirty old lady. My partner thinks that’s hilarious, and says ‘thank God for that!’ These are the ways I engage with life already, and the ways I will continue to engage, I suppose, since all of these people and activities help keep my life fertile, abundant. I can’t imagine not doing any of them. There was an article in the New York Sunday Times yesterday about people who are dying but keep on doing all the activities that give their life meaning, and who leave this plain content. That seems a good prescription to me, and a perfect answer to the above question. So be it.