And Soon You'll Turn 43

No one tells you how to be middle aged. It just happens one day. You wake up and realize that you’ve lived half of your life. For most of your life, your life was ahead of you—a mystery, an unknown variable. You could be anything, do anything. You had so much time left, you couldn’t even imagine living past 30.

And then you did. And you lived further. And some of your friends died. A shocking number of your friends had cancer. You tried to reach out more, and you became a better friend, and you let go of the people that weren’t very good friends to you. And you thought about cancer so much that becoming diagnosed with cancer became one of your biggest fears. And your parents got older, and ill (with cancer), and your friends’ parents got older, and some became ill, and some died, and you felt mortality coiling around you and squeezing. You’re not ready for your parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends’ parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends to die. And there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable tides.

You develop a prevailing awareness of death.

And you always thought you had time to have kids, and then you found yourself in a fertility clinic listening to a specialist, one of the best in the state, tell you that it was too late. You had gone into early menopause, and the only option was a donor egg, IVF, and hormones that would cost over $30k for an 11% chance of carrying to term. And you couldn’t stop weeping for the loss of something you never had. You wept at your friends’ children, and you wept at Shazam! (of all things), and you wept at old home movies, and you wept to your mother and your husband, who told you that it was okay, that you weren’t defective. But you still aren’t sure you believe them.

Your body continues to betray you, and although you knew it was going to happen, although you knew that things would start to hurt and creak and crack and pop and stiffen, you didn’t expect it to be your left knee. Or the ball of your right foot. Or that place beneath your left shoulder that becomes so knotted that when you hold things over your head, you hold them at an angle.

You expected to have a mid-life crisis where you would buy a ridiculous car or go on an expensive trip or at least get a completely different sort of haircut, and instead you question if you’ve done enough, if you’ve done it well, if you’ve done the things that you wanted. You question how much time you have left to do all the things you still want to do, and realize that you’re going to have to choose between them. You’ve reached a strange place where the opinions of other people matter less, but your aren’t sure what you think of yourself and your life and how your values have changed and how your goals have changed. You think things like if you adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? If you don’t adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? And since adoption starts at about $30k anyway, and you’re already in the hole about $130k for student loans, and you have a mortgage, then you think that maybe mid-life is about realizing that not only can you not take anything with you when you die, but how much you’ll actually owe instead.

And on second thought, maybe it’s a really good thing you didn’t have a mid-life crisis where you bought an expensive car or went on an exotic vacation because you couldn’t afford any more debt anyway. Retirement isn’t going to save up for itself.

No one prepares you for mid-life. No one is interested in mid-life accomplishments. Everyone is focused on the 30 under 30, or the 40 under 40, but no one writes about the 45 at 45, or the 50 in their 50s, the 60 in their 60s, or the 70 in their 70s. And no one cares if you’re 80 or 90 or 100, but if you’ve managed to live the longest, 104, or 108, or maybe even longer, then you get a feel-good news story about how you did it, and you can attribute your lucky longevity to whiskey and scrambled eggs and always owning a dog.

Sometimes, you find yourself writing in second person even though you always hated when people did that. Weirdly, it’s not so bad now.

You are surprised at what you know. You know how to argue against companies, and you know how to demand fair treatment, not just for yourself, but for the people around you. You’re very good at wrangling. You’re fairly savvy with money, and surprisingly organized, considering that once upon a time you never wrote anything down (who were you then?!). You have a strange affinity for rules and order that shocks the everliving ebejezus out of you when you find yourself complaining about jaywalkers.

You seek out seats at concerts and are delighted when bands start early. The idea of being out past midnight exhausts your soul.

You sometimes wonder if you will ever develop confidence in yourself.

You also sometimes wonder if you will ever develop a taste for anchovies. You are surprised that Skittles don’t taste as good as they used to. You marvel at some of the things you used to eat, and are not surprised that your tooth enamel isn’t better.

Your range and breadth of emotion has deepened and expanded, and you feel things now that are so complex and nuanced you cannot find adequate words to describe them. You find a picture of your old living room and you feel happy/bitter/sweet/nostalgic/yearning/loss/forgiveness/gratitude/delight and you don’t know what to call it. You feel things like that all the time now. You are surrounded by this nuanced ocean of emotional sensation and resonance. You are overwhelmed by the constant complexity of it.

