Pat Taub
GUEST POST by EILEEN GRIFFIN
I did not welcome my seventieth decade.
With the arrival of my 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and even the 60s, I crossed each threshold with relief or anticipation or calm acceptance, but always ready. Not so with the 70s. On my 70th birthday, I wanted to open the door and holler “Go away, scat, you have the wrong house.” But It came in and sat down, made Itself comfortable, as if to stay. And so It has.
I felt a great uncertainty, unease and sadness. How did this happen?
Where did the days, the years go, or rather how did they go, when had it all disappeared? I was most grateful to be alive and well. Yet a heaviness and a not-knowing-what-to-do descended upon me and into me. Each day weighed heavy like wearing an old scratchy wool coat four sizes too big along with beat-up oversized galoshes, so that I had to walk hunched over, sloughing along.
The fact of the matter is I didn’t want to be 70 — not one little bit! I read a study that showed the 70s were a happy decade for many. That information was upsetting. How could these folks possibly be happy, my only answer — delusional!
Women embracing their 70s
I thought my usual busy involved Self would shake off the malaise of the 70s, but that Self wasn’t around anymore. I was left with only a vacancy sign swinging to and fro.
I somehow came to the conclusion that it was best to just accept this strange uncomfortable creature and see what it had to offer. So I went about the business of living as best as I could. A sister, 13 months older, was continuing to have a challenging time with her 70s. It was good to have an unhappy companion on my journey. Donna lives in Virginia. We would check in with each other often, taking our temperatures to see if the malaise was subsiding.
The author, left, and her sister, Donna as girls
Eileen and Donna at their High School graduation, 1962
What was so difficult? I think it was the fierceness of the awareness that there really is no fairy tale turning back, and the remaining years are indeed finite. That was scary.
I had suddenly become an older woman, and what in the heck did that mean for me and my place in the world? And, then too, the world itself looked and felt different —foreign and unsettling.
Slowly, oh so slowly there was a turning, a tiny flowering of acceptance, no acorn birthing an oak, but rather a small crocus with its tiny green leaves and just the hint of yellow pushing up through the hard brown winter earth to brighten and offer hope.
It was not a purposeful journey I took, but rather a slow unfolding one.
Looking back, I am so grateful for those early years of the 70s. They pruned me and therefore made possible the growth of new awarenesses and understandings of what it is to be an older woman in the world of today.
I have a deeper appreciation now for human development and for my own development. It truly is a never-ending upward quest, and I best not refuse it — as that is to decay. Most important was the discovery of my own evolving consciousness, of what it is to be a human being — being human.
These days now I focus as best I can on being — not doing. Of course, I do the doing, but now with a new stronger sense of who this 76-year-old is. I’m happy to be 76, to see what it is each day brings and what I can be, and then with a deeper consciousness (and appreciation) — do.
