Late-Life Love Page 8
Old lovers know that love does not conquer all, that our intimacy cannot establish a safe haven somewhere, someplace for us. We are vulnerable to miseries that make us opaque to each other. Yet even if we are stuck or stumped, we are living and learning and loving. Despite everything, Winnie wants to be grounded in her newborn expectancy. She has turned into a role model. Beckett is probably rolling over in his grave.
At times Winnie considers the teasing incongruity between who she is now and who she had been then: “To have been always what I am—and so changed from what I was.” At these moments, she knows, words may fail, and one must wait for them to return. And even though there are no remedies, transitional objects prop us up. The apparatuses of the aged—walkers, wigs, hearing aids—become part of us but also not-us. They may not be as treasured as toddlers’ teddy bears or security blankets, yet they help us cope with loss. As a prominent scholar of aging, Kathleen Woodward, once speculated, the transitional objects of old age symbolize and mediate our separation from the lives we used to lead and maybe also our ultimate separation from life itself. Munchkin, my mother’s chipmunk, takes on new meaning. The props at yoga for cancer patients—bricks, straps, bolsters, chairs—do too. “Shake me up, Judy”: isn’t that Dickensian tagline also an imaginative prompt and prop?
Tomorrow morning and the next and the next, I will maneuver around the walker in the narrow ground-floor bathroom to position a small end table on which I will place a bowl of soapy water and a washcloth.
PART II
grounded
Alterations
OVERNIGHT, THE RAVINE has crept closer. The trees moved in. The leaves on their branches extend out over the small strip of the grassy backyard, shadowing the back rooms of the Inverness. Light splashing through the windows illuminates the front living room, where Don sits with a book or the new iPad Susannah has sent. But I recline in the family room, where a lamp has to be turned on. It’s not easy to do, because a knob has fallen off the light fixture, and I hurt my fingers twisting the little switch. Whenever the exhausting chores allow, I sit on the blue couch with my legs outstretched, a book or the laptop on them. Except in the joy of cooking, I am no domestic goddess, nor was meant to be.
I have always resented spending time or money or thought on upkeep. When in the past I went with Fran to look at new cabinets for her kitchen, I admired the interest she took. Now, when I awake from nightmares about her, my incompetence meshes with apathy about the broken handle on the front screen door. But I must pick out a dishwasher at Sears, run to the pharmacy or grocery, cook dinner, do the laundry and dishes, take out the garbage and recycling, and plan another dinner while it rains and clears and then rains again.
The boon of reading is like that of quilting: it can be picked up and put down and then picked up again. To be within reach of call, I am settling down for the duration with the books I have been collecting in my study, bringing them downstairs, one and then another. With Don less and less communicative, the books are my constant companions.
Reading certainly provides an escape, when I get lost in a book. But, Rebecca Mead reminds us, “a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.” Besides grasping and holding us, books sometimes read us, clarifying the issues we confront. In the best moments, according to the playwright Alan Bennett, a perception or feeling “you had thought special and peculiar to you” is “set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
The hand reached out by Ovid steadies me. The boon of reading his tale about late-life love cannot be attributed entirely to its regenerative transformations. Every aspect of the brief section devoted to Baucis and Philemon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses speaks of aging and deterioration, yet the fable glows with affection for its late-life lovers and then for its even later-life lovers. When we first encounter the couple, they are enfeebled by advancing age, and by the end of their tale they are thoroughly exhausted. Clearly Ovid’s account has not been integrated into the tradition usually mapped as the history of love’s discourse. Writing about love, meaning young love, Roland Barthes declared, “In no love story I have ever read is a character ever tired.” But Ovid and those who follow him by producing stories of late-life love often describe fatigued lovers.
