Earlier this month, I read Susan Moon’s memoir, This is Getting Old, and I was pleased to find this sequel, written at age 80.
She no longer worries about getting old “because I already am old, with a history of getting old behind me.“
I don’t exactly worry about getting old, just about the consequences of being old and frail and alone, or with dementia like my grandma, and having to leave my garden. A moderately able bodied and mentally more or less astute old age at home doesn’t scare me.
Susan Moon’s books are written from a Buddhist perspective, with this lovely chant being said at the death of an old friend: Gate, gate, paragate parasamgate, bodhi suaha. (Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone to the other shore. Oh, awakening.) ….
Again I think of the question that I heard Temple Grandin asked in a documentary, upon seeing animals die: “Where do they go?”
Susan’s friend “was “gone.” Her body was in the same spot, but everything was different. A body of absence lay on the bed. Where did she go- the one who had been breathing? And not just where, but how? How did she get out of here?“
I do not have an active belief in any kind of afterlife, yet Susan’s writing gives me a glimpse of….maybe…something. “If you’ve been present at both a birth and a death, you know it’s the same gate, whether it says “Entrance” or “Exit” across the top. How do you know? If you get up close to the person who is being born or dying, you can get a fleeting glimpse through the gate to the horizonless expanse on the other side, and it looks the same whether they are coming or going.”
As for coming, we have been seeing a lot of (fictional) births as we watch season after season of Call the Midwife. I was afraid to watch it because, having had a miscarriage and no child, I thought it would depress me. Well, even though it kind of does on occasion, the excellent soap operatic plots and Britishness have me hooked, and Allan seems to like the show as much as I do. I simply had to watch because Miranda Hart was in it.
About the inevitable losses of getting old, Susan Moon writes: “… impermanence is good news, too. Occasionally things change for the better. Even if you’re old and getting older, you can’t assume that tomorrow will be worse than today. Something wonderful might happen quite unexpectedly, or you might collaborate with reality to make something wonderful happen.“
(I think now of the title of another book I was soon to read, Abigail Thomas’s What Comes Next and How to Like It.)
Susan Moon expounds upon her four pieces of advice for aging: Observe, Adapt, Let Go, Accept. Well worth acquiring the book to read that. Our Timberland Regional Library has it.
One of her projects was to transcribe her grandma’s old diaries, when they were sent to her by a family member. “I devoted some time to this transcribing project. …. I started each day with Grandma, visiting with her for half an hour or so, studying her hand-writing, turning several pages of her blue-ink days into a few more paragraphs of Times New Roman…As I typed, the gentle meter of Grandma’s life wove itself into mine, giving a sense of rhythm to my more chaotic days.”
Oh, how very much that moves me with its reminder of when I transcribed my mother’s garden diaries. During that time, in 2016, I would put, in this blog, the entry from my mother that matched the date of my own days, and I also made posts of entire months of my mother’s life between age 70 and 74, which can be found herein with the search term Ginger’s Garden Diaries. I realise now that a worthwhile project would be to get those posts shared, in order, over on my quite obscure Grandma’s Scrapbooks blog. A retirement project, along with garden maps.
The chapter about her grandma’s death had me in tears. Her grandma said, “I have had a long & satisfying life & don’t want to be greedy. There is even a chance of seeing those I have loved in the past.” A chance! My grandmother is who I would want to see, and Bryan, and my lost cats, especially Smoky, and my mother, to say I wish I had tried harder.
Susan reflects that “….the Grandma who lives inside me doesn’t need a beating heart-she can share mine. I animate her with my thoughts and with these words I’m writing. You could say I’m making her up, but she’s making me up, too.
Quite naturally, I think about death more as I get older. I’m further from Grandma’s death in time and yet her death comes closer to me as I get closer to my own.”
My grandmother died after two years of dementia in a horrible dirty nursing home where she was sometimes tied to her bed, and where on my weekly visits (a long bus ride on three buses) she would beg me to take her home, and I would have to say (because I was buying her house, which my uncle had been going to sell to pay for her nursing home fees, even though he was rich) that I had to work to pay the mortgage or the house, which she had wanted me to inherit, would be lost. Once I cleaned feces from under her finger nails. She was not well cared for there. I hope that in her dreams, she was home. Years later, I found out that Allan, who had known her for several of her last good years, visited her, too.
