Growing Older

The song Slowly popped into my playlist the other day, it’s about slowly growing older.  Nobody wakes up old.  It happens to us one ordinary day at a time.  We tend to spend most of our life planning for tomorrow and rarely notice it quietly rolling in.  When we are younger, growing older feels additive.  New experiences, new friends, new responsibilities, and more stories to tell.  Lately, I’ve realized growing older alone feels a little different.  It feels more like carrying those things that were once new.  For almost four decades I wasn’t growing older, we were growing older.  And I am learning, there is a difference.

Sandy and I had a shared vision of old age that included chasing each other around the nursing home in our wheelchairs.  We would joke about that often.  I am not sure at what point those jokes stopped being jokes and became the future I expected.  The version of older age I am living is different than either of us ever imagined.  Grief didn’t show up all at once, and neither has healing.  Both seem to be arriving the same way as old age, slowly.

I have touched on this before, but losing a spouse is bigger than just losing your person.  You also lose the version of the future that you’d been quietly building together.  I guess I took for granted what growing older might look like.  It had always looked like the two of us, the Smith’s.  And it was good to be a Smith.  It meant never wondering who was sitting in the control chair, who was riding shotgun in the Galaxie or who was holding my hand when life got hard.  It looked like a lifetime’s worth of inside jokes, funny stories, familiar routines and two people carrying the same history.  I guess somewhere along the way, the future Sandy and I imagined stopped feeling like a possibility and started feeling like the way the rest of our life would unfold.  I never considered a version that did not include Bride.   

What has surprised me over the last 147 days is that life has not stopped arriving.  New conversations kept happening, friendships kept deepening, and new memories kept on finding ways to be made.  What I didn’t understand at first was why that surprised me so much.  If you’d asked me a year ago what old age looked like, I would have described a life built around the two of us. 

When Sandy died, that future disappeared with her, or at least I thought it did.  For a while, I thought losing that future meant losing my future.  Over the last several months, life has  continued on, with little regard for how I happen to be feeling about it.  The future I expected is gone.  There is no use in pretending otherwise.  Some days I still catch myself reaching for pieces that will never be.  At the same time, another future has continued to show up whether I was ready for it or not.  Understanding that has been difficult because, truth be told, I haven’t fully accepted it.  Regardless of how many times I have heard “life goes on” I was just not prepared for the harsh reality of what that means after losing her.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I might be asking the wrong question.  Maybe the question isn’t, “how do I get back the future I lost?”  I can’t get that back.  That future belonged to us, and I now I am just me, myself, and I.  It seems the question now should be, “what do I do with this future that refuses to stop showing up?”  That one is still very much a work in progress.  I am beginning to think the answer starts with saying yes to people who keep showing up for me.  The friends who call, the ones who visit, the friends who will sit through the laughter and the tears.  The ones who keep proving I am not nearly alone as I once thought. 

What I understand now is that the story didn’t end when that future did.  The last several months have been filled with people who have refused to let me walk this road by myself.  Friends who showed up, friends who figured out how to show up for me, friends who sat with me when neither of us really knew what to say or how to say it.  In a strange, or maybe not so strange way, they have become part of this new future I had not planned for and never saw coming.  Not replacing anything, not substituting anything.  Just something different altogether.

Today, I think I would describe it differently.  I’d describe it as a collection of chosen and actual family choosing, again and again, to walk beside each other for a while.  To be clear, this is not the future I planned.  This is simply the future that arrived.  Different than the one we imagined.  And just like old age, just like grief, and just like healing, it seems to be arriving one ordinary day at a time.