life after 70
by antiga

Getting old – even if we lived in a society that honored women, which we don’t - is a process of sustaining losses. One measure of how a woman is aging is how she deals with those losses. The losses are both personal and material. One of the losses that was the hardest for my mother to deal with was needing to sell the house she had lived in for forty years. Another, which has also happened to me, is no longer being able to drive a car. Personal loss. Women that you know and value die. Just this week one of the feisty nuns I knew in Minnesota died. Rose Tillemans was a woman who devoted her life to working with the homeless. Her sister nuns are making jokes about how things are going to change in heaven now that Rose is there. She was that kind of a make change woman. She wouldn’t let even God stand in her way if she saw a change that needed to be made. Her sister nuns agree that there are some changes that need to be made in heaven.

In addition to losses, an old woman has to deal with being made invisible. I recently was with a younger woman. We were trying to find a particular place and needed some directions. I knew where we wanted to go and had partial directions. When I asked a woman who was familiar with the area how to get where we wanted to go, she addressed all her answers to my younger friend. In this erasure of me, she behaved as though I had no intelligence, could not communicate or hear what she was saying. One of the things that young women can do to combat this agist pattern is to refuse to be a part of it. When you are talking to an old woman, speak directly to her, treat her exactly like you would treat a young person.

Certainly aging has its difficulties. The older a woman gets, the more health challenges she has to deal with. For me, living with diabetes for 35 years caused loss of my vision. I had three grueling eye surgeries in one year followed by several years of recovery, yet never recovering my vision enough to drive a car. Dealing with my own health challenges seems to get harder as I get older. None of this means that it’s bad to be old. A woman who lives long sees and understands things that are hard to see when she is young.

One of the transgressions that I commit against the unspoken rules of patriarchal society is that I tell people how old I am. Any self-respecting woman who has reached 70 is supposed to be ashamed of that fact and keep it hidden from everyone. Once I say “I’m 70” the predictable response is “You don’t look your age.” I wonder what they expect 70 to look like anyhow! Like any other age 20, 50 or 60, there are many ways people of those ages look. How I am at 70 is one of the ways that someone who is 70 can look. How a woman looks is the only thing that matters about her no matter what age she is. Because I look okay (I am slim and I can still walk) I cannot possibly be 70! Another line an old woman is likely to hear is “You are only as old as you think you are!” as though it were possible to think young and feel as though you were 30 years younger. I am tired tired tired of educating people about ageism and sexism and I probably won’t quit. Do you ever hear anyone tell a man that he doesn’t look his age? I never have. It is fine for a man to get old. He becomes distinguished when he gets grey hair and wrinkles. But, for a woman, it is not okay. Many old women are past being of use to men. This is a great crime against the patriarchal system. So old women are ridiculed and put down. The attempt is to make us feel worthless.

Old women can be dangerous—especially those of us who are financially independent and not attached to a man. Those in power are aware of this and try to discredit us before we discover just how dangerous we can be. So, as you age (no matter what age you are, you are getting older) pay attention to the ways you can change an oppressive system. Small changes can accumulate and bring about bigger changes. Especially if we stick together as women, we can make a difference in the direction that this society is taking.

We can use the invisibility that comes to old women to our advantage. Since what we do or think is often discounted, we can be fairly open about what we do, and those in power will not even notice. So let’s be outrageous and challenge a system that is in place to oppress women, children, people of color and anyone who does not fit the patriarchial definition of who a person is.

I quote Barbara MacDonald, a lesbian who has thought and written about ageism among women. She said, “We have become the old women we dreaded and find we like being who we are now. We live it with joy and have come here to celebrate it, yet there is still a dread that holds us back from taking charge of our lesbian power. What is it, then that we dread? Is it not some unnamed fear of the future—something that keeps moving ahead of us but is never where we are? Doesn’t the 60-year-old say, ‘I like being 60, but what will happen when I am 70? And doesn’t the 70-year-old say, ‘Being 70 is exciting, but I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m 80.’ And doesn’t the 90-year-old enjoy 90 and worry about being 95, 96, 97 and beyond? Are we not dealing with a myth of old age - an accumulated deposit of everyone’s fears about the uncertainty of life, which all of society has pushed ahead each year until it is compressed into the furthest end of our lives and we, who are old, are expected to live out those fears.”1

What I ask of you is this: be kind and gentle to your elders; notice how your own fear of aging affects how you treat us. Any old woman has sustained a lot of losses to get where she is—most of them unseen. Your care of and for her can mean a lot. Valuing and listening to old women can birth significant changes in a world that needs lots of changing.

1 Excerpt from Barbara Mac Donald’s address at the 1987 West Coast conference By & For Old Lesbians.