Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.  But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. ( From The Velveteen Rabbit, By Margery Williams, 1922)

Sooner or later, our body changes, betrays or fails us, whether illnesses, surgeries, or just growing older.   At times, I’ve found it difficult to admit how I’ve taken my physical health for granted, shocked into awareness by cancer, heart failure, injuries, surgeries, or waking up to discover I’m getting older.   

It is inevitable. Our relationships with our bodies continuously change.   Sometimes it’s a struggle, a “difficult friendship,” as Jane Kenyon once described in her poem “Cages.” (in:  Otherwise, New and Selected Poems, 1996). Other times, it’s something simple, like seeing a photograph of yourself, feeling a finger throb with pain as your fingers move across the computer keyboard.  And there are those times, like the grey days that are more frequent as winter beckons, that you notice that you, too, are shifting into a different season of life. 

It’s difficult to accept our changing bodies, whether it’s illness, injury or aging that leaves its imprint on you.  I remember when my life was full of athletic pursuits, whether rough and tumble play of youth, girls’ high school basketball, or the jazz dance classes I enthusiastically participated in as a single mother.  In those times, I didn’t imagine an older self, that my joints would stiffen or see the older face staring back at me in the mirror, one, apparently, that is my own.  My ