'What if instead of dreading aging, we continued to idealize it?' (via latimesopinion )
In a two-week period doctors told me that I had a small tumor in my breast and that my Hodgkin’s lymphoma had come back, for the third time. I was 36. As I waited for test results I found that in addition to the two cancers, I’d developed something else: a rare case of geriatric envy.
I began daydreaming about the prospect of growing old. The sight of an elderly woman would bring me to tears.My preoccupation wasn’t entirely out of character. Growing up, I was close with my grandmother. She was classy, funny and cool. I remember watching her methodically reapply her lipstick when we’d go out to eat. She’d teach me Yiddish phrases: insults, for the most part — but now and again words of wisdom, like “Mann tracht, un gott lacht,” or “Man plans, and God laughs.
It wasn’t too long after that that I got cancer for the first time. Instead of a college orientation session with other 18-year-olds, I found myself in a chemotherapy treatment room where the other patients were four times my age. It wasn’t the peer group I’d planned on, but there was a comfort in sharing that sort of space as we confronted the pain and uncertainty of life.
I was fortunate to get through it, each time: at 18, in my 20s and again at 36. Now, with the cancer behind me, as my 40th birthday approaches I’m wondering why other people my age are so hung up on getting older? Personally I’m going to be celebrating. What if instead of dreading aging, we continued to idealize it? As children, after all, we champ at the bit to do grown-up things: stay up late, drive a car, fall in love. But as we get older, we romanticize youth, and lose that craving for maturity. We fixate on external decline instead of inner growth in spirit and discernment.A few months ago on a flight to Los Angeles, I sat next to a 75-year-old woman. She exuded sophistication but also a calm contentment.
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