dancingthroughchaos

“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” – Fred Astaire

“The first hundred years are the hardest.” – Wilson Mizner (US playwright)

My mother has just celebrated her 90th birthday.  

Despite not wanting a party, to see hordes of people, to dress up, to go anywhere or engage with any socially demanding occasion, she responded very positively to a cream tea in the garden a week before The Big Day with friends, neighbours and a smattering of relatives.  Phew!

The whole endeavour was a logistical challenge, and despite drought conditions leaving the grass crackling beneath our feet, and the flower beds looking more Benin than Banstead, it seems that we pulled it off and she was glad that we did it. Phew, again!

The following week, on The Actual Day, she also enjoyed an afternoon with the three daughters at a quiet hotel in Surrey, where she tucked into a three tiered afternoon tea.  More scones, more cake, more memories unpacked and more restrained celebrations.  Also a success.  Double phew!

If we go by the traditional three score and ten, then she’s already had a bonus score of years.  This fact meets with a variety of responses.  Most people raise a respectful cheer and make polite noises, as if taking consecutive breaths for such a period of time is down to a combination of talent, practice and personal choice.  However, just a week ago, I spoke to a lady who told me she had no aspirations to reach ninety.  She’s currently in her eighties and can’t wait to ‘go home’.  She’s tired, bored and exasperated by a body that won’t do what she wills it to anymore.  How frustrated she is.

Mum, meanwhile, boasts to anyone who will listen that she is now the oldest member of her church congregation. The previous owner of that title (who was a mere twenty days older than her), shed his mortal coil a couple of years ago, so she is now the official ‘oldster’.

In spite of this, she’s not slowing down.  For better or worse, she still drives, mows the lawn, weeds and prunes the garden, navigates the stairs and visits Waitrose most days, waving to various shopkeepers along the route, many of whom she has known for the better part of her life.  They know her by name and will notice if she doesn’t make the daily trip.  Once again that local John Lewis establishment has kindly given her flowers to mark The Big Day.  

Mum has lived in her house for over 60 years now, and will not be going through the shenanigans of down-sizing any day soon.  She fully intends to leave here ‘in six bits of wood’ only.  Not the prettiest way to talk about your coffin, but then she trained as a midwife in the 1950s and tends to call a spade a spade.  

She recently asked me about the term ‘woke’, by which she was seriously baffled.  I think she’d come across it in a newspaper article somewhere.  Grateful as she is to wake each morning herself, she couldn’t wrap her head around what the word might mean in modern parlance.  Various other terms have passed her by which can inadvertently throw metaphorical hand grenades into conversation – always interesting and sometimes terribly embarrassing.  She drops politically incorrect clangers at frequent intervals, but I think perhaps because she’s as old as she is, more often than not she seems to get away with it.

I am increasingly aware that there will probably not be too many more birthdays for us to celebrate together, so this one is particularly special.  While, as they say, ‘growing old is not for sissies’, I have known several friends who would love to have stuck around to see such an age but instead, left way too early as far as I’m concerned.  Having gone to yet another funeral this week, it feels rather poignant today.

As it is, we will endeavour to savour the time we have left, which could well be another ten years, in which case a telegram from the Monarch will be received with great enthusiasm.  Meanwhile, she has no desire to travel anywhere else and is content to keep her grey matter ticking with sudoku, crossword puzzles and Countdown.  As long as she remembers to turn on her hearing aids, she does remarkably well.

I can’t help but wonder whether I will be in such good nick if I get to such a grand old age.  Much as I loathe the news that ‘we’re all getting older’, the longer recovery period after injury reminds me that none of us can dodge truth for ever.  So, while none of us knows what the future holds, I’m encouraged that each of us can know the One who holds that future safely in His hands.  I know Mum does.