There is a certain raggedy charm about people who are past 70 years old.
They have long ago accepted their oddities and predictabilities. Their drooping spare tires, their pendulous chins. The child-like hobble in old age. The shuffling of careful, unsteady steps, like a toddler with a loaded diaper.
The hair thinned and grayed, a not too pleasant image in the mirror, but which they have dismissed, though reluctantly, as something inevitably coming. After all, a guarded optimist says, it’s what’s inside the cranium that matters, not what’s on top of it. And wrinkles, they lend character to that old face.
At 70, the body slowly simmers down.
There is a wide fascinating range of possibilities to live our life instead of just imagining it until the diminished years of retirement end. Why wait till the body is riddled with cancer and diabetes to learn how to live? Our golden years can be truly golden.
Other people we know are alone, with frozen sense, unanimated, and emotionally flat. They lead pepless lives except for a sprinkling struggle against pain where analgesics and a regimen of therapy and pills are the common weapons to fight the inconvenience.
At 70, depression sinks in. Dementia. Intermittent incoherence. Inability to locate pertinent words. Difficulty connecting faces to their names. Melancholia. Alienation. Sluggishness. The past and the present collapsing all together. The family learns to live with it.
We’ve done our bit; we should indulge ourselves for a change. Turn all the conventions upside down. Be naughty. Be nice. Be bad. Do a lot of social roaring. Go to friends’ birthday parties, or invite them to your own. Blow the many candles on the cake and wish for more birthdays to come. Keep hips moving. Shock people and shock yourself, too.
Get yourself a makeover. Wear makeup, heavier mascara, redder lips, high heels, Marten’s boots. As for the men, wear a pony tail or a Mohawk. Style your hair into alien shapes. Never mind if the hair is a halo of white—you’ll look more gentlemanly and erudite that way. And if you need to, fudge your age by 10 years. Make each morning an agenda of adventures. Make up for lost salad days.
Look up an old flame. First love never dies. Passion does not wither with age. The heart’s quest for romance never ebbs. Refuse to die of a broken heart. Exchange valentines. Don’t die longing for companionship. Consider mental phantasms of escape. Boracay! Disneyland! Hot air balloon rides!
One of the pleasures of being 70 is being free. It’s a freedom, not in a physical way, but a liberating of the mind from old middle-age insecurities. The children have all grown up and are doing well. The grandkids are impossible to dislike even if they spew their taho on the floor. They adore you. Grandchildren are born embracers so you get welcoming and warm. There’s no façade in hugging them back.
So you’ve added weight. See it as ballast against life’s windswept weather. Who cares now if you haven’t been on a diet these last few years? You can’t expect yourself to be a snug fit in a swimsuit at your age. Love those bulges! You’re still a lovable, adorable, plodding Colossus with grizzled chin whiskers and soft lisps from the metal in your false teeth when you speak.
A precocious widowhood should neither come across as the start of a long sadness nor be an excuse to surrendering yourself to become an embittered shell in a dark corner. It would surprise you when you realize that you stand at least two inches taller when you don’t hunch your shoulders.
Move on, up, around. Explore both uncharted roads and big highways, even the fantasy realms, of the stub end of your life.
Live. Dream on, big and with optimism. Take risks. They add zip to what you’d do. They can erase the fogginess of many years past. Time is a thing we all run out of. Now is the perfect time to just live life.
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October 1 to 7 is Filipino Elderly Week per Proclamation No. 470 of Sept. 26, 1994. It aims to increase awareness of the different issues concerning older people.
Additional photos by Diana B. Noche
