The Lioness in Winter: Writing an Old Woman's Life

THE LIONESS IN WINTER

THE

LIONESS

IN WINTER

Writing an Old Woman’s Life

ANN BURACK-WEISS

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2015 Ann Burack-Weiss

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52533-6

Excerpt of MFK Fisher’s Last House. Copyright © 1995.

Used by permission of the Literary Trust of MFK Fisher c/o InkWell Management.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burack-Weiss, Ann.

The lioness in winter : writing an old woman’s life / Ann Burack-Weiss.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

Summary: Ann Burack-Weiss, a gerontologist with more than forty years of experience, analyzes and engages with the writings of a dozen well-known authors for insights into old age. Featured are Maya Angelou, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, M.F.K Fisher, Doris Grumbach, Carolyn Heilburn, Doris Lessing, Florida Scott-Maxwell, May Sarton, Anne Roiphe, and Alix Kate Shulman, among others, all of whom wrote about essential issues in old age including physical changes and disability, living alone, reflecting on and revaluing the past, generativity, public life, and the changing roles of family and friends. Burack-Weiss frames including an introduction that discusses narrative theory and older woman — Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-231-15184-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-15185-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-52533-6 (e-book)

1.  Old age in literature.  2.  Older women in literature.  3.  Aging in literature.  4.  Literature—Women authors—History and criticism.  5.  Life change events in literature.  6.  Life cycle, Human, in literature.  7.  Life change events in old age.  I.  Title.  II.  Title: Writing an old woman’s life.

PN56.04B87   2015

809’.93354—dc23

2015008944

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Jacket design: Mary Ann Smith

Jacket images: © Shutterstock

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Roy

Because he was he

Because I was me

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: AGING, I WROTE

1. WHO IS THAT OLD WOMAN?

2. WHAT SHE THINKS ABOUT SOMETIMES, SOME DAYS, ABOUT SOME THINGS

3. I HAD LOOKED AT MYSELF IN THE FULL-LENGTH MIRROR

4. HOW WE ARE WITH EACH OTHER

5. BUT WHO WERE THEY?

6. THERE IS A GRACE IN DEATH, THERE IS LIFE

7. MY MAP OF A PLACE

8. INTERESTED IN BIG THINGS AND HAPPY IN SMALL WAYS

9. JUST SHOW UP

10. FIERCE WITH REALITY

CONCLUSION: AGING, I WRITE

AFTERWORD: BRIGHT AS STARS IN THE HEAVEN OF MY MIND

Annotated Readings

References

PREFACE

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. … We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

—JOAN DIDION, THE WHITE ALBUM

ONCE upon a time I was a young social worker making home visits to old people in Manhattan; people who had outlived their resources—health, money, family—and were now vulnerable and alone.

After I had made my way up flights of stairs in hallways covered in graffiti or emerged from an elevator that creaked ominously between floors, I would see a bent man or woman propped up in the doorway or an open latch with a distant voice beckoning me to come in and find my way to chair or bed.

Few were gladdened at the first sight of me. Why did they send you? You are much too young! What do you know about being old? I replied as my teachers had instructed me (and I was later to instruct scores of students): I don’t know; but I want to. Please tell me how it is for you.

What emerged was Joan Didion’s phantasmagoria of experience, struggles to get through many of life’s daily tasks; a litany of unfiltered troubles from morning to night. I listened long and attentively and asked many questions before answering.

I expected that everyone would warm up when they heard of the array of services available to them: meals-on-wheels, home care, transportation, rehabilitation, money management, and the like. Some accepted the offer of aid; most were wary. They knew they needed help, but the idea of sacrificing even a bit of independence to receive it was hard to accept.

It was then that we moved from their actual experience to Didion’s narrative line—the stories they told themselves about how they got into this situation and what would happen next. Although most were eager to tell me stories starring their younger selves, there were few Scheherazades. The same one or two stories were told on each visit, beginning and ending in the same place, using virtually the same words, featuring the same cast of characters (the client and others in his earlier world), and depicting an encapsulated event. All bore the patina of oft-told tales.

As different as the particulars, were, each story had an underlying theme. These ran the gamut from pride in who they had been and what they had done to a lifelong sense of defeat.

Once again, I responded as my teachers had instructed me (and I was to instruct scores of students), by delving deeper into the story: I asked them to tell me about what happened before and after the event and to describe the characters and action more fully. In so doing, I hoped to evoke more of their inner lives—dormant thoughts and feelings embedded in the story.

