The Lioness in Winter

Writing an Old Woman's Life

Ann Burack-Weiss

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231525336
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

When she started working with the aged more than forty years ago, Ann Burack-Weiss began storing the knowledge and skills she thought would help when she got old herself. It was not until she hit her mid-seventies that she realized she had packed sneakers to climb Mount Everest, not anticipating the crevices and chasms that constitute the rocky terrain of old age. The professional gerontological and social work literature offered little help, so she turned to the late-life works of beloved women authors who had bravely climbed the mountain and sent back news from the summit. Maya Angelou, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, M. F. K. Fisher, Doris Lessing, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, May Sarton, and Florida Scott-Maxwell were among the many guides she turned to for inspiration.

In The Lioness in Winter, Burack-Weiss blends an analysis of key writings from these and other famed women authors with her own wisdom to create an essential companion for older women and those who care for them. She fearlessly examines issues such as living with loss, finding comfort and joy in unexpected places, and facing disability and death. This book is filled with powerful passages from women who turned their experiences of aging into art, and Burack-Weiss ties their words to her own struggles and epiphanies, framing their collective observations with key insights from social work practice.

1

WHO IS THAT OLD WOMAN?

It is not a surprise to look in the mirrors and think: Who’s that old woman? … And inside this fluidity a permanence, for the person who looks at the old face in the mirror is the same as the one who shares your earliest memories, when you were two, perhaps less: that child’s core is the same as the old woman’s. “Here I still am: I haven’t changed at all.”

—DORIS LESSING, “OLD”

EVERY woman past a certain age has had Lessing’s experience. It is not a sense of “where did the years go?” (we can all answer that one) but “what can we keep of all that passed between then and now?” What is the balance of “fluidity and permanence” in the identity of an old woman? How can she preserve “the child’s core”—as well the essence of who she was through every period of her life since then—as she navigates the rocky terrain of her last years?

“I am downsizing,” a friend of seventy-five remarks as she moves from a large house to a small apartment. She adds how freeing it feels to get rid of so many “things” and live with only the essential, the beautiful, the needed. What she doesn’t say, but we all understand, is that the downsizing was not a choice made in the thick of her life as a wife, mother, and professional whose house was abuzz with activity, for whom these things were essential. It is a necessity made now, when she is a retired widow, living alone, and too arthritic to manage the stairs of her previous home.

My friend has made what gerontologists would term an “adaptation” to the losses of age. Relieved of previous responsibilities to others, she will now have time and energy to focus on herself. She will devote herself to “wellness,” conserving her energy for activities that matter to her now. She will transition into one of the “successful aging” who make professionals feel hopeful about their own old age. Gerontologists have a rosy view. I should know; I was once one of them.

Now that I am on the other side of the desk, I am not so sure. Now that I am old, I ask questions that I never thought of before: How is my friend, how am I, how are other old women now in the first (or second, or third) flush of downsizing to meet the increasing losses of people, places, and things that are now our lot? How are we to face our own declining attractiveness, health, and ability to function day to day? How are we to face our own death that no longer hovers in the distant future but is now too close for comfort?

Lessing writes: “I haven’t changed at all.” I agree. Inside my old carapace dwells all I once was. That is not the issue. Rather, I ask: How much of that can I keep? What, if anything, will I be able to add? How can I meet my last years with the dignity and grace to which I aspire but that I feel incapable of achieving on my own?

To answer these questions I turned to the life writing of women I admired for help. Most were born many years before me and sent out news from the front before they died. Several are peers—now writing in their seventies and eighties—and a few are Baby Boomers hot on our heels.

These women may have lived in other places, at other times, and led different lives, but age has a tendency to cut one down to size. Removed or having removed themselves from much that had occupied them before, they were reduced to their core. It was this core, who they were now, that I sought to understand and incorporate into my own aging self.

My search for mentors was neither organized nor orderly. I started with authors I had known and read before and branched out from there. My criteria were simple: life writing of women who had something interesting to say, life writing that could open new paths of my own thinking about aging and perhaps help the generation of gerontological practitioners who are working today.

The authors did not lead ordinary lives. Many came from humble beginnings, but extraordinary gifts marked them as special from an early age. Their “specialness” opened educational possibilities while granting them life opportunities closed to many. So it is reasonable to wonder: are they representative of the rest of us—those who lack the words or platform to share what we think and feel about growing old?

Are the authors representative of the legion of old women for whom lifelong deprivations of poverty, racism, and lack of essential life supports trump concerns about the passing of the years? It is unlikely. The freedom to contemplate one’s inner life presupposes an existence in which not only basic needs but some of the comforts of life are fulfilled.

A more germane question might be: does the fact that the authors don’t represent the experience of all old women matter? I think not. The individual story—whether poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction—represents only itself. And the truth (or lack thereof) is not found on the page but within the reader.

My present life has little in common with that of the authors. Nor do my early years resemble theirs. There is much in their writing that does not speak to me. As I read of this one’s love of cats, that one’s deep religious faith, I feel no resonance. Then there comes a phrase or paragraph that takes my breath away. How could she possibly know and express so well what I am going through? Not only that, but her words lead me deeper into myself. Her story opens the door to mine. It is what good writing has always done.

