aging women

Micromorts


Death found an author writing his life.. Desig...

Image via Wikipedia

Expanding one’s vocabulary deserves missionary zeal, but how many of us bother to learn a word a day?

Here’s a word for you – micromort – it’s the one in a million probability of death. Check out the chart. Very cool.

Most of us don’t spend much, or any, time worrying about our impending deaths. But make no mistake, everyone’s death is pending and has been from the moment you first drew breath.

The lucky majority, and I use the term “lucky” subjectively, will shuffle off to the undiscovered country at various degrees of ripe.

Statistically, only a small percentage of those over 70 can be considered healthy enough to be envied. The rest are, in various ways, chronically ill or disabled or both. One’s sixties, realistically, are the last frontier because the exercise one didn’t bother to do, the healthy foods not eaten, sleep deprivation, needlessly self-imposed stress and a general wishful thinking about being one of the lucky few because one’s great-grandfather married a twenty year old and had a half-dozen babies with her when he was 70 won’t matter one bit. Old age is ruthless and can really only work with the raw material at hand, not the genetic promise willfully squandered decades before.

Some of us though will bite it long before our born on dates could conceivably be considered stale.

Bad luck. Bad timing. Bad roll of the genetic dice rendering us susceptible to environmental triggers for all manner of nasty conditions. Whatever. Still dead.

And the odds mount as we age. At 60 a man’s risk of dying in his sleep on any given day is 27 out of a million. It climbs to 118 out of a million at age 75. In 1841 the odds sat at 86 and 266 per million respectively. But though modern life affords us more years, it doesn’t usually grant us good ones.

If you knew that sometime in your mid to late 60’s you’d physically deteriorate to the point where daily life was a real struggle, would a long life be as appealing?

The yogis – the serious ones – tend to live and live and then just die. But I suspect that their lifestyles make that possible in a way that no one in North America can really emulate.

My mother had a health scare recently. A lump in her breast turned out to be a harmless cyst, but at nearly 80, she has slowed noticeably. Her eyesight is failing at a rate that will result in blindness at some point yet to be fully copped to by her doctor, and she suffers from a variety of ailments that haven’t dampened her enjoyment of life but are harbingers of heart disease and strokes yet to come.

I am reminded of mortality – again – by the death of a friend’s father this last weekend.

Sudden but yet not really.

“How old was he?” Rob asked.

“Five years younger than Mom,” I said.

“Oh, well, that’s getting into prime death territory for men.”

And he was right.

We are lulled by media stories of centenarians climbing mountains but they make the news precisely because there are so very few of them.

The clock is always ticking. It just speeds up at 60 and gets steadily louder and slightly faster with every year after.

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Club L


birthday cake

Image by freakgirl via Flickr

A friend turns fifty today. It’s one of those “milestone” birthdays of which are scare once a person passes the infamous twenty-one. Passing from one decade to another though ceases to be momentous after a certain point because, in my opinion, many of us peak in terms of knowledge base and ability to add to existing skill sets.

My friend is not one of the stunted folk, which isn’t a surprise in a earth sign. In fact, I’ve only known one earth sign in my life who was a tool and my assessment is based on his rather twisted personality rather than a lack of innate intelligence.

Being female, however, this friend rather lamented the run up to her inaugral year in a new decade. The AARP didn’t help with it’s welcome wagon membership privileges either. Fifty is harder on women than men though my own darling husband is hurumphing and grim-faced about his own fiftieth later this year. He, at least, has the decidedly unfair advantage of the myth that men improve with age while women merely get old.

There is nothing “mere” about what happens to women as they get older nor is it appreciably different than what happens to men, but in a society that worships youth in the female form and exhorts women to look to 12 year old actresses as beauty standards, it’s understandable that many women dread and even fight aging with everything in their arsenal.

Being of a certain age myself, I am torn between grace and battle. My hair has been graying since my late twenties – it happens with redheads – but I’ve hidden it with highlights because I am blessed with that pure white replacement rather than the steely variety, but there isn’t enough of it to allow it dominance. Blonde simply lightens me in a way whitening red does not.

For the moment, I do nothing, but I think about doing something and that is maddening. Because why should I think about doing something anyway?

Not long ago I ran across an article bemoaning the fact that Elle Fanning is the new fashion “it” girl, the one designers love and hype as the “perfect female form”.

She’s twelve. And who wasn’t sparkly and full of feminine promise at that age?

Of course it’s her rack that attracts both filmmakers and haute couture pimps alike. She’s coltish with a ballerina body type, blond and fair. She’s the fantasy. The idea that for some reason maturity ruins females. Roundness and hair in the wrong places, and oozing once a month render us worthless. Not to mention that it is the beginning of the end. Age will take us and if it takes us – it can take men too.

Maybe that’s the real appeal. Men look at scandalously young females and see themselves in a way that defies the mirrors they ignore.

But why should my friend lament fifty? Why should anyone?

It’s not like many of us would willingly relive twelve. No one but the most stunted long to be teenagers again in any way. And, for one, resent the suggestion that I should emulate a 12 year old. It’s insulting and not just a little creepy.

In mythology, women travel from maiden to crone, but crone is powerful. The form she takes is of her choosing really, and that is the beauty of aging. Choice. And the wisdom, experience  and means to make ones that suit us. Let a 12 year old claim that.

At twelve, females are objects. Too young to know that, they smile and accept inappropriate and dangerous to them ideas and attention. At 50, not so much.

Happy Birthday then to my fabously fifty friend, who is wise and wily and wonderful.

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