I went to buy myself an iphone yesterday. I was 66 and a half years old so I thought I’d buy myself a half yearly gift. Keep up with the technology. The young fellow at the apple store was trying to explain something to me and my brain was dead. He looked at me like, Oh, another old lady who doesn’t know anything about technology. If I were in India, he might have called me Maataa Jee — what old women are called. I had to go to a new location to run an errand and I was nervous about getting lost. I took a selfie with my new iphone and my chin sagged, my eyes couldn’t open, my face had changed its geography drastically, and I looked really faded.

I came home and put on some lipstick and wore some jewelry and it didn’t do the trick at all. Eye make up would have made me look pathetic. Somedays I wake up — after not sleeping well — and my sole goal is to navigate myself through the day without going too crazy. I actually misspelled ‘sole’ to ‘soul’.
Okay, my soul goal, then. Sometimes just getting through the day is purpose enough. Don’t knock it. Our goals must shift as we age.

But let me get back to the mourning before I move ahead. I want to mourn the being that I was to my heart’s content. The pretty woman (I didn’t think so then; but compared to now, I certainly was!) whose greased brain worked so darned well on its gears, who had energy to work in the garden, write (I’m not giving this up anytime soon; I’ll die before I do. It just takes longer), be social, shop — oh yes, shop!, the material, sensual, sense pleasuring girl that I was, is dead! dead! dead! Never, ever to return! Only photographs remain.

But this little old lady is alive! After she is done mourning, dried her tears and calmed her rage, after she has laid the young one to rest in her grave after bathing and anointing her and wrapping her in a silk shroud (yes, she would have liked silk!) she will rejoice, she will count all the things she has (they are not material, though some are) now that she didn’t have then.

She will move on. She must. There are more things to discover, more things to experience and write and sing about, yet another dance she must do, before she herself lies in the same grave as the other one.