A former colleague joined the recurrent Ovarian Cancer club recently and we have re-connected in a sisterhood far beyond tax fairness. We accept our reality while exploring every avenue for slowing our walk towards death. She wrote a poem I share below. I, with recurrence in 2011, relinquished my envy of old age as I focused on living long enough to turn 60. I have friends who would love to reach 50, or 40, or 30 and suspect they will not. As a child the first phrase that I was ever motivated to memorize was, “I cried because I had no shoes until I saw a man with no feet.” But admitting what we envy is to be human.
Before dying at age 44, a friend interviewed “little old ladies” so that she could experience that future knowing she would never live it. I loved that problem solving just as I love Sandra’s clarity with words.
Old Age Envy by Sandra Morgen
Envy unleashed:
walking past a man in his 70s
hauling himself down
an uneven path
before summer heat
boils the morning.
Last night
under a vine maple
lit by a gibbous moon
the silhouette of
a couple in their 80s
her blanched hair escaping hairpins
his back straight with effort
frail fingers knotted.
I used to dread old age
imagining loss, dementia,
fading, being a burden.
Cancer trumps those forebodings
incubating envy
but not resentment
an aching appreciation
of what is unlikely to be.
livingly dying 