A couple of weeks ago, my mother brought my grandmother to my house for Easter lunch. When they left, Grandma paced inch-by-inch down the sidewalk, clutching her walker, while my mom leaned on her cane and limped to the car. I walked them out and as Grandma was attempting to fold herself into the front seat while my mother stood with one hand attempting to quell the pain in her back, I quipped, “Hey! I see my future right here,” and I swept my hand at the scene and said, “and I’m scared!”
They both laughed at my feeble joke, but the truth is, I wasn’t joking. I bent down and lifted my grandmother’s swollen foot up into the car and she winced and groaned at the pain. The hip joint has deteriorated and even that tiny movement shot searing pain up her leg and to her hip. She even said, “Oh, that hurts,” which is as dramatic as she gets.
I never liked being young. I was eager to get through my teen years as quickly as possible. I didn’t savor my high school years or wish that time would slow down. I could hardly stand the excruciatingly slow pace of adolescence and the walled off borders of teenage-dom. I wanted out and I wanted out yesterday.
My college years raced by, though, in a blur of longing and confusion and fretfulness. And before I knew it, I was married. My twenty-sixth birthday depressed me, but only because we had been trying to start a family and ended up caught in a maze of infertility and adoption attempts and all I wanted was to be a mother. I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to sleep in, more than I wanted to have a career, more than I wanted chocolate chip cookies. So, when I turned twenty-six, I moped around.
But before I knew it, I was a mother (to twins!) and then, in a flash, I turned thirty. And the thirtysomething years marched on and then, what? My fortieth birthday arrived. By then, I had four children and I was trying to remember just exactly why I had been so desperate to be a mother. Okay, not really. Okay, well, not most days, only occasionally because, hello? I never get to sleep in anymore.
My dad died when he was forty-seven. So, on one hand, I am so thankful for every day of living and so aware of the alternative to aging. On the other hand, I see my mother’s eyelids sagging lower and lower as if are too tired to stand up any longer. And I look at my grandmother, lingering a century on this earth, and I dread the day when my eyesight fails and darkness falls, even on a sunshiny day.
How is it fair that just as you become comfortable in your own skin, your skin gets speckled with age spots and bunches in wrinkles around your knuckles? Just when you figure out what to do with your hair, a new stripe of gray appears with a wiry texture. And even your knees betray your age with tiny purple spider veins appearing over the winter under cover of your pant legs. Aging is like receiving a package in the mail that you did not order and you cannot return.
But, oh, the alternative is to never breathe in another lilac spring day and to never watch the tulips grow taller day by day.
Life is too short. Even when you live to be a hundred, like my grandmother, life is too short to focus on the flaws, on the missing pieces, on the crooked places you wish were straight. Life is too short to not take chances, to not speak up, to not stand tall. Life is too short.
Old age will come, ready or not. In the meantime, I will sear into my memory the vision of my daughter dancing a high-step in the back yard and the faces of my boys as they carry homemade bows and arrows made of bamboo in improvised sheaths on their backs. I will appreciate my body sweating on my exercise bike and I will be mindful of the fuel I give my body. I will smile at my face in the mirror and be grateful that I can clip my own toenails. I will snip an armful of lilacs to carry into the house, even though they’ll fade and die in the vase in a week and they’re such a pain to clean up.
Because today, I welcome the fleeting beauty of lilacs into my home. Life is too short and soon, the lilacs will be gone. My boys will abandon the backyard for the wider world. My daughter will find better things to do than to harass the ants on a fine spring day. The neighborhood boys won’t trample mud into my carpet. I’ll have an uninterrupted telephone conversation and I’ll think, oh, I remember when–
Act fast. Get yours now. Life is too short. Already, the tulip petals have fallen. But you can get in on the lilacs if you hurry.
Actual Unretouched Photo 
Beautiful post Mel! Although I’m getting older, I try not to worry too much about the visible signs of aging. I try to focus on my inner age and live my life accordingly.
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I am 52 going on 15 and I will never grow old…at least, not on the inside. This is such a wonderful post, Mel…we truly do need to stop and savor the tulips…and gather the lilacs…and smell the roses. Maybe it’s the beautiful memories we make today that will help us get thru tomorrow. I know after my Dad had his devastating stroke and before he died, he spent a lot of time sleeping and I asked him one day, “What do you dream about?” He told me, “About when you kids were little.” Well, those were the happy years of our lives and if he wanted to snooze and dream about that, more power to him. Now he can rest and dream on all he wants.
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Perhaps this shows that I’m not quite thirty that when I read this post I respond completely to what you are saying about welcoming life. MAinly because I have had to learn to do it, and sometimes I still forget. But when I read about aging I think about all the things I have learned the past few years about, nutrition, and anti-oxidants, and how the Egoscue method helped my feeling way beyond my years joints to realign and feel right again, and how at 29 I feel younger than I did at 18 physically, even with another child germinating and sapping all my energy so I want to nap all the time, and I think that maybe aging won’t be so bad, so far getting older and wiser has been better than young and foolish, and I want to tell everyone about what helped me. This is probably a sign that I am in fact still young and foolish and have no idea what old and wise is.
Anyway, thanks for the reminder to live.
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I love this: “Aging is like receiving a package in the mail that you did not order and you cannot return.
But, oh, the alternative is to never breathe in another lilac spring day and to never watch the tulips grow taller day by day.”
You choked me up.
Linking to you ASAP. 🙂
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Very well said. And so very true.
~K!
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I love your writing – thank you so much for this post. I have had a hard time to watch my kids grow – as sweet as that it is – still I have wanted them to stay babies- – then stay toddlers – then stay sweet 6 and so on… it has felt a bit like trying to hold sand at the beach – the harder you squeeze the quicker it slips through your fingers. So I am learning – just learning – that each stage has its beauty – even for myself as I get older. I don’t always appreciate it when my knees feel a bit creaky but sometimes it feels good to “know” a few things and that has come hard-won.
Thanks again
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i am here via citizen d, and i am grateful to have been led here today. this is a magnificent writing. i am sad that it is only a blog post. something like this should be published in magazines, in books, on posters. when i was 14 i was diagnosed with cancer. i have been healed for 13 years. because of the events of my life, i consistently feel the brevity of our existence. sometimes i feel it so deeply that i can barely move. sometimes i feel it and tire of its constant lingering and i ignore it altogether. lately i have been reading walt whitman, henry david thoreau and ralph waldo emerson. there is so much vitality, so much desperation to capture the moment, the day, the tulip petal and lilac vase before the chills of winter take us all into Sleep. thank you for joining their voices for me. life is too short not to remember.
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Mel,
That was such a beautiful post. We all are given the same amount of time; it’s what we do with it that makes the difference.
Thanks for reminding us to stop and smell the roses, or lilacs in this case.
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Mel,
That was beautiful. I’ve been reading your “The Amazing Shrinking Mom” on ClubMom for a couple of weeks now, and I followed a link from one of your archived articles to find this blog. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and writing.
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I think this is my most favorite to date. I find myself thinking the same things…Why do we have to be forty and just now figuring these things out? I made a committmant to myself and the Lord two years ago…I will live each day to the fullest, no regrets, coloring outside of as many lines as possible along the way. Guess what…I really like that decision, and the skin I am settling into…I’m liking that too.
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