You weren’t prepared to discover that old friends that you had lost touch with became addicted to drugs and are homeless.

You realize that your grandparents died 20 years ago. You have never stopped grieving their loss. At the same time, you can still feel them with you.

And you realize that everything from your childhood has changed. Your grandparents’ house. Your grandmother’s condo. The house where you grew up. The magnolia tree that your mother planted is gone. The fence that your father built is gone. And although these things are gone, you remember them, bright and vividly, like you could travel to where they were and they would still be there, exactly the same.

But you can never, ever remember to wear your reading glasses.

And you realize this is all okay. Life is more beautiful and precious and ephemeral than you ever realized. And although you already knew that life was amazing and precious and brief, you didn’t know that life was amazing and precious and brief. Only the accumulation of time has been able to teach you that in way that reaches the bone of your bones. Every moment matters more than you could ever have possibly realized before you were middle-aged. Life has a different savor. Like learning to taste the different notes in coffee. No one told you that time is transformative. You had no idea that mid-life would be a time of growth. You can feel the uncomfortable shifting of being in chrysalis, and you are delighted that you have the capacity for so much more change and potential than you ever knew.

Memory piles up thick and deep, like stacks of books. Little things remind you of other little things, and before you know it, you’re knee deep in the past. And every time, the past pulls you deeper into the present. Into this miraculous, flicker-short life. Into the sheer fantastic impossibility of existing as a being of consciousness. Becoming middle-aged is like becoming a banker, but not one who deals in currency, but one who invests in the daily miracles of being alive in this world. The miracle of breath. The miracle of grass. The miracle of rain. The miracle of motion. You have so much more than you ever thought you’d have.

And you’ve lost so much more than you ever thought you could lose.

No one told you that time is cleansing.

No one told you that mid-life was a time of incredible growth. That it’s painful and heavy and glorious and liberating and sad and adaptive and strange. But most of all, it’s learning. And accepting. And being.

You have no idea why people don’t write more about mid-life. Or make lists of accomplishments from middle-aged people. Or, perhaps more appropriately, lists of insights.

Being middle-aged is nowhere near as boring as you thought it would be.

And no one told you how grateful you would be to be here for it.

And you begin to think that, regardless of the amount of time you have left, it doesn’t really matter. Because the only time that matters is now. And now is all you have.

Now is all you ever had.

Mensa

In 2003, my friend Thaddeus and I, on a lark, took the Mensa test. We went to some public school that I can’t remember the name of, and we bubbled in the bubbles on a few Scantron sheets in response to a small battery of IQ tests. It felt horribly like the GREs or SATs, and I had to keep reminding myself that nothing was at stake. We took the precaution of telling no one what we were doing. My scores weren’t being sent anywhere. And the questions, or, at least, the language questions, really weren’t that bad. We laughed after the test, and went to the pub, and that was that.

We both got in.

And for the past 17 years, I have continued to renew my Mensa membership, despite the fact that I have been to exactly two Mensa functions since 2003. One was a lecture. Thad and I both went, and we both went to the pub down the street before the talk, for social lubrication purposes, and walked in fairly drunk. I remember talking earnestly to a good many people after the talk, all of whom invited us to various local chapter activities. They clearly thought we were extroverts. (So much for high IQs.) Of those invitations, we accepted one. We reviewed essays for scholarships. That was the second Mensa function. The experience was so surreal, an odd combination of contentiousness, formality, and zealotry, that I remember it all occurring by candlelight (which surely couldn’t be right) in a formal dining room (possibly right). Next year, at essay review time, we were “busy.”

For at least five years (and probably longer, because I’ve reached the age where everything that I think was five years ago was actually 15 years ago), I have been determined not to renew. I don’t need to spend the money on a membership I don’t use. I have no stakes in the organization (although it is a fine organization). I don’t need the validation (as much as I once did). But just as the deadline is about to slip by, I renew. Even when I had no money as a graduate student, I managed to renew my membership.

Because 17 years ago, when I received my acceptance letter to Mensa, I told my father, who guffawed and said, “Well that’s just funny.” I told my mother, who was suitably impressed. And I told my grandmother Gigi, my father’s mother, who was ecstatic. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed, “Mensa! Why that’s wonderful! How simply wonderful. Oh, tell me all about it. I want to know everything. Were there any cute boys? Hee hee!” We talked on the phone for an hour, and I promised I would let her know how the first meeting went.

