The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and when you are older, around the time when you stop feeling like you’ve crawled into somebody else’s shell

Tide In, Tide Out: Anne Lamott on Growing Old and Making Peace with Death

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2024-04-18 17:30:06

The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and when you are older, around the time when you stop feeling like you’ve crawled into somebody else’s shell, old friends begin to die with appalling regularity. If life made sense, they would all be older when they went. How did they get old enough to die?

My father’s death feels like it was twenty years ago but it was more than forty-five. It races, like scrolling through microfiche, zzzzzip, and nothing anyone says can make this less awful. Well, maybe one thing: Kitty Carlisle’s mother said the good thing about being older is that every fifteen minutes, it’s time for breakfast again. Karen has tea, an OxyContin, and orange Jell-O for breakfast now.

She is so sick and sad that it can be hard to be with her, but until I got COVID recently, I showed up and listened. Most of the time that is all we have to offer, and it is enough. Come to think of it, it was also hard in its own way to be with her many times over the years because she can be a curmudgeon and contrarian.

Plus, horribly for me, her three grown kids, who are all pretty amazing, were also extreme achievers, which my son Sam was not. All those years until 2012 when my son got clean and sober, she and I would be on a trail at Deer Park and she’d tell me all about the grad schools her kids had graduated from or just been admitted to, and then ask what Sam was up to.