Aunt Helen knew aging was not for the faint of heart

Opinion

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This article was published 06/05/2024 (518 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘No one gets out alive.”

That’s what my Aunt Helen would tell me as she faced the end of her own life. You might have had an Aunt Helen of your very own. Wise, full of mirth, though well acquainted with loss, for her eldest son had died of cancer in the prime of his life.

She was an adept juggler of competing claims, independent of mind, enraged by discrimination in any form, and, at any moment, willing to challenge its barbarity.

Magnificently ahead of the time in which she was born, opposed to domestic servitude, my Aunt Helen discovered her own strength and meaning, and, naturally and without apology, transgressed stifling convention wherever it stood in her way or in the way of others.

I adored her. She lived in Detroit, I lived in Winnipeg. As she aged, she shared her third-act wisdom. We would talk on the phone regularly — towards the end of her life, daily. She would advise that aging was not for the faint of heart, remind me not only that no one got out of this life alive, but also that marijuana-infused cookies provide welcome diversion.

Lovingly supportive and encouraging, she deepened my understanding of what is possible if a woman concerns herself with things that matter. When I stood in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. along with a million others advocating for the right of women to choose, I noted poster after poster carried by those with photos of their mothers, whose history and legacy they intended to bring with them.

I called Aunt Helen to share this experience with her. We cried together in the bittersweet that defines such activism. She was unable to travel. My own mother had died years before. We brought our small, valiant circle into the centre of the Mall, her time and mine, intersecting, alive.

While my Aunt Helen’s short-term memory faded, her long-term memory remained bursting with experience and insight. She could recite Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, long-ago memorized, even as she forgot the question she had just formulated.

She told and retold the stories of her childhood bright beside a river I too had come to love, and together, by phone, we would walk from her cottage round the corner to the one my grandfather had built, which became my own summer paradise.

She recalled to life the small enclave of Old World Jews who lived in cottages, legendary figures — ludologists stationed round poker tables; alchemists spicing steamy kitchens.

Aunt Helen died in 2016 at 93; my husband, Mendel, died in 2017 at 68. I am, in 2024, a new 74. When my Aunt Helen referenced that aging was not for the faint of heart, she also noted that I would not understand what she was saying until I met such a reality on my own.

She was right, of course, as she was right in so many things. When I wake in the morning, I see much of my own mother’s face in the mirror. I examine age spots and think of them in relation to the strange facial markings that accompanied my two pregnancies, these maps of momentous occasion the body can present as part of its own luminous narrative.

Twinges and turns, spasms and stitches introduce themselves throughout the day; medications stock my bedside table; appointments with a range of healers proliferate; exercise promises are followed then unfollowed; a lunch out with the friends who remain begins with an audit of prescriptions and continues with stories of those withering and those whose chances have disappeared.

From a theoretical point of view, in our early adult years, we understood that time would advance, that our health would fail in any number of ways, our capacities diminish and we would say farewell to many loved ones, just as the few remaining would say farewell to us when our time came.

The theoretical point of view prevailed for decades; theory now, however, becomes practice. We think deeply about the time that comes in the now we are living. We prepare. That preparation is layered, fraught, sometimes overwhelming. Each of us will bring the world we have created in our lifetime to the threshold of our departure.

Aunt Helen noted with clarity, courage and compassion this inevitability — the staging of a mortal life requiring an ending that cannot be outwitted. Her insight lives in me, deepening the significance of every step and breath I take toward my existence as a memory in the imagination of those who follow.

Poignant, this last act; transformative its power.