A week later, she had a stroke in Costco, went into a coma, and died.

I had just started knitting her a scarf when my father called to tell me she’d had a stroke. “No need to come to the hospital,” he said. The hospital was in Northern Virginia, and I was in Richmond. “We’re going to wait and see how bad the damage is.” I kept knitting. I was new to knitting, and I knit slowly and carefully. The next day, my father said the damage was extensive, and she would not recover or wake up. The next day, the decision was made to take her off life support. Later, I would learn that my aunt, my father’s sister, had protested this so vehemently that my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, had to side with my father to overrule my aunt. My grandmother had no living will, and my aunt remembered her wishes differently from everyone else. (My aunt typically remembers most things differently from everyone else.) After my grandmother died, my father had to drive back to Northern Virginia to sign the paperwork releasing my grandmother’s body to the funeral home for cremation. My aunt refused to sign the release. Because my father had gone ahead with the funeral proceedings, my aunt stopped speaking to him for over a year.

The service was in Northern Virginia, where my grandmother had lived. At the service, my aunt blithely introduced my mother to my father’s new wife. My aunt’s son, my cousin Buzz, who hadn’t spoken to my aunt in nearly 20 years, was surprisingly there. At the reception in my grandmother’s condo, he cornered me in the kitchenette after finding out that I working on my Master’s in English, and mercilessly needled me for not having thoroughly memorized Milton. (“I should probably be the one getting the Master’s degree! Hahaha! But I’d rather have a job.”) My aunt held court in the back bedroom, and mourners were brought singly or in pairs to pay their respects. When the lights flickered and momentarily went out in the condo, my father looked at me said, “That’s Mother. And she’s pissed about all of this.”

The interment of her ashes was in West Virginia, where my grandmother grew up. My father drove, and I sat in the backseat of the car, with my grandmother’s urn resting on the floorboard, still knitting her scarf. I have almost no memory of the interment. Instead, I remember my stepmother in the front seat, getting a paper-cut on a book she was reading, and insisting we stop at a drugstore for antibiotic ointment. She hopped back in the car and slathered the ointment on her finger. Thirty minutes later, she began to feel strange, and decided to check the ingredients in the ointment—after all, she was allergic to sulfa drugs. And lo, the antibiotic ointment did indeed contain sulfa drugs, and she began to go into anaphylactic shock. My father sped down the windy mountain roads in search of a hospital, and when he finally found one, 20 minutes later, he pulled up to the ER entrance. He helped my stepmother into the ER, and the ER staff whisked her into treatment. My father came back outside and parked the car in a parking space. He stood outside the car, locking the car again and again with the key fob. The mountains echoed the repeated half-honks.

“After all,” he said, pressing the button on the key fob, “my gun’s in there. And Mother.”

I finished knitting the scarf on the drive back, and then I read in the back seat. I put the scarf in my knitting bag. I tried to wear it once, and wrapping it around my neck felt like suffocating in memory. But I couldn’t give it away, or throw it away, or do anything with it at all. For 17 years, I’ve carried the scarf with me, from home to apartment to home, from Virginia to Georgia, and every winter, when I pull out my hats and mittens and gloves and scarves, I find it again. Off-white cream, feathery, with soft watercolor pastels here and there. Sassy and soft and subdued all at once. She would have loved it. And I put it back in the box.

I know that this year I’ll probably renew my Mensa membership again, even though right now, I tell myself I won’t. But I don’t throw away the notice either. I hide it on my desk until March, and when my membership is just about to expire, I’ll have it waiting. And I’ll have it waiting because I don’t have her. Because I never drove up to the hospital to see her one final time. Because she always believed in me and treated me with kindness. Because she always loved and encouraged my writing. Because when my father shook me and knocked me down and called me stupid so many times I thought I was going to die, I snuck into his bedroom and called her, because only his mother, my four-year-old self reasoned, could tell him what to do. “Please,” I begged, “please tell him to leave me alone. I promise I’ll be good, please tell him that I don’t want to be hurt anymore. Please spank him so he knows how it feels to be hurt. Then he won’t hurt me. And break his toys so he knows not to do that. Okay? Please?” She asked me to put my father on the phone, and I refused, because I would get into trouble for using the phone without permission. So we hung up, and she called back. I held my breath and hid in my room. When my father found me, he told me never to talk to my grandmother without his permission. But he also left me alone. For an entire week.

