Are Boomers Really the Worst?: We're All Gonna Die
Are you more focused on staying young, than aging with dignity and grace? How about your peers?
For the first ten years of my life, I thought I was going to die. Being surrounded daily by my father’s violence led me to conclude my chances of survival were slim. Not that I thought my father would kill me, I just thought because of him I was going to die.
Every night my father slept with a loaded gun by his bed. One night in a drunken stupor he fired it off sending bullets through our dining room with one landing in the binding of my mother’s Fannie Farmer cookbook. Constantly delusional, he did things like hold my mother at gunpoint at the dining room table. I could go on, or you could read the whole story in my memoir, My Mother’s Song.
That said, I remember riding in the backseat of my parents’ car as we drove past a playground where a woman was pushing a child on a swing. I distinctly remember thinking, that woman is so lucky she got to grow up.
So, on the day my father died, I was overcome with relief. And a sudden realization that I was now going to live. And because I had never thought I’d grow up; I went on to welcome every stage of aging with open arms. Because in doing so, I was defying the childish notion that I would never get the privilege of becoming an adult.
Add to that, I admired my maternal grandparents. To me, they represented older age as a season of exotic adventure. In the 1960’s, I often stood in front of the big windows at National Airport in Washington DC awaiting my grandparent’s arrival home from places like Nigeria, Hong Kong, and Pakistan. Those old prop planes would pull up close to the windows and big stairs would be pushed out to the belly of the plane. The door would swing open while I stood mesmerized waiting for my grandmother to step out.
It was always the same. My grandmother would be impeccably dressed, with a scarf eloquently over her hair and tied underneath her chin. A perfectly fitted pencil skirt accented her slim figure. With her head held high, she’d step down those stairs with the elegance of the Queen of England. Right behind her was my grandfather in a suit and tie always wearing the crisp new white Stetson he bought every year. He was the brains but she was the star.
As I got older, I expected to naturally gravitate into the kind of matriarch I saw in my grandmother. And I fully expected my peers to follow the same path. But in the generation just ahead of us, Hollywood was already changing the narrative by giving us shows like, The Golden Girls. And as I aged, sexualized geriatric women with the mindset of an adolescent started to fill the screens. And when my friends would extol praise on women like Betty White for how she modeled “staying young,” I would cringe. And everything in me longed for my grandmother to teach me how to be more like her and not at all like Ms White.
I don’t begrudge anyone for wanting to stay as young and healthy as possible. But I do find fault when the quest for youth leads us to lie to ourselves about death. If staying young means we deny aging, we are fools. And if impending death doesn’t cause us to contemplate our lives, we have, like Tim Dillon says, “lived a long time but gained no wisdom.”
We are all going to die. And no attempts to ward off the inevitable will change the course we’re on. And whereas Jennifer Lopez may look 34, she’s not. And at 54, she can bank on the bulk of her life being behind her, and not the other way around.
So, what is most important to you? Your sex life, your ability to look half your age? Affording that face lift, or Botox injection?
Perhaps our kids and grandkids want us to grow up and be elders they can admire like I did my grandparents. Maybe if we stop acting like our kids, they’ll seek us for the wisdom our age has bestowed upon us. Wouldn’t that make for a much better world? I think so. How about you?
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