Most of the authors quoted in this book lived large, long, and out loud. Living large was, for many, a matter of traveling freely across boundaries of geography, gender, class, and culture that marked the personal choices of their lives. Multiple places to call home, multiple intimate relationships, working in multiple literary genres as well as trying their hands in other careers.

No one presents herself, nor do I present her, as a model of how to think or feel or behave. Rather, it is the singularity of the vision of old age—the unconventional view on the most conventional of subjects—that commands attention. Reading through her work, I find that Marguerite Duras was sixty-nine, alcoholic, and creatively blocked until a twenty-nine-year-old homosexual man, an admirer of her work, came to call. He stayed on until her death fourteen years later, as an inspiration for a renewed spate of writing as well as to her consideration of him as the great passion of her life. Not many older women could live this life (or even want to), but it does open the door to consideration: what possibilities beyond imagining could lie ahead for any one of us?

Living long, the authors could continue writing well into the upper decades of the life span. (Although a few were as young as fifty, most wrote well into their eighties and a few until their nineties.) Of particular interest in their long writing lives is the fact that many revisited the same aging-related themes. So we read Doris Grumbach lamenting her failing health in her seventies and then read on to see that she is now in her nineties and has turned her interest outside to her peers. Some, like May Sarton, Colette, and M.F.K. Fisher, grow old before our eyes. When we read them in chronological order, we know the future they are facing at the time of their writing and they don’t. This gives us pause and a place to remember: as old and limited as we are now, our situations will change, and with them our attitudes.

Living out loud is to notice all that passes between the lived experience and its representation in print. The authors’ earlier writing may have spanned many genres; the scope of their concerns may have been wide; but now, in old age, they lean more to the personal. Living out loud, they carry their readers on a trajectory of stops and starts, of gains and losses that parallel their own journey through time. Like many of my contemporaries, they are downsizing to essentials.

The old woman’s life, like every life, is the culmination of all that went before. But unlike earlier ages, the opportunities for “reinvention” are limited. While staking out new ground is possible and sometimes necessary (moving to new housing, forming new relationships), it is the quotidian rounds—and the thoughts that accompany them—that form the basis of their writing.

What they have written of their experience comes from well-furnished minds calling on all they have read and experienced until now. Their stories are not “uplifting” or “hopeful” tales written to persuade or instruct. Their stories are tales of their daily lives, of how they have chosen to live out the time left and reflections on what it all means to them.

They write of their decaying bodies, of how they look and feel, of all it takes to make them look and feel better, and of what they do when nothing they try works. They write of being alone in a shrinking world, of what they call on to get themselves through the long days and often longer nights. They write of how remnants of their prior lives stream into the present. They write of their fears and hopes of their last days on earth and what they imagine comes after.

The authors speak to us across time and place as good authors always have—drawing timeless insights from time-bound incidents. They write because they must. And each is sui generis: an observing lens ground from so many elements—life history, genes, personal choices, and the vagaries of chance.

My choice was to cast a wide net to include authors who had written on many subjects over a long period of time, adding richness and variety to the text while adding to the complexity of the task. One such complexity: How to account for the half-century gap of time between the birth dates of the oldest and the youngest? What of the differences in where they lived and the people they spent their lives around?

The passages quoted in later chapters can stand on their own. Yet a knowledge of their place in the context of the author’s time adds resonance as we consider “who is that old woman?”

THE TIME OF HER LIFE

Colette was born in France in 1873. Diane Ackerman was born in the United States in 1948. Seventy-five years separate these two women who helped me—a city girl born and bred—find my place in the natural world.

Colette and Ackerman rejoiced in the dawn and taught me to claim it for my own. They got me up. They got me out. How lovely that first light and its promise of the day ahead! What else had I been missing all my life?

Dawn is one of the few things that did not change in the close to four generations that separated these authors. When they came indoors and entered the rhythm of their lives, they inhabited different worlds.

Age—the most powerful “demographic” data—is cited in everything from political research to cereal buying habits. When we say “seventy is the new fifty,” we are referring to three dimensions of time, each of which contributes to the substance and sensibility of the authors quoted here.

There is chronological aging, the internally programmed senescence we know too well: the graying of the hair, the sag and wrinkling of the skin, outward indicators of all that slows and sometimes shuts down within us. Although medical advances can now prevent, mask, delay, and treat conditions that befell our foremothers, the old body is still the old body. When we read of the physical ills and increasing dependence experienced by women who were born over a hundred years ago, we nod in recognition. Perhaps our time will come a little later now, but it will come.

Then there is aging looked at from “period” and “cohort” effects—sociological concepts that enlarge our understanding of differences among the writers. “Period effects refer to what is going on in the world while we are alive in it” (Riley 1972).

For our authors, this would include most of the events of the twentieth century: several if not all of the wars, economic growth, depressions and recessions, technological breakthroughs in every aspect of life. From horses and steamships to railroads, automobiles, and airplanes. From stage to movies to DVRs and YouTube. From books to e-readers. From letters to telephones to emails and texts. From outdoor to indoor plumbing. And yes, from old pieces of cotton cut into rags to be pulled out monthly (washed and hung on an outside line to dry and so notify the neighborhood of the intimate physical details of one’s life) to sanitary napkins and tampons.

Period effects are experienced differently depending on the age we are when they occur. This is the cohort effect—the influence of what everyone who is within ten to twenty years of our age is thinking and doing; the news of the world that catches our...