It rarely worked. Details of the experience had faded and only the fragile narrative line remained. The present had no narrative line at all. It was only a disconnected series of events that had to somehow be endured. For many old people, it was as if the story-making capacity faltered along with the capacity for independent functioning; as if the interpretive, sense-making mechanism had worn away along with the cartilage in their aged joints. With no connective tissue or padding to cushion daily experiences, they were left with the mental corollary of the osteoarthritic condition of bone on bone.

This was not always the case. And I relished the exceptions—current events converted into newly relevant minted stories that connected the individual’s past with their present and dared even to reach into a future they would not live to see.

I recall my first visit to an eighty-seven-year-old woman who was both blind and paralyzed, conditions that—to my young mind—seemed impossible enough to bear individually, inconceivable in combination. Asked what she needed help with, she pointed toward her radio. It had broken down and she could no longer listen to the news. The shop she had called offered to pick it up, take it away for repair, and return within the week. Impossible, she said, I need food for my mind!

There were often neighbors or other helpers present on succeeding visits, and I would find her drawing them out on what was going on in their lives. When we were alone, she recounted some of their experiences with pleasure. She was not immune to frustration or fear or lonely moments, but she seemed able to overcome them by continuing a lifelong pattern, connecting her life with that of others.

My final visit to her was in the hospital a week before her death. As it happened, her minister was there. How fortunate I had come just then; how much she had wanted the two of us to meet! We did different things but were really in the same line of work—helping people through hard times. We would surely be great friends. Standing at either side of the bed where she lay hooked up to innumerable tubes, the minister and I exchanged incredulous looks.

It was only later, after I looked back on what I knew of her early life, that I found the connecting thread—the sense of self that she carried into the present. It linked who she used to be with who she now was.

My client had been disabled since childhood. Her adult life had been spent on a college campus. As student and professor she had lived a large portion of her life through the lives of others. She had now outlived family, colleagues, and friends. Though her sense of identity had frayed with mounting disabilities, she had tended it with care, and it saw her through to the end. It was the story she told herself about herself.

It was many years later that I came to connect the difficulty that many former clients had in accepting help with that lack of a sustaining story. The former professor had no trouble accepting needed assistance. It did not diminish her sense of autonomy, the idea she held of herself in any way. She gave and received in equal measure.

She—and others who had held on to the story-making capacity—were not all that different from their peers in respect to life experience. Rather, they seem to have been blessed with a sensibility that looked beyond the transient; a perspective that, while not necessarily religious or spiritual in origin, could be called a search for meaning in their current lives—however diminished in scope. The stories they told preserved the essence of the people they were while adapting them to new circumstances.

It was these stories that returned to me when, in 2008, I undertook writing The Lioness in Winter. I had read widely in the life writing of noted women authors grown old. The memoirs, personal essays, journals, and letters of their last years were never wholly about current experiences or recollections of earlier lives. The authors linked the two and continued as integrated selves well into their eighties and nineties. It seemed to me to be the highest elevation of the spirit. Surely there would be inspiration here for myself, for other women who were concerned about their own aging, and for a new generation of gerontologists.

I had just completed The Caregiver’s Tale: Loss and Renewal in Memoirs of Family Life, in which I summarized and analyzed over one hundred published, book-length memoirs of individuals caring for ill or disabled family members. I did this by juxtaposing a combination of verbatim quotes from the texts with an interpretation based on my own professional experience. It was this method that I expected to replicate in The Lioness.

Joan Didion was the first author I considered and could be said to be the inspiration for all that was to follow. She and I were of the same vintage—the years of Joans, Judiths, Barbaras, and Robertas—the girls who were briefly young, busily middle-aged, and now old and alone a decade ahead of the Baby Boomers.

Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005 was about the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. It predated my husband’s death by five years. Blue Nights in 2011 was about regrets and fears of declining powers. It predated my similar concerns by three years. Nevertheless, I felt myself qualified to challenge some of her assumptions. After all, I had been a gerontologist for over forty years. Surely I had something to say!

I began with a critique of the bleak scenario she portrayed. All the more distressing, I perceived, because the Lisas and Jennifers who came after us, and the Tracys and Stacys who came after them, read Didion for news from a frontier that was comfortably still far away. Recognizing happy images of the golden years to be a sham, captivated by her frail persona, besotted by her rhythms, they hailed her writing for its ability to probe the dark places of aging.

I did resonate with the regrets she expressed. I had already experienced more than a few, had replayed the scenes, imagined rewinding the tape, realized that it was too late, too late. I too wakened each day to a self who, no matter how hard she tried to look better than she feels, will never look sixty again. Among the great tragedies of Didion’s life—the deaths of husband and only child—she mourned the loss of four-inch heels with cashmere leggings, the gold hoop earrings. Of course. Who but another old lady could understand?