The teller of the tale, Lelex, is himself getting on: he exhibits judgment that “had been ripened by his years” (872). And he, in turn, first heard the story from “sensible seniors” (1014). He narrates the long-ago time when Jupiter and Mercury, disguised as mortals, were met with a thousand bolted doors in one town before being welcomed into a humble hut by “a couple equally advanced in years” who were wed in their house “and there grew old” (892). Baucis, the wife, and Philemon, the husband, grew old together in a relationship noteworthy for its reciprocity. Too impoverished to have servants, they therefore have no masters in the house, “for there were only two there, and the one / commanding was the same one who obeyed” (898–99).
Lelex emphasizes their equality, their poverty, and also how the couple has been affected by the passage of time. Their door looks ramshackle. Baucis huffs and puffs to resuscitate a flame from yesterday’s coals. The “hunk of what had once been bacon,” an “old chine,” was “not at all improved by long-term storage” (914–95). Baucis trembles as she sets a table, which is rickety, requiring her to slip a potsherd underneath its shortest leg. Her cracked cups are repaired with yellow wax. Despite the couple’s patched existence, they represent the sort of domestic harmony that would be associated in the eighteenth century with the elderly Darby and Joan: “He’s dropsical, she is sore-eyed, / Yet they’re ever uneasy asunder.” The names Darby and Joan later became synonymous with social clubs for British pensioners.
Baucis and Philemon’s ample hospitality contrasts with their scant means and results in a simple meal as well as a series of miracles. The opening course they serve is rustic—cabbage, ham, olives, pickles, endives, radishes, fresh cheese, and eggs; the next consists of nuts, figs, dates, plums, apples, and an oozing honeycomb. First, they notice that the earthenware bowl for the mixing of wine and water fills up every time it is emptied. Second, since the replenished wine tells them that they are hosting immortals, they resolve to sacrifice their only goose and exhaust themselves chasing it, but the gods keep the bird alive. Then Jupiter and Mercury decide to punish the inhospitable town by flooding it, but they exempt Baucis and Philemon, who, leaning on walking sticks, climb with their guests up a steep mountain. Finally, the gods save the cottage and transform it into a temple with columns, a roof of gold, doors of inlaid bronze, and a marble courtyard.
After the gods ask their wish, Philemon consults with Baucis to obtain their mutual decision. They want to be allowed to guard the temple as its priests and, more importantly, request that eventually “the same hour take us both together, / And that I should not live to see her tomb / Nor she survive to bury me in mine” (994–99). Neither Baucis nor Philemon wants to be widowed; they fear the survivor’s grief and loneliness.
The moral maxim with which Lelex concludes his story—“Let those who reverence / the gods be reverenced as gods as well” (1020–21)—strikes me as close to the mark, until I think about what exactly the gods have done in this fable. Jupiter and Mercury, offended at not encountering an open-door policy, have obliterated an entire town and the multitude of people who resided in it. Isn’t this a case of overkill? The flooding reminds me of the story of Noah and his wife, Lot and his, and of the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, a part of the seder that always disturbs me.
Although I resist the moral, the metamorphosis of the couple strikes me as compelling and disquieting. After years spent tending the temple, Baucis and Philemon, depleted by older old age, stand by its columns; they are speaking of their past
w
hen Baucis saw Philemon come into leaf,
and Philemon saw Baucis put forth leaves.
Then, as their faces both were covered over
by the growing treetop, while it was allowed them,
they spoke and answered one another’s speech:
“Farewell, dear spouse!” they both cried out together,
just as their lips were sealed in leafiness. (1005–11)
The leafing wife and husband escape the grief and loneliness of one predeceasing the other. But as C. S. Lewis’s partner knew, death—even if lover and beloved die at the same instant—still constitutes the ultimate divorce . . . a farewell to life itself and to each other. Ovid captures the shocking finality of that separation by depicting the couple’s faces “covered over” and their lips “sealed” at the moment of their final goodbye. The alarm of flesh turning into bark, of limbs turning into boughs, of faces turning into leaves troubles their fate—in part because the metamorphosis of Baucis and Philemon recalls the transformation of another mythic character in Ovid’s book, Daphne.
