Growing Older, Maybe not so Gracefully by Nancy M Bell

 

The cover of the Ontario offering for the Canadian Historical Mysteries Collection from BWL Publishing to be released November 2024

To find out more please click on the cover

I recently came across some old pictures. I look at the girl in those photos and I wonder who she is. It's almost like she's a different person and not a younger me, which is absurd. But I realize how much I have changed as I grow older. Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, Crone. I don't mind growing older, I just feel like I've somehow lost a bit of connection with the younger me.

I used to believe I could do anything I put my mind to. Anything. As I've grown older and managed to break myself a few times in pursuit of following the credo I could do anything I put my mind to, I have learned that such beliefs need to be tempered with caution.

Caution??? A word my younger self didn't even have in her vocabulary. I scaled cliffs above the town of Minden in the Kawarthas of Ontario,  I rode all the rough horses I could get my hands on, if something was walking the knife edge of danger I was there. (I said I was young, not that I was smart, okay?) I liked the bad boys, you know the ones I mean, the wild ones, not a mean bone in them but good fun with no strings attached. I attempted a waterski jump with heavy wooden skies weighted down with metal strapped to me feet on Davis Lake. Just let me say that venture didn't end well and was a one off. I used to hitch up the horse trailer and go where I needed to without a worry. Embark on road trips without worrying about the weather. I can remember running out in the pouring rain of a thunder and lightening storm in the big back field behind my childhood home.

The me of today? Hell, I worry about the roads being icy, or a ton of what ifs that never happen. I imagine part of that comes from the long periods of convalescence I've endured after breaking a pelvis and mucking up my spine and a few nerve endings in one incident, and then another long period of waiting for a crushed tibia plateau injury to heal complete with metal plate and seven screws. I wonder if that taught me caution or if it just served to put a bag over the head of the younger me. I'm not sure about the caution, but I'm determined to reconnect with the younger me who threw her head back and embraced the storms.

I refuse to be a boring old Crone. I have learned to be more blunt and speak what's on my mind. It came to me in my fifties (I think) that a lot of people didn't seem to care if what they said was hurtful to me and why the hell was I being careful about what I said to them? I don't go out of my way to be mean or hurtful but I am more apt to say what's on my mind. That's something my younger self would NEVER do. I always did my best to be invisible and escape notice. 

So, I'm not sure that I'm growing older gracefully, but darn it I am getting older. So I've decided to be the best Crone I can. 

1960s Sprucedale ON at Aunt Lottie's

Me on the right, my sister on the left 

Gramma Lois Pritchard, Aunt Rotha and Aunt Lottie Hines 

May 1977

   

Glastonbury Tor

2000s Surrey International Writers Conference

1980s Uxbridge Fair

early 1970s at Davis lake

 

Growing old is...lucky! by Sheila Claydon

Find my books here

I know this book cover doesn't seem to match the title of my blog, but bear with me!

A couple of weeks ago my cousin was 80, so I called him to wish him a happy special birthday. Our whole life we have teased one another so I knew our conversation wouldn't be emotional nor full of the cliches often used on such occasions. What I wasn't expecting when I laughingly asked him how he had got to be so old, however, was his answer.

"It's because I'm lucky." he said.

Wow!

Then, on 9 Feb, I read fellow author Barbara Baker's BWL blogpost 'He's determined to Ski again' about her 90 year old father, and I clicked on the link to her YouTube video of him doing just that Dad Skiing Again - 90 years young - YouTube . He was amazing. So graceful and determined.

Double wow!

That video together with my cousin's words, were so uplifting. And my cousin is right. To achieve a very old age relatively healthy in both mind and body is not just lucky, it's a privilege. A privilege not granted to everyone. Like many people, I have lost friends in their forties and fifties. I also know two children who lost their mothers while they were still in reception class and another girl who died from a brain tumour when she was barely in her teens. The unlucky ones.

So old age needs to be celebrated. Medication, even operations, might be needed to keep some aches and pains at bay but they need to be celebrated too because, even as recently as the mid twentieth century, very little of it was available.  We are the lucky ones, which is something we should never forget, which brings me on to my book Saving Katy Gray the final book of my When Paths Meet trilogy.

It is a romance but behind the romance is the story of a bright and intelligent woman gradually succumbing to dementia and how, with Katy Gray's help, she found herself again. Not completely but enough. Enough to live a fulfilling life. Enough to use the skills she never forgot even on her worse days. The hero, the heroine, the romance are still there but I hope that readers will take from it the wider lessons. The ones that make growing older just part of life's story. 

I have two favourite sayings about ageing. The first is a slick throwaway, attributed to the film star Bette Davis.  And there is a lot of truth in it for even the healthiest of us as we grow older.

Old age ain't no place for sissies 

The second, by Albert Einstein, is the one I want to live by though.

Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious 

children before the great mystery into which we were born.

If I can do that right to the end, then I will indeed be lucky, and privileged. I hope you will too.

Other books in my When Paths Meet series deal with autism, childhood trauma, adoption, desperation and death. Not subjects that are usually associated with romance you say! Don't be fooled, these books are contemporary romance with a capital R. It is romance that is embedded in real life, however, because very few of us tread a smooth path where love is concerned. If you decide to read them, I hope you enjoy them.