Liz Carpenter, Journalist, Author and LBJ staffer 
The Silver Lining
Growing old gracefully.
(Page 2 of 3)
The meaning in your life isn’t just handed to you, as a wayward motorist might be provided with a set of directions. You give life meaning through the commitments you make beyond yourself—whether they are commitments to religion, to loved ones, to your life’s work, to your fellow humans, to some conception of an ethical order.
I recently ruptured two disks in my back while carrying suitcases off a plane—something I had done hundreds of times before with no problem. Five weeks in bed were essential. Surrounded by magazines full of beautiful houses, I began to grow impatient with my home. Paths were worn into the carpet; the upholstery was fading; the whole place seemed to be falling apart, just as I was. I knew I had many more years in me, and I wanted my house to serve me well. I wanted it to be my “forever place.” I also wanted to plan (the best therapy against depression) for my old age, to study what other people had done to grow old with grace and humor. I began by collecting bits of wisdom about aging. In my reading, I came upon gems like this: “Age is a matter of mind. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” I also started listening, with my good ear, to conversations, for the purpose of analyzing older friends. I gained real insight. One evening I joined James Michener (who was living in Austin writing a book about Texas), Lady Bird Johnson and Walter Cronkite for dinner at Walter’s favorite Austin restaurant, Green Pastures. Momentarily, I thought I was the youngest at the table. Michener was 77, Lady Bird was 71, Walter was 67. But only momentarily! They were off to the races talking about their projects.
Michener had been to almost every one of the 254 counties in Texas to research his book. He was about one third through and relishing each day. He said that he rises before dawn and walks two miles before settling at the typewriter. “My characters come out better when I walk. I like them better.”
Walter had just sailed the intracoastal canal with an artist friend and written a book about his first love, sailing. He was planning to do another. Meanwhile, “Jim,” he said, “I want to do a little lobbying with you. I want to go on the first space shuttle of citizens, and you are on the NASA committee. Don’t you think the requirements should be someone who has attended every launch and was once an editor of the Daily Texan?”
And Lady Bird! I have known her since the day in 1942 when I went to Washington and called on my congressman, the young man who was making news in those yeasty days of the New Deal. I have learned so much from her, and still have so much to learn: how to be a widow, how to grow out of grief and into action. What had Lady Bird been doing? Michener and Cronkite were full of questions about her National Wildflower Research Center. On her seventieth birthday, she decided to toss her hat over the windmill, as she put it. She donated some land and some money, rallied some old allies from the beautification days in the White House, and found a way to spread wildflowers along our highways and in public places. Why? Because it saves millions in mowing costs. Why? Because it is irresistible to her.
They weren’t talking about age at all. They were writing for the future, planning for the future, and walking hand in hand with the present. They were exemplifying another bit of wisdom that I had filed away, from the example of Cato the Elder in the first century B.C. At 84, Cato was writing treatises and studying a new language, and every evening he repeated the events of the day so that he might keep his memory in order, because, according to psychiatrist Frances J. Braceland, “anyone living in the midst of such studies must keep his mind in full stretch like a bow and never allow it to go into old age by becoming slack.”
I decided to analyze my anxieties about age, asking myself, “What are my fears of aging?” I don’t want fears to clutter up the time I have left. I sorted out five basic ones: not feeling needed, losing a sense of purpose, losing control over my own destiny, not feeling loved, and not being touched. Listing them made me look for cures and comforts.
The first, not feeling needed. Every mother eventually knows the loneliness of the empty nest. I have two children, a son and a daughter, one living in Seattle (and holding my grandchildren hostage), the other in New York—each a long and expensive plane ride away. There is no one with a skinned knee to comfort, no car pool to run, no dinner to cook for anyone but myself. An awful sadness sweeps over me when I think that the people I have lived for do not require anything of me anymore. It’s a cycle, of course. I remember with remorse how my mother told us children, “Just when you all got interesting, you all left home.”
One of the happiest days of my life was when I took matters in hand and called my frantic daughter, who was moving into a new career and into a New York apartment, and said, “I am giving you a gift: me! And two weeks of my time to answer your door for deliveries and run your errands.” She let me, and I loved it.
Last summer she rewarded me by calling and asking, “Mom, do you believe in free speech? Good, you’re making one for the women in cable in Las Vegas.” I did. And again, we were friends needing each other, an ideal relationship.
The second agony, losing a sense of purpose. It leads to questions like, Why am I here? What do I mean in the infinite scheme of things? I could die tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter to anyone, I say to myself in a depressed moment.
Call it ego if you like, but you want to keep counting in humanity. And so you must be willing to rejoin it as part of something. I am ever in the debt of the battle for the equal rights amendment because it came along just when I needed it. And I know that the women’s movement needed me. It needed my political savvy, my humor, and a certain respectability that I brought to it because I was not a marcher or a zealot, though I have become both. Being part of a movement, whether it is labor, business, the environment, civil rights, zoning rights, or saving the whales, is life-giving. Anger and indignation are good for you. They keep the circulation going.
Third, losing control over your own destiny. Avoiding this takes more philosophy and coping than I have, but it is what I fear most. It makes people too frugal. They aren’t good enough to themselves; they keep saving instead of buying that dress or taking that trip, and if they are parents, they worry too much about not being a problem to their children. I like the pillow that Mrs. Drew Pearson needlepointed: “May I live long enough to be a problem to my children.” I also like a bumper sticker seen recently on a camper in the West. “Yes, we’re spending our children’s inheritance,” it read.
My Library
