On The Precipice

I turned fifty-nine years old a couple of months ago and that fact seems to be on my mind quite frequently these days. It has been said that sixty is the new forty. What does that mean exactly? That question keeps popping into my brain as my sixtieth birthday comes ever closer. I neither feel nor look forty, that much I know, but what should I look or feel like at sixty?  The spirit of me that was nine is still the same at fifty-nine, that doesn't change but the body I carry that spirit around in has.  

Yes, this is who I am inside.

Fifty years ago perhaps, forty was the age of the dreaded "mid-life" crisis where men had affairs with their secretaries and traded in the family station wagon for a little red sports car and women had sex with the gardener now that the kids were in college. People married younger, had a family younger so by forty they were envisioning the life that many of us nearing sixty have in front of us now. Children are finally out of the house, relationship issues settled for better or worse, more financial stability. 
Back then parents in their forties probably seemed as old to their twenty-something offspring as we appear to ours now. Is that what is meant by "sixty is the new forty"? My parents generation grew up faster but did they really grow old faster or is that just a construct of my egotistical, rule-the-world, 'aren't we the best' generation of Baby Boomers? We have to believe that we can't possibly be as old at whatever age we are as our ancient parents seemed to be. 

June and Gabe ready to party
in 1972!  They are 51 and 43

I have a picture of my mother at her sixtieth birthday and when I look at that and think of who she really was and what she was doing at that age it is no different than my generation. No, she wasn't trying to wear clothes that her daughters were wearing or taking Boot Camp classes but she did go back to work after I left home and she and my dad were traveling and partying with friends in their spare time.  Living their life and enjoying it. No different than my husband and myself now. 
Its a conceit to believe because we may think we are fitter, better dressed, hipper and more worldly than the generation before us that somehow we are "younger". Sixty is sixty. If you were to open me up and examine what was there and compare it to what my mother's insides looked like at sixty you would probably not find much difference, in fact she might come out on top. I have had a different sort of life filled with more fast food and alcohol, more pressures and stresses over parenting and lifestyle, added to by social media and Martha Stewart. I've been bombarded by microwaves and the constant societal pressure to be young and perfect and yet, most of my peers require reading glasses, many have hearing aids, a surprising amount have hip replacements and are on blood pressure or cholesterol medication. We are not forty, and modern medicine is not going to save us in the way we think it will. 

So at fifty-nine and counting I feel as though I am standing on a precipice. I have been playing around in the forest, and now I have wandering over to the edge and am looking down. Unlike when forty was forty and there was still many years ahead, at sixty there are more years behind than ahead now. As I contemplate all this, the words of my late father, Gabe, come into my head. When he turned eighty he told me that he had never been bothered by any birthday except for his eightieth. He knew that he was probably in his last decade and that pissed him off a bit. He died at 87. I'm not feeling morbid or old or afraid of dying. I will choose to back away from the edge, live my life not looking down, unafraid of any birthday, like Gabe. And at eighty I'll let you know how it feels.