Learning to live differently, expand repertoire

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/07/2025 (385 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have just turned into a 75-year-old. In reviewing the landscape from this (ad)vantage, I discover surprises that will sustain for however many years I might have left in the galaxy.

My first surprise: I am adaptable. Ten years ago, my late husband and I went shopping to replace the cars we owned that were well past due. For the first time ever, I got a “brand new car,” a small car, spiffy and fire-engine red.

A standard, it made me feel like I was really driving, though family and friends noted with varying measures of chagrin that I was not only a jumpy, bumpy gear shifter, but also given to enthusiastic responses to side shows en route — an impressive rock formation, fetching storefront exhibit, a summer biker dressed as Dracula.

This past month, coincident with the marking of my 75th year, I let the small car go and took over the Subaru I had given to my youngest son after the death of his father. It is much bigger, an automatic, with all the bells and whistles my children feel make me safer on the road, both in terms of other drivers and their own children, whom I transport as befits my expanding role of Baba as up they grow.

That’s another surprise. I expand my repertoire. While my agility fades (well, it was never in top form), I find myself in back-and-forth runs to garden stores with my four-year-old grandson, whose interest in planting flourishes. I haul bags of dirt (the small ones), annuals and bushes into and out of the Subaru and work with him for hours in the afternoon sun.

He is a very good worker. Together, we consider the yield to come, begun in pots and planters in his back and front yard, up high so that his one-year-old dog, a prize digger of dirt, won’t destroy them.

An eager and appreciative gardener for years, in this third act I find myself increasingly euphoric in the presence of what nature gifts — the ambition of perennials, returning every year, in spite of the climate catastrophe we have created.

How is this possible, I ask myself? How is it possible that I get to enjoy this return? As I am closer and closer to my own ending, so too I am more aware of the delicate growth and implacable decline that distinguishes the lifespan of daisy and mallow, day lily and peony. If I do not participate in this return next year (for who knows what may come), my bones burst now with the magic of natural cycles defining the changing conditions of my own life on earth.

And in terms of expansion and awareness, I am present to the preteen blossoming of my 10-year-old granddaughter. I watch the unbridled joy she brings to her dance routine, presented as part of a talent show at her school. I am seated beside other grandparents at the back of the gym, as devoted to their offspring as I.

Right before my granddaughter takes to centre stage, a young gymnast performs remarkable aerial feats, hanging from hot pink silks. The man to my right, her grandfather, sparkling with pride, observes, “That’s my granddaughter.” I can imagine Cirque du Soleil.

When my granddaughter finishes, he turns to me, “She’s good isn’t she?” We smile. However good or not-so-good these young ones may or may not be, they suggest an ongoing emanation and while I may not share in my granddaughter’s adulthood, I remain free to dream her future, content with what I have been granted thus far.

Content.

A deepening contentment.

I had not expected this. Driven in my adulthood by fear of failure, unsure, struggling to balance competing demands, to meaningfully contribute, I am learning to live differently.

I still wish to create, to be in community, to contribute, but I am gentled by the increasingly swift passage of time, my emerging identity as widow and Baba, the natural curve of declining cognition and the jurisdictions defining an aging body, whose ever-expanding breakdown “surprises,” not because I did not anticipate old age — having lived parts of it with my own parents in the challenges they faced — but because its experience is a kettle of fish unknown before it is lived.

If there is luck in making it to a third act, I don’t intend to squander the teaching such luck provides: realizing the chance to see alternatives; lightening the load of my younger self by letting go of demands that no longer abide; widening and deepening my respect for the rhythms of living and dying circulating within me just as they must through every aspect of creation.

This connectivity, molecular and magnificent, astonishes. I reside in its embrace, resolute and purposeful, inclined toward joy and the surprises taking root within that growing inclination.

arts@freepress.mb.ca