How old is old, really?

As she celebrates her 60th birthday, Rona Maynard talks about the reality of "old."

By: Rona Maynard       

When I was a hesitant 29, faking poise with a sale-rack suit and a new briefcase, I used to wonder, How old is grown up? I hoped to cross that threshold at 30, but my birthday flew by in a barrage of projects. I noticed one change: a longer to-do list. I still hadn't claimed that era's trophies of success - a secretary and a Dictaphone. I still lived in a house with no living room furniture. So why all the hype about turning 30?
For the better part of three decades, I've been shrugging off milestone birthdays. Forty: eclipsed by my mother's death two weeks earlier. Fifty: an excuse to squeeze a girlfriends' lunch between my morning and afternoon meetings. Then, last October, I turned 60. I marked the day with my first birthday bash since primary school, but I hated to leave my fifties. Oh, what a glorious decade - like the forties, with more confidence and savvy. Let me tell you, there's nothing familiar about 60.

Age: Just a number - or more?

"Age is just a number," people say. I've probably said it myself. But, at 60, I am now twice 30 - the age at which, in the parlance of my flower-power youth, a person can no longer be trusted. At 60, I wonder if I can trust myself to navigate the years ahead with the same emotional tool kit that had seen me through my rapidly dwindling middle age. I face a perplexing, even shocking new question: "How old is old?" Emotionally speaking, this latest birthday has flipped me upside down, swung me by the feet in a stiff wind and deposited me back on terra firma unsure just where I'm bound.
At least I'm in glamorous company: Meryl Streep and Twiggy, also 60, and Helen Mirren, at 64, are putting the sex appeal in sexagenarian. Looking at their life-burnished faces, I'm tempted to believe the rah-rah slogan (more than 400 million Google citations), "60 is the new 40!" But I know better. My bum knee and complaining shoulder won't allow me to forget. Sixty is the boundary between thinking I have forever to do my growing up, and accepting the fact that I don't.
You might think I'd be a full-fledged adult at this advanced age, but I haven't quite lost the goofiness of girlhood. I still reach for the wrong fork at the occasional candlelit table, still replay awkward conversations and realize too late what I should have said. I still walk down busy streets smiling at my own private jokes, while passersby wonder what's got into me. My days belong to me, but won't last forever. Without even trying, I've recaptured a young person's sense of doors about to swing open on discoveries that could change my life. But it's not the same anticipation. In my youth, the adventure was about finding someone: a partner to love me or a mentor to groom me for promotion. Now it's all about finding the newly unencumbered me.
I no longer have a son to raise, a mortgage to pay or a boss to impress. This has been so ever since I quit my job at 55, but there's something about being 60 that compels me to reflect on my life as if it were a treasure I could hold in my hand and examine from every angle. The first thing I see is this: My days belong to me. And they won't stretch on forever, like childhood summer vacations. I've acquired an elder's sense of time, in which decades speed up as if on fast-forward.
Forty seems, if not quite yesterday, then no more than a few birthdays ago. I still remember every detail of the home we sold when I was 40. I can feel the warmth of the polished oak banister under my hand. But here I am at the midpoint between 40 and - can it be? - 80. No question, 80 is old. Old enough to worry that your next "home" might have a logo and a brochure that delicately promises "care when you need it."

Dressing your age - or not

On a good day, seen from afar, I don't look all that different from the 40-year-old me. I can still wear tight jeans and sleeveless tops. I take offence at fashion stories on "dressing for your age" (ever notice how the sixtysomething gets the least appealing outfits?). Not so long ago, a younger man addressed me as "babe." I wasn't 60 then, or even 59, but I've hardly changed, honest. I've been eating broccoli and fish, sweating up a storm in Pilates class, wearing full-strength sunscreen even on the darkest winter days...doing everything I can, short of surgery, to keep the spring in my step and the wrinkles off my face.
In short, I've thought of aging as a manageable process, the cruise control of my later decades - as if, with the right preventive measures, I could coast along the highway of life, smooth-cheeked and taut-bellied, never reaching the dreaded end point, old.
I look at photos of my grandmother at my age or younger and am struck by how ancient she seemed in her prim shawl-collared dresses and orthopaedic shoes. Every night she put her teeth in a glass and gave her face a rubdown with Noxzema from an economy-size jar. How she'd scoff at what I've spent on skincare products sold only by white-coated estheticians, when I could be saving up for my grandkid's education. I feel blessed to have the means and the self-assurance to put myself first from time to time, as Grandma never could.
Yet her generation faced a truth we've willed ourselves to deny: No matter how buff you look at 60, you're headed for one of two fates: You'll either die too soon or you'll grow old. I'm not ready for this.
Perhaps I ought to feel grateful for reaching this age. Five of my friends, all stricken with cancer, didn't live to be 60. The first died in her mid-forties - a shocking fluke, it seemed at the time. Women our age were supposed to be hiking in the Rockies, going back to school, landing our dream jobs and generally becoming our most fulfilled, accomplished selves.
Now scarcely a month goes by when I don't hear of a contemporary stricken with a life-threatening illness, or felled by one. Such news never fails to unnerve me, no matter how slightly I knew the former colleague whose death notice I've just read. The shocker isn't that I could be next, but that time is already dismantling and rebuilding the world as I have known it.

Old women in a youth-obsessed culture

I'm not ready for this. I don't want to be unsexed and unnoticed, as old women are in a culture obsessed with youth. I take it personally when unemployed peers can't even land an interview, much less a job, because they have "too much experience." I cringe at predictions that addled, tottering boomers will soon bankrupt the healthcare system. Hey, pundits! You're talking about me and my friends! Yesterday, we defined the promise of the future. And now you've recast us as the problem?
Way back around my 30th birthday, I drew strength from stories of women achievers, a little older and a lot bolder than I as they forged careers in a man's world. At 60, I look for a different brand of female boldness - the courage to be fully oneself. My current heroine, British memoirist Diana Athill, released her latest memoir at 91. "When you are young a great deal of what you are is created by how you are seen by others, and this often continues to be true even into middle age," she writes. "But once you are old you are beyond all that...."
Athill is wonderfully frank about the diminutions of old age - sore feet, for example. Speaking about one of her last lovers, she observes that sharing painful feet "was almost as important as liking sex, because when you start feeling your age it is comforting to be with someone in the same condition." She has since lost all interest in sex, which perhaps is just as well since she's tethered to a cranky, bedridden partner whose demands never end. But that's my judgment, not hers.
What inspires me about Athill is the pure delight she finds in new pleasures and accomplishments (her dog, her drawing class and, above all, her writing) that continue to expand the boundaries of her life. On top of all this, she has answered the question on my mind: How old is old? Seventy-one, says Athill, with an elder's penchant for emphatic declarations. If she's right, I have 11 more years "within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters."
Oh well. I've decided I don't give a damn how old is old. You can call my stage of life whatever you want; I'll call it the wisdom years. I've earned the right. Maybe somewhere along the way I will finally grow up.