After the virgin Daphne prays to be delivered from Apollo, the desirous god pursuing her, she feels torpor seeping through her limbs. Her trunk is girdled with a layer of bark, her hair turns into foliage, her head into the summit of a tree, her arms become branches, and sluggish roots staple her feet to the earth (1.756–72). When Apollo feels a breast trembling under the new bark, the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri points out, “It’s not clear where the nymph ends and the tree begins; the beauty of this scene is that it portrays the fusion of two elements, of both beings.” Daphne escapes the rape of Apollo; however, she had wanted to continue chasing through the forest, a chaste huntress. She can retain her chastity only by relinquishing the chase. Daphne, Baucis, and Philemon lose voice, volition, and mobility.
Or do they? I have heard the trees around the Inverness whisper and whistle, rustle and moan; once in a straight-line wind storm, I heard them shriek. They twine and bend like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s thoughts about the sturdy wood of her husband. After Don and I moved to the country, before a road was paved beyond the red shed and through the field and forest beyond it, we regularly tramped a rough path that meandered around a clearing of rocks placed in a circle—we called it the Shrine of the Virgin Sacrifices—and into tangled thickets with crowns that hummed and thrummed. We have watched trees closer to the house bow, turn, and twist their arms and also their trunks when they grew curved, lost a branch, or went up in flames, hit by lightning as was one of our giant fir trees. We smell the scents of their foliage, see them blossom, fork, wrinkle, shed, drink, wave, shelter birds, and heal their own wounds.
The pioneering thinker Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick believed that after her demise she would be “differently extant.” Baucis and Philemon as intertwined trees—they are described as “an oak and linden, side by side” at the beginning of the tale (877) and “side by side, / sprung from a single trunk” at its close (1013–14)—are exactly that, differently extant. They are separated neither from each other nor from life itself. Although they can no longer speak in a language we understand, they remain braided on earth.
Nestled together permanently, they abide differently, which is what Don and I must learn to do, which is what the aging Baucis and Philemon must have learned to do even before their transformation, when they trekked with their sticks out of the drowned town to tend the temple. Now Don and I cannot leave the Inverness without difficulty. The heavy cobalt-blue cast keeps us mostly house-bound. The town hardly exists for us.
However, we have heard about a resource called Agewise Design. Its “Certified Aging-in-Place Specialists” suggest renovations to ensure the safety of older people in their own homes. We will invite them for a consultation. Maybe the ground-floor bathroom can be made more accessible. In other respects, I have made the ground floor habitable, though I miss our bed upstairs. Its old-fashioned wooden frame charmed me when we found it, probably because I had never before had a real headboard. Both Don and I grew up in makeshift sleep areas—on sofa beds in our parents’ apartments: his on an enclosed porch, mine in a living room. At our visit to a bed store, we were both amused when I tested out firmness by lying down on a succession of mattresses, and the salesman said to Don, “I’m sure your daughter will find one to her liking.”
The bed in the ground-floor bedroom has no headboard. Getting into and out of it constitutes the single most difficult activity of Don’s day. When Susannah arrived here for the second surgery, she bought a new mattress. The previous one really did need to be replaced. Don and I had purchased it two decades ago for my former husband. Because he could not live alone while recuperating from heart bypass surgery, he recovered in the ground-floor bedroom.
During the next twenty years, how many guests slept on that bed? Dyan or Rick visiting for a weekend, Jonathan when he was commuting from Chicago, my British cousins when they came to surprise my mother, Don’s sister, our children and their partners, Mary and Andrew’s kids, and Sandra. I have stuffed two pint-sized rocking chairs, a scooter, and a plastic frog full of Legos into the closets to make room for clean stacks of Don’s camper outfits, a commode, a laundry basket, and all the lotions and potions that do not fit into the adjacent bathroom.
