Geriatric Grace

"The best part of getting old is ... you lose your fear of getting old."
 
"Really, Janine?" I retorted skeptically. "I'm 78 and I worry all the time."
 
Janine took a swig of her tea. She looked so contented that I wondered whether it was spiked with some sort of happiness potion. She was 98 years old, and had been diagnosed with half a dozen major health problems. The most recent one was a Triple A — an abdominal aortic aneurism — which could kill her in minutes if it burst.
 
"Do you remember Granny on Beverly Hillbillies?" she asked.  
 
"Vaguely. I thought that show was just silly. Granny was always jumping up and down in a rage, and cooking inedible foodstuffs."
 
"Granny said that life is a lottery. 'Any morning I wake up alive, I'm a winner.'"
 
I stuffed another brownie in my mouth to block the resentful retorts I longed to spew. I chewed, swallowed, and rummaged through my mental filing cabinet, searching for a suitable response. "Old age is not for sissies," I said finally. "I guess I'm a sissy."
 
"What bothers you the most?" Janine asked.
 
"I was at a tenant meeting this morning.. Everybody was running in circles, complaining, demanding, and insisting that everything was better in the good old days. I hate living in a senior ghetto. I'm drowning in a sea of old people. I don't want to be one of them, but as soon as I look in the mirror, I realize that I'm on a one-way ride and there's no going back."
 
"Drop all your regrets," Janine said. "You'll feel a lot lighter."
 
"My regrets?" I asked. "What do my regrets have to do with it?"
 
"Trying to re-write the past is a terrible waste of energy. Invest that energy in something here and now. Bend your time line a little."
 
I changed the subject.  But I thought about what she said. I wondered if she had once been like me, and spent the last twenty years struggling with old demons.  Had she really defeated them, or was she just putting on a show?
 
I never got the chance to ask her. Two weeks later, she was dead. 
 
Her Celebration of Life was a somber rite, full of hypocritical accolades delivered in hushed tones. There was little evidence of the real Janine.
 
Last night I put on lipstick and went to a bar with a couple of her inseparable cronies, Eva and Marion.  Whenever anything weird and wonderful was going on at the Gracious Geriatrics Centre, something that could not possibly succeed but usually did, changes were that they were in the thick of it. 
 
We watched a burlesque show, because that’s what Janine enjoyed. I was 'way out of my cultural depth, but I surprised myself by laughing uproariously. We sang in the taxi on the way home (and gave the driver a nice tip for complimenting our efforts). I convinced Eva and Marion to come in for a nightcap. We had camomile tea with lavender and traded stories — real stories — about Janine. Her wicked smile, her hearty laugh, and her delight in embarrassing pompous popinjays. One of her favourite sayings was I'll try any wine once.  She made a lot of mistakes, but she learned from them instead of letting them weigh her down. We laughed and cried and resolved to follow in her footsteps.
 
I slept soundly until nine-thirty this morning, with a minimal hang-over.  
 
The best part of getting old is collecting more and more interesting stories to tell