Peg Kerr's Journal

I had some trouble settling on an idea for this week. Again, I was preoccupied by my mom's care (we moved her into her assisted living apartment this past week). In addition, I was coping with a great deal of arthritis pain in my left hand. Finally, it was Halloween and as I usually do this time of year, I watched the movie Coco again.

I have already done collages about all of these topics before. I thought about what might be a common thread tying all these things together, and I started thinking about hands.

Caregiving as my sisters and I had done in the past week was very hands-on: fastening and unfastening the brace, combing Mom's hair, handing her coffee and water cups, holding onto her waist as she took walks, and holding her hand.

Yet I couldn't help much with the tasks of moving Mom from one apartment to the other as my left hand was so dreadfully painful. I thought of the x-ray taken of my hand last April, how it revealed how the cartilage was disappearing, and the way the delicate edges of bones were grinding painfully against each other.

In the movie Coco, as I've previously explained, the story focuses on the bonds of love and loss that tie generations together: children, their parents, aging grandparents, and finally, the dead. One of the first signs that Miguel is in danger of never escaping the Land of the Dead into which he blundered is that his body starts to gradually disappear, revealing the skeleton underneath, beginning with one of his hands.

I mulled over the movie's story this week, thinking about the slow turn of generations my siblings and I are sensing. Babies are born and their parents care for them. They grow older and their own babies come. And then the parents are gone, leaving only memories behind--and the aches in their own bones that tell them that their own time is also coming.

I thought of one of those vivid mental snapshots I made of a moment when I was a child. We were at my Nana's house, doing something together--perhaps putting a puzzle together or playing a card game. I looked at my Nana's hands, wrinkled and shrunken and age-spotted. And I looked at my mom's hands, strong and finely boned and slim. And I looked at mine, a soft child's hand.

And then a day came thirty years later when I was doing something with my mom and Fiona, and I realized that it was my hand that was now strong and finely boned and slim. And it was my mom's hands that were starting to get shrunken and age-spotted. And there was Fiona's hand, soft and baby-smooth.

And my Nana was gone.

Right there, right then, I saw the earlier picture of my memory superimposed on our hands, and I felt the wheel of time make another turn.

Image description: Background: semi-transparent black and white photo of marigolds, the flower traditionally used to decorate ofrendas in Mexican Dia de Los Muertos celebrations. Lower center: a marigold blossom held in a pair of cupped hands. Superimposed over it: a pair of semi-transparent hands in x-ray view. Upper center: a pair of clasped hands (my mom's hand clasped by a friend's).

Hands



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I had my yearly physical with my doctor last week. We went over the annoyance of my asthma and discussed changes to my medication. (More money. Groan). We discussed lipid levels, vaccinations, exercise and mental health. And she remarked, "Oh, I wasn't going to do a Pap smear, because technically you're not due for one. But the guidelines don't recommend the test for women after sixty-five--nor will insurers pay for it--and considering your upcoming birthday next spring, we probably need to do one after all."

It took a moment for the significance to sink in. "You mean...this is my last Pap smear?"

She smiled. "Yes. This is your last Pap smear."

"My goodness. We should have confetti. Or balloons."

This time she laughed. "Yes, we should!"

So I got up on the table, and she did the exam in her usual courteous and comforting way. I gave her a high five when we were done.

Wow. My last Pap smear.

It does seem like such a milestone. Our culture talks about menarche, and new motherhood, and menopause. But it hadn't occurred to me that there would be one more significant marker to signal that, well, my reproductive life is effectively over.

I have really entered the crone years.

I thought about that this week. In general, I don't believe that I am afraid of aging. It helps that my mother has aged so gracefully and so well. I'm not bothered by wrinkles or gray hair (an easy thing to say because I seem to be graying later than many of my peers). Well, okay, I'm less blasé about the extra moles I seem to be accumulating as I get older, but that's a minor detail.

I talked today with a friend (in her eighties) about the gifts that aging brings. You can be calmer, and more self-confident. Things don't seem to be so do-or-die dramatic. You can roll more easily with the punches. Your time is more your own.

Hopefully, this stage will bring wisdom.

I took a picture of myself and prematurely aged it to make this collage.

Image description: lower left corner: a doctor's examination table with the stirrups extended for a Pap smear. A raven perches on the head of the table. Lower right corner: a bunch of brightly covered balloons. Upper right corner: an old woman with her head propped on her head smiles (Peg, aged a couple of decades in advance). Upper left corner: a pair of aged, cupped hands hold a piece of paper with the word 'Wisdom." Just below the cupped hands, set at an angle, are the Maiden/Mother/Crone symbols (waxing moon, full moon, waning moon).

Crone



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Sometimes, coming up with the theme for the digital collage of the week is easy.

This wasn't one of those weeks.

The problem, I reflected rather gloomily as I mulled over the question, was that I have already done collages about all the most obvious things. This week, I read fanfiction, obsessing over my favorite fandom. I exercised. I wrote fiction. I mulled over new career directions. I practiced French. I cooked, trying out healthy recipes. I could talk about Halloween, and the tarot reading I'd done, but I've done that as a collage before, too.

I'd spent last week trying to go out and do different things I hadn't tried before. But now it seemed that I was back doing the same old usual routine.

Did I truly have nothing new to say? What WAS this week all about?

One small thing did happen this week, that has been niggling at the back of my mind:

My mom told me, on our usual weekend visit, that she was making arrangements to bring her cello to a musical instrument consignment shop.

I've mentioned with pride before my Mom's devotion to music. She just had her 95th birthday, and she has played the cello for 85 of those years. What an extraordinary accomplishment!



