The Beauty of Embracing Aging

As Evelyn Couch said to Ninny Threadgoode in Fannie Flagg’s “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe”: “I’m too young to be old and too old to be young. I just don’t fit anywhere.”

I think about this line often, this feeling of being out of place, particularly in a culture that obsessively glorifies youth and teaches us to view aging as an enemy.

No one really tells us how we’re supposed to age, how much fighting against it and how much acceptance of it is the right balance. No one tells us how we’re supposed to feel when the body grows softer and the hair grayer, how we’re supposed to consider the creping of the skin or the wrinkles on the face that make our smiles feel unfortunate.

The poet Dylan Thomas told us we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” that “old age should burn and rave at close of day.” He died, sadly, before turning 40.

For those of us well past that mark, rage feels futile, like a misallocation of energy. There is, after all, a beauty in aging. And aging is about more than how we look and feel in our bodies. It’s also about how the world around us plows ahead and pulls us along.

I remember a call, a few years ago, from a longtime friend who said it looked as if her father was about to pass away. I remember meeting her, along with another friend, at her father’s elder care facility so she wouldn’t have to be alone, and seeing the way her tears fell on his face as she stroked his cheeks and cooed his name; the way she collapsed in the hallway on our way out, screaming, not knowing if that night would be his last.