Ovid’s tale charms in its depiction of the sort of hospitality Don and I used to relish—not formal, but easygoing and unpretentious: brunches for graduate students on the back porch, the sun streaming through the skylight; suppers in the dining room for newly tenured, retained, or departing colleagues. Even though Baucis and Philemon could not catch their goose, the appetizing meal they serve suits their beaming expressions of goodwill. Did the capricious gods save the goose because they were satiated, or did they relish the prospect of watching decrepit Baucis and Philemon chase after it? I no longer have the time or the energy to cook for others, and Don has neither the physical nor the emotional resiliency to be sociable. Will all that fine hospitality be relegated to our past?
The only socializing I do these days involves not immortals but memorials. Jayne stayed with Don when I went to speak the words he had written for Paul Zietlow’s memorial. They were beautiful words spoken in a beautiful setting—a tent set up in a lush garden—but at the lectern I faced Paul’s widow, who was sitting in the first row weeping. There was a hole in the tent’s roof and when the rain started, it poured down right on the heads of my three most elderly and incapacitated colleagues.
As soon as I got back home, I searched for A. R. Ammons’s poem “In View of the Fact,” a consoling work about late-life lovers mourning the deaths and disabilities of their friends. Ammons begins by expressing his sadness at attending too many funerals. Then he catalogs friends in intensive care, or losing a limb to diabetes, or left alone in an empty house. His poem captures the sorrow of an address book with names and numbers scratched out, of holiday cards being replaced by sympathy cards, and yet he conveys the need to hang on to the ones still living.
What seems remarkable is not his vow that he and his wife will love every one of their losses, but the next step. Ammons imagines that after he and his wife die, they will “leave it to / others to love, love that can only grow brighter / and deeper till the very end, gaining strength / and getting more precious all the way. . . .” Love is not a limited substance (like a quart of fluid) that you can spill or that, given away, is gone. It is more like a blazing torch handed over in a relay or words whispered and transmuted in a children’s game of telephone. This bountiful view of love—a prized activity that can outlive us, intensifying after us—heartens me.
Although our circumstances have nose-dived since I began this project, Ammons seems to be affirming my decision to prize the preciousness of my late-life love by learning how others have envisioned loving in later life. On the anniversary of my father’s death, I decided to be more methodical about the books I have collected. I have amassed quite a few ambitious novels, plays, poems, and movies. I trust they will alter and deepen my understanding, and I can group
them into a more orderly progression. For in these works the issues of late-life lovers fall into easily recognizable categories, some of which I have touched upon but all of which present new complications.
First of all, sexuality—in same-age but also in winter-spring relationships: sex involving older lovers arrives with its unique inhibitions, motivations, practices, and pleasures. And then problems related to inheritance and retirement, obstructionist adult children, the transformation of temporality in older age, the caretaking needed by ailing partners, and the subtractions or multiplications of memories in aging lovers. Each portrait in these quite different creative works will undoubtedly record a mutated facet of later-life love. Each will serve as a guidepost providing information on the highways and byways of my own later-life partnership.
I want the books especially—vibrant and nuanced—to take precedence over boring domestic routines during a period in which Don and I can at least intermittently hope for his partial recovery. I’m beginning again, but then when am I not beginning again? There have been comebacks before: after my father’s suicide, after the divorce, after the terrible surgeries. After 2013, the predicted date of my demise, I became a sort of revenant. “Who would have thought my shriveled heart / Could have recovered greenness?” And I have a map now, marking tracks through the terrain, providing the pleasurable prospect of an evolving project.
Like Baucis and Philemon feeding the gods or relying on walking sticks, Don cannot move the way he used to, and to a lesser extent this is true for me as well. Is it age that covers us like a bark and puts down encumbering roots? Will we splinter like ancient trunks? Inflexible, he creaks and hesitates or groans before planting a foot down to rise or take a small step. While the bark thickens and the roots stiffen, arresting us, we must come to terms with the metamorphosis of aging. Here resides the difference between the fate of Baucis and Philemon, on the one hand, and the destiny of fleet-footed Daphne, on the other.