Gram’s frequent comment as she aged at home, healthy till age 78, was that she wanted “to die in the garden with my boots on and bees buzzing around my head.” An advantage of not having children is that there will be no one but some sort of state authority to have me taken away. My uncle had to call a policeman to get her out of her house, and when he got her to his house, she tried to push him down the stairs. The problem was, she could not stand being told what to do, and the kind caregiver who lived with her toward the end of her life in her adored “little red house” quit when my grandmother broke the caregiver’s glasses in a struggle about whether or not Gram should climb the ladder to the attic. These are all things that would have horrified my grandmother if she had known what she was doing, and they do strike great fear of aging into me. But enough of that painful set of memories…
Susan writes of a visit to Mount Auburn cemetery, whose beauty I recently read about in a book about Emily Dickinson’s garden. “On a visit back to Cambridge a couple of years ago, my friend Fanny took me for a walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery…. It’s the most beautiful cemetery I know. It was a June evening, and the whole park glowed in the late sun: trees, shrubs, curving pathways. We heard birds singing good night and frogs croaking. Life abounded among the graves. Fanny showed me the plot she had reserved for herself and said she could hardly wait to lie down and rest in this beautiful spot. Fanny alive and Fanny dead were both at home here, where the last of the season’s lilacs were still in bloom.”
Here is described a very satisfying and meaningful sort of display to include, two days early, with our annual Halloween display. “Every year around November 2, the Day of the Dead, I make an altar just inside the front door of our house, in the Mexican tradition, on which I place photos of loved ones who have died, along with flowers and candles and little skeletons and maybe some extra Halloween candy.….I encourage you to make a Day of the Dead altar in your home and leave it there for a week or so. Spread a bright cloth over a small table and put some candles on it-you can get convincing electric candles these days if you don’t want live flames in the house. You can decorate the altar with photos and other mementoes of your loved ones, like your father’s pocket watch or a box of the mints your mother liked. Or add autumn leaves and fruits and flowers.” Perhaps our Halloween helpers would like to participate in creating such a thing. But not until 2024 when we are more retired. Maybe we could set it up on Alicia’s front lawn, where there is plenty of room, but someone would have to keep a close eye on it, so maybe it needs to be closer. I will give this some thought.
This is a beautiful idea, although too indoor-social for me: “Last year I invited a few friends to come over on the evening of the Day of the Dead and to bring for the altar a photo of someone they loved who had died in the past year. I lit the candles on the altar; offered wine, tea, and pumpkin pie in the Oaxacan spirit of celebration; and we hung out together. Then by turn we told each other about the people in the photographs. We living people were celebrating our dead people, we were witnessing each other’s love for the departed ones, and we were welcoming them back into the room as our guests. ….Our individual griefs blended into one grief so that none of us was alone, and the people who had already died, the ones we cried for, sat together on the altar, keeping each other company, so they weren’t alone either.‘
Susan advises reading the obituaries in the newspaper. “These doctors and sunbathers, burping grandpas and motorcycle riders, remind me to be myself right now and to offer what I have to offer. I don’t have time to turn myself into somebody else who can offer what somebody else offers. I’m a human being who’s going to die, and I have the chance to be alive, as me, until I’m dead.”
She quotes a haiku by Susan Ashley, with which I fell in love:
A gardener’s haiku:
Let the weeds rejoice
Over my remains, free from
My grasping fingers.
I want to make a sign of that for my garden.
For sorting out one’s possessions before dying, she suggests a book called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, now on my must read list.
It is comforting to know that despite a lifetime of spiritual study, Susan Moon hasn’t figured it out, either.
“Sometimes I feel as though I’ve spent the first three quarters of my life getting ready to live and now, instead of actually living, I’m spending the last quarter getting ready to die. What a waste!“
I particularly like the several pages toward the end about continuing to be politically active even when quite old. “Back in the sixties, we had some good ideas about how to make social change, but this is a different time, and we elders, even the savviest among us, are in a different phase of our lives- the last one. To be blunt, we’re all going to be dead fairly soon. The Movement for Black Lives, the Green New Deal, the movement for LGBTQ rights, and the Sunrise Movement (with apologies to the many other important movements I’m unintentionally leaving out) were not created by old sixties activists.” She remembered that when she was young, she was encouraged to see old people at a demonstration. (I am not sure if that is still generally true; I observe that generations are now stirred up more than ever before by the media to dismiss each other’s wisdom and to be at odds.)
In her spiritual practice, Susan chants “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” And she writes,
“A person who can vow to save all sentient beings can’t quail at working for environmental, economic, and racial justice, can she? Even if she is old?”
Finally, Susan Moon’s bio on the last page says “She hopes that this will be her last book about old age and death.” Is it wrong of me to hope there will be another, perhaps when she is 88, and that I will be around to read it?
Tangly Cottage Gardening 