The waiting room for death

I come from a long line of strong women. My paternal grandmother grew up dreaming of being a schoolteacher. A combination of family circumstance and the conservative Ireland she grew up in made that dream impossible, but she resolved to make it possible for her two eldest daughters. My father grew up in a house of strong females, an only son with three sisters. This made him almost uniquely unchauvinistic for a man of his times: if anything he saw women as better than men, an attitude he imparted to me. His sisters and mother all doted on him and supported him in his eccentricity, which people outside his immediate family were often less understanding of and charitable towards. 

His youngest sister Ann, the only one not to become a teacher, was a kindred free spirit. The fierce independence and clarity of thought that characterised all the females in her family combined with a rebelliousness that took her all over the world as a musician and writer with her Beloved (as she calls him in one of her books), Irish traditional music legend Bobby Gardiner. In Bobby she found a traditional musician but non traditional male who saw his wife not as a supporting player but as an equal collaborator. They had three daughters who grew up with the same strong independent streak. 

I remember Ann from my youth as the smiling playful aunt with a wicked mischievous sense of humour that did nothing to disguise her kind generous worldly wise heart. Maybe the fact she had no sons of her own made her have more time for me when I visited, or maybe that’s just how she was with everyone. Whatever the case she was, along with her own mother (my grandmother), one of the most positive female influences on my childhood. One thing she said when I was ten or eleven shifted my view of the world instantly and positively. I was at the time a morose painfully shy and unhappy child who felt out of place in the world and thought I always would. On a visit to Tipperary, Ann said these words that I think are probably the most important anyone has ever said to me:

“Everyone says that your childhood years are the best of your life. That’s rubbish. They can be the worst. You have to go along with what you’re told, you can’t be your own person. That all changes who you become an adult. You just have to get through your childhood to that point, and that’s when your life really starts”

Those were the words that got me through my difficult teenage years, and those are the words I have lived by since I turned 18. 

My aunt, now in her eighties, remains a force of nature. Still writing, still looking after herself and her Beloved in the house they built together, still looking and moving like a woman half her age, still as mentally sharp and positive as ever. It only occurred to me recently how much she shaped my entire life with those words of wisdom that cut through the bullshit to the heart of what I needed to hear. 

When we visited them recently, the discussion turned to how people live their lives. Ann said she thinks we should live as if we expect to live to be 200. This seems, on the surface, to be the polar opposite of the “live every day like it might be your last” advice that is more usually dispensed. Yet when I thought about it, I realised I much prefer Ann’s philosophy. We live in a time when ageing is portrayed as a drift to irrelevance, old age reduced to a pointless coda, a waiting room for death. I know people my age who have basically taken this to heart and essentially given up. They stop doing the things they love, they won’t  take up any long term projects or pursue new interests, they aren’t looking to meet new people and make new friends. They seem to be waiting for death. In a sense, they’re dead already. 

We are so bombarded with the message that the world belongs to the young that I have found myself succumbing to this way of thinking, and wondering whether I should just retire rather than become a fading version of my former self. I had more or less decided to announce my retirement from poker in the near future, but Ann’s philosophy has caused me to reconsider. Why should I stop doing something I love just because societal norms suggest I’m almost too old to continue doing it? Ann has continued writing and performing along with Bobby into their 80s, and they are the most contented people that age I have ever met. So I’m going to follow her lead and live like I expect to make it to 200. Of course none of us actually will, but I like to think we will enjoy and make more of whatever years we have left than the ones who have already given up in the waiting room for death.

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