Aging Isn't What You Expect: Everyday Magic, Day 1,113

Yup, it's a tunnel of light but not that kind of tunnel of light

"How are we? How do we think we are? We are just waiting to die," Nanny (my grandmother) would tell me when I asked how she and Papa (my grandfather) were. Never mind that they were in their early 60s (and would live 20+ more years).

Immigrants from Poland, they had been through everything from pogroms to losing their young child child to discovering all of their family in Poland were killed in the Holocaust while they were making a life in the strange new land of Brooklyn.

So it's wonder that back in the 1960s and 70s, my grandparents seemed ancient. When I turned 65 this week, I was amazed by how young I still am in my mind (although not always so much in my body), but then the older you get, the younger these rising numbers seem.

While the actual numbers we turn are strange and surrealistic, and it's easy to feel like we're 29, 47, 9 and 65 on the same day, turning older thrilled me. For one thing, there was a big financial reward. As a self-employed artist who needs ample health insurance, Medicare has given me a massive raise with my insurance costs dropping to less than a sixth of what they were.

There's also the cancer thing. My breast cancer survival rate back in 2002 wouldn't have received an A or B if the survival rate, even with chemo, was translated into a grade, but rather an F for effort (I believe it was 55% with chemo and 42% without). Eye cancer? No one would even tell me the survival rate, and all my docs, therapist, and healers implored me not to research it.

In the more calm and lucid moments between bouts of freaking out, I begged all gods, ancestors, and the good earth for a long life imbued with the good luck of aging. "It beats the alternative," I joked (but no joke) with friends. Many of us know that when you've sat on the edge of your bed or an examination table, terrified that your number might be called, age isn't something to take for granted. And many us -- by the time we're 65 or so -- have faced that terror and uncertainty.

Also, having tunnelled and hugged my way through my first cancer when I was a youthful 42, the vagrancies in the house of the body can make mortality so much more visceral. However this house falls apart, and some parts and bits are definitely in need of repair or renovation, it's more of the same. That's one thing that surprised me most about cancer -- and it turns out age too -- it doesn't diminish but reveals who we are.

When I was a kid, I imagined how it would be to turn 40 in the year 2000, both of which seemed like impossible numbers. The child of young parents, I couldn't even picture my mom turning 30, yet alone 40.

I don't know what I expected when I was 65, but it wasn't this much awareness of the wild and careening uncertainty of life, this little clarity about what comes next, and this abundance of constantly sorting through how to best use my time remaining without having any idea of what that time is.

All I know about the years ahead -- and I hope there are many vital ones -- is that aging isn't what we think it is. It's something far more vast, interesting, and tender with music, long car rides to hug old friends, laughing until I cry, delicious soups, and the bedazzling light through trees overhead that will eventually knock me off my feet.