I returned to The Year of Magical Thinking in 2010 after the sudden death of my husband, the love of my life for fifty-four years. My Roy, like Didion’s John, was taken in a sudden, cruel flash. Less acute but still painful were the names filling our address books; people we thought to call with good news or bad. Until we remembered. Always the dull ache. Sometimes a stab to the gut. Blue Nights was even bleaker—the illness and death of Didion’s daughter shading into fears for her own future.

And still. And yet. I protested her view of the aging female experience. So hard did I protest that it would not take the insight of Shakespeare or Freud to recognize that I protested too much. When the facts of Didion’s life were so familiar, and the style with which she presented them so compelling, it was tempting to succumb to the narrative line she imposed on it: all the good life is behind. Only the fearful present and the dreaded future remain.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, she famously observed. But how could the story she made of her later years help her, me, anyone live?

Some criticized Didion for writing from the perspective of a privileged woman. I was not among them. So many of us are privileged by ancestors with the foresight to immigrate to America, sparing us the concentration camp, the Hiroshima blast, war on our doorsteps, rape in our homes, early death for lack of antibiotics or vaccines.

We live on. The largest group of old ladies the world has ever known. We live on to walk the streets in fear of skateboards and to sit in doctors’ offices mulling over whose name to place on the notification in case of emergency form. The world is filled with privileged women past a certain age who aren’t dead yet.

I was well into the first draft of The Lioness when, in May 2013, I went to hear Didion speak at the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Review of Books at Town Hall in New York. She was one of seven writers on the program—representing the history, breadth, and depth of the publication. A frisson passed through the audience even before she appeared. Stage and lighting crew appeared to be on edge. The dais, at which Bob Silver, the editor in chief, presided over the session and everyone else stood to speak, was removed. A table and chair were run in from stage left. And then—very, very slowly—she appeared: small, frail, expressionless; leaning heavily on the man who guided her to the chair. Without preamble she began to read from a lengthy essay she had written at the height of the uproar surrounding the trial of the Central Park Five, black teenagers convicted of the gang rape and beating of a white woman (and recently exonerated after decades of imprisonment).

The essay was both prescient and a challenge to received opinion. It argued that essential facts to understanding the event were denied or glossed over by those who wrote or spoke of it. Two tropes collided in the cover-up: white women sexually endangered by black men, and victims of sexual assault requiring anonymity lest they be further tainted by public opinion. In both cases protection of potential or real victims trumped recognition of unchallenged assumptions and impeded recognition of the truth.

Didion read in a monotone, sometimes the pause between words so long that it seemed she would never speak again. Was it her vision? Her voice? Her mind? Neither the applause at the end nor even visible recognition of the crowd seemed to register as she was again, so very slowly, helped to a standing position and walked off the stage.

Watching her slow exit, I had to think that the stigma of old age and the desire to pass in a society that honors youth for youth’s sake makes cowards of us all. And wonder: what would happen if we began to question assumptions about the inner and public life of old women—how we appear to ourselves and how we present ourselves to the world?

Didion was trying to present an image that hid the truth of the changes going on within her. And ironically, that was the theme of the essay just read—our failure to look an unpleasant reality in the eye and call it by its rightful name.

I couldn’t help but think how the night could have gone differently had Didion shown herself as she now was—the same visionary who commanded our breathless attention but different now.

She struggled to read from the original text. It could have been reformatted or enlarged for easier reading. She was unable to walk on her own. She could have used the wheelchair or walker that was probably waiting off-stage. Instead of feeling uncomfortably drawn into a pretense, we would have had to face the facts of life and mortality enacted before our eyes; the very facts that the featured speakers—she foremost among them—devoted their literary lives to examining.

It was not that long ago when Black is Beautiful and Gay Pride were not yet a part of popular discourse, a time when many African Americans and gay men found passing as members of the socially dominant group a reasonable alternative to facing the stigma if their true selves were seen. We old women are also stigmatized selves. Just think of how many businesses and products exist to mask the passing of the years on our faces and bodies.

We each draw our own line in the sand when it comes to how we present our aging selves to the world. Shunning pity and troublesome questions, fearful that we will be considered past consideration as fully functioning adults, we stake our claim. Some of us are relieved at no longer having to care. Choosing comfort over style in dress, eschewing cosmetics, accepting the cane, the hearing aid, and other visible signs that we are no longer who we were, we cede the battle. For those of us still willing to invest time and effort in looking our best, choices abound. Ridding ourselves of gray hair is a quick fix. Ridding ourselves of drooping flesh is more expensive, and risky. Freed of widow’s weeds and garments that earlier times deemed appropriate for the woman whose days