When my grandmother died, I had already lost both of my grandparents on my mom’s side. My grandmother Boo died in 2000, my grandfather Man in 2001. My parents divorced in the fall of 1998, and my father married the woman he’d been having an affair with a few months later. She came with two young children, and my father gave them all the things he never gave me or my brother. He went to their soccer games. He bought them bicycles. I watched them closely for signs of abuse. But they never had to call my grandmother in secret, begging her to stop my father from hurting them.

After I got into Mensa, and after my grandmother died, I applied to a PhD program in Atlanta. I got into that, too. And I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. It never felt like starting over. It felt like starting. My mom supported me and came to visit often. My father never visited. And time covered the holes and gaps of loss. The loss of my grandparents. My hometown. The father who would never be a father to me. Living far away from my mom, my friends, my brother.

But the holes are still there. And sometimes, when the stars align just right, and the right scent or right sound or right memory surfaces, time whips the cover off those holes and I fall in. Time is a fickle bitch. After 17 years, I think I’m safe. I think I’ve had enough time. And then memory knocks me down and shows me that really, I don’t know anything at all.

And that’s what Mensa is, a defense, an homage, a blessing, a protection. It’s the sound of my grandmother’s voice, soft, thrilled, quivering with excitement. It’s my mother’s pride. It’s my decision to change my life and start my life, to stop letting life happen to me, and to start making my life happen.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do yet. Will I let go, because 17 years is long enough? Or will I keep holding on, carrying my membership card like a talisman of remembering? Maybe I’ll renew, and finally attend another event. But I’ve told myself that before, too. I’ve been in this limbo before. I’ve been awash in the tides of memory and past and future, rolling like oceanic dreams that I can’t quite wake up from. But I know one thing for sure. Soon enough, it will be March. And I’ll decide.

The lyre of Orpheus

I had planned to write next about Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, but we went to the symphony on Sunday. And whenever I go to the symphony, I get ideas. I keep a little notebook in my purse to jot down these ideas, and inevitably, during the first performance of the evening, I slowly creep my hand into my bag and retrieve my notebook and pen as quietly as I can manage. 

Sunday’s performance opened with Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. I had never heard of Dimitri Shostakovich, and I was spellbound. His symphony reminded me of all the things I remember that are no longer fresh. Like: the moment after my grandparents died, and I went to their house with my mother to help clean it out, and a vine had grown through the casing of the dining room window and spread up the wall towards the ceiling. In the hallway outside the dining room was a door that led outside, but it was permanently shut, and high above the ground with no steps. My grandmother kept a planter in front of it. I had always wondered why that door was there. I remembered walking up the stairs to the second floor, and how difficult it was to make a slinkly slink down the carpeted steps. I remember the attic room with closets full of my mother’s and aunt’s old clothing. I remember the bookshelves filled with their old books. I remember the kitchen table by the window with the country green plantation shutters.

None of these memories are fresh. I’m petrified by what I can’t remember. I remember how much I loved that house, and I loved it because it was my grandparents’ house, because my grandparents were there. But I can’t remember the wallpaper in the kitchen. Or the kitchen chairs. Or the floor. I can’t remember the stove. I can’t remember the tables in the hallway or the knick knacks on them. I can’t remember the color of the carpet in the downstairs bedroom. 

I can’t remember how many games of Go Fish I played with my grandmother. I can’t remember how many times I watched my grandfather flip over cards in his endless games of Solitaire. And I want to remember. I want to remember the sounds of their voices, their turns of phrase, the way they hugged. 

But sometimes, I can be caught off guard by memory sneaking up behind me, and I can remember everything, like the morning we spent shelling peas from my grandfather’s garden at the kitchen table. Or gathering walnuts in the yard. Or going to the pool in the summer. 

Memory is what makes our stories possible, our narratives of life and self and others. Even the spaces, the absences made of forgetting are just the spaces in the weave of the fabric. We don’t always notice the holes, but they're there, holding the threads together. Sometimes the holes are what allow us to notice the thread. Sometimes we see it on our own. And sometimes it takes an entire symphony for us to notice the way the past is held together in our minds, and to remember what we can of it.