But her eyesight has been growing worse, and she's becoming more frail. Hefting a cello and driving to orchestra rehearsal is not in her wheelhouse anymore. And so, soon the cello will be gone, hopefully to someone who will be delighted with it and who might play it another half century or more.

One of the things I have always admired about my parents the most was the way that they continually stretched themselves to stay engaged with the world, getting out and doing things as they grew older. When my Dad was 82 years old, he went to the Dominican Republic to install bio-sand water filters to give poor people clean drinking water--he'd spent the previous year raising $40,000 dollars to fund the project. My mom continued traveling, playing music, and socializing into her 80s and 90s. They have been a downright inspiration to my siblings and me.

The natural tendency for many people, I have often thought, is for their lives to become smaller as they age. I had been rather shaken, as I reported a few weeks ago, by some physical setbacks. I could see how it would be easy to reason, 'Well, I'll just ease up on things a little. Not go out as often. Skip the walk around the lake. That lecture looks like it might be interesting, but I'd rather stay at home." Little by little, if I let myself, my life could get narrower and narrower.

Maybe it's partly losing Rob, and the memories that always come back this time of year. I still have years of healthy living to look forward to, but I can feel the press of time, and even my own mortality. I am sensing that the event horizon is not infinite.

I will not be able to read all the books I intended to read before I die.

I was brooding over all of this when I met my friends Eleanor Arnason, Naomi Kritzer, and Lyda Morehouse for Zoom coffee, as we faithfully do every Friday. I do my weekly collage during these Zoom coffee sessions, and this week, more than usual, I spoke with them to help me pin down my thoughts about my worry that if I am not careful, my life could become more and more constricted. They instantly understood what I was struggling to articulate.

"It's more than one thing you're talking about here," Lyda pointed out. "There's having a regular routine that you follow because you have to maintain your life--or because you can't think of anything else to do. But you also repeat things because they have become ritualized, because repeating them brings you comfort."

That was true, I realized. I have often thought that the passage of time may seem like a wheel, as in the wheel of the year, but it is also like a spiral, like a nautilus shell. You come back around again, but you are in a slightly different place, because you have changed in that year, and you are not exactly the same person.

A life can become more constrained as you age, as you begin to face your mortality. But the trick, as my parents knew, is to live your life as adventurously as possible as long as you possibly can, so that when the natural constraints of aging come, it's still a pretty damned wonderful life.

I got my karate black belt at age 51. I don't practice karate anymore because my knees gave out. But damn it, I have a black belt, and no one can ever take that away from me. How much smaller my life would have been if I reasoned at age 43 I'm too old to be doing karate.

My mother is giving up her cello. But she played that cello for 85 years, and she has a lifetime of wonderful memories to hold close to her heart, not to mention the admiration of the countless people (including her own children) who heard her play. Her dogged determination to keep playing music for so long is doubtless one of the reasons she remains so sharp and acute into her old age. Even now, at the age of 95, she exercises, socializes with the others in her senior unit, enjoys time with her family, and goes out to concerts. She is living a full life.

I will have more adventures in my future. I still have to figure out what they might be. But with my parents' example to follow, I am sure I will live a fully realized life, too.

(I really like how this collage came out aesthetically. There are only three elements to it, but I think it's beautiful. The way that the curve at the cello's base echoes the curve of the nautilus shell's inner divisions is very satisfying to me.)

Image description: Background: A stylized nautilus shell shape set against a richly hued dark blueish-green background. Overlaid over that: another nautilus shell, cut away to show the spiraling inner compartments. Overlaid over that: a cello and bow.

Mortality



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

I discovered the blog Advanced Style and have been poring over some of the entries with great interest. First of all, I've been thinking a lot about my body and how I dress. Pennies have been tight for quite awhile, but although I don't know much about fashion, I know all about the mental lift it can give you when you feel as though you look fabulous.

This blog spotlights women in their seventies, eighties and even older who dress them to suit themselves and carry themselves with confidence. Some of them look stunningly elegant:





some of them (in my opinion) look more than a little dotty:




but what pulls the blog together is these women's self-confidence. Many of them choose pieces with brilliant color:











They are dressing to suit themselves, and they've reached the age where they can say they don't really give a flip about what you think; they're not doing this for you, they're doing it for themselves. It's the difference, as one woman puts it, between 'Look at me!' and 'Here I am.' It's no coincidence that many of these women have active and busy lives into advanced old age.

The man doing the blog, Ari Seth Cohen, has a book out and a movie in development:




I'm very attracted to these women, who seem quite sure of themselves. It was interesting to probe my reaction to these pictures of confident crones, if you will, (and I use the word 'crone' in the best sense of the word) with the more wary reaction I have to the Red Hat Society (and not just, as sdn says, because their website looks so awful that it sort of breaks the eyes). The Red Hat Society, if you'll remember, is a social organization for ladies, primarily over 50: they do outings together, where they all wear purple clothes and red hats. Both Advanced Style and the Red Hat Society are trying to tap into the power of older women, help them harness self-confidence. And yet...I once was in a Red Hat Society store, and it struck me quite forcibly: 1) how corporate it is...see all the stuff they're trying to sell (note all the ads on the website) and 2) maybe it's encouraging women to discover their inner zing, stand out, be bold. But note how it works in practice: all the women at a Red Hat Society meeting dress alike: red hats, obviously, and purple dresses. The women that the Advanced Style blog follows seem to me to be much more individualistic. And they often make their own clothes, or create their own art pieces that they wear, sometimes with thrifted items.

I am sure the Red Hat Society has been a godsend to some women, opening them up to new adventures.

Somehow, I kinda think I might prefer, however, to hang out with the ladies profiled in Advanced Style.