When you didn’t expect to exist at the age you are now
Wondering what is life going to look like when you didn’t consider an old age
The last time I properly thought about myself getting old was on the 1st of July, 2011. The day of my wedding.
When, in a light-filled country house in the Surrey countryside, I stood at the front of the room with the love of our friends and family billowing behind us like a veil, and read my vows. In it, I sketched out a future in which I would be 80 years old, still fighting with my husband over books. Rob would insist he was a fast reader and ‘would be done before I knew it’, and I would eye the book on his bedside table wondering if he’d notice it going missing.
I remember being able to see the picture of this so clearly in my mind’s eye. How jowly his face would get, how I would probably shrink into a peanut lady like my mother. It wasn’t about expecting the euphoria we both felt on that day to last – what I was looking ahead to, was the rest and peace you find in another person.
When he died four years later, there was so much to mourn, it was impossible to pick apart the strands and assign value to them. It was all lost, to a darkness that stretched to the depth of an oceanic trench, and everything gone was priceless.
With it, the ability to properly imagine my future. To think about the detail of it. What life would be like as an older person.
Paid subscribers not only keep this newsletter going but also receive access to the full archive and access to chats - if you’d liked to consider an upgrade please do and you’ll have my eternal gratitude!
It may come as a surprise to people who have heard me talk and write about ageing, how we can change the narrative we have around it, how I’ve mentioned that in the same way we pay into a pension, it’s wise to pay into a pension of sorts around your body and pursue things that will give you strong bones. After all, what is that if not thinking about your old age?
But truthfully, while all of that is true, it has been a vague concept, an amorphous blob that lacks structure, texture and shape. If you asked me to drill down into things such as who I’ll be living with, how will I pay for it, who will be looking after me when I get older, what kind of life will I be living – I haven’t been able to think of it since his death because the idea that I’ve even made it to 43 still seems surprising.
I don’t mean this in a nihilistic or a depressive sense. It is more that, as some people know, when you experience a fundamental grief, a death that has changed who you are, that has made even the smallest things about living unbearable, it seems impossible at the beginning to conceive of how you will make it to day two, let alone carry the concept of a week. Time becomes fractured, nonsensical, even. The idea that you can assign timelines to anything and expect it to happen exactly as you planned is laughable.
Shortly after the funeral, I didn’t think I would make it to the first week, until I did. I didn’t think I would make it to a month, until I did. It’s not that I wanted to die, it’s that I didn’t care if I was alive. And nothing, not the love of my family or friends, changed it. The only thing that did was waiting it out, until it became marginally less painful, and that became a finger hold to something bigger and more sturdy. The longer I lived, the more I wanted to live.
When I was younger, I didn’t understand when people said after the death of a partner, ‘oh they died of a broken heart’, but when Rob died, I understood it. I stood at the crossroads of my existence almost every day, and every time I ate, or moved, or slept, I realised this was it, this was making a choice to not die, and to exist.
Therefore, if you had asked me back then, when I was 34, what life would be like at 43, I would not have been able to comprehend it. It would have felt impossible, imagining a future self when the present self was doused in fire and forced to rebuild its metaphysical flesh every morning. But in the nine years since, I have built my life around the loss, and it is a life I love, with people I love, and I have loved romantic partners too.
I have such a giddy sense of the present not feeling awful, and wanting to actively be in my life, that I turn my head towards it like a flower following the sun. I want to experience everything, try everything, taste it, feel it, arch my back with it and rarely has that got anything to do with thinking about the future.
And yet, the future is tapping away at my window, asking me to think about it.
All of this has been prompted by two things. Making a will, and trying to get my finances in shape after four years of an extended YOLO approach to money due to the ripple effect of the pandemic. It has brought up some deeply uncomfortable stuff. Will I keep working until I am either mentally or physically incapable? What is my plan for when I get older in terms of well… everything? Do I need to have everything planned now or certain things planned?
Paid subscribers not only keep this newsletter going but also receive access to the full archive and access to chats - if you’d liked to consider an upgrade please do and you’ll have my eternal gratitude!
Asking people about this has proved overwhelming because I’ve had about five different answers to the same questions. Most people I know have children or are married, or both. Many have accrued more money over the years due to being in better paid professions. Or they have a better sense of financial literacy. And of course, finances are important but only a part of it.
I don’t expect to know exactly how I will be living in ten, twenty years time because I believe there should be enough room for evolution and growth, and the grace to change one’s mind. But I think the time has come to have some sense of it, and to remember that as with other things I talk about around the ageing narrative, it doesn’t have to be steeped in fear and loneliness.
In the last four years, it has felt necessary to be led by spontaneity and to a certain extent, hedonism. That where money permits, it’s mostly spent on things that give me joy when there is enough left over after the essentials. Several lockdowns and a pandemic will do that to a person sometimes, especially if it was spent alone. But there are times now, when I wonder if I need to redress the balance. I still don’t want to discuss what I’m doing for Christmas six months out, and have my following year planned like a lot of other people do. But there does need to be some sense of making sure I have options in the future, and thinking about the life I’d like.
The biggest hurdle I feel, will be to convince myself that all things being well, there will be a future. That it’s okay to imagine myself older, even if it doesn’t look like the picture I sketched for two, 13 years ago. It is one of the final griefs to let go of, one that had hidden in a corner for a long time because it was too painful to bring out into the light.
But if there is one thing I have learned, whether it’s around finances, fear, grief, old hurts in particular, is that keeping them in the dark in never the answer. It doesn’t allow us to live fully. And while I don’t quite know what the future holds, I do know I want to experience every moment of it in the light.
I had a grief of a different sort from yours when my husband left suddenly after 25 years of marriage. I can relate to so much of what you say about living it out and turning to the light now.
When he left me at the start of 2020, there were two things that would wake me up in panic. 1) what will happen at Christmas? 2) how will we separate the finances? We had had a joint account since our early 20s and he dealt with most financial matters.
A close friend said to me 'you can do it'. And I did! I learnt it all, had to watch the pennies very closely but now I love the liberation of knowing where every penny goes. Now i realise that it wasn't very feminist not to know.
Finances, pensions etc - you can do it xx
You are allocating words to so many feelings felt by others in a similar situation who simply don’t have that capacity to do that. Brava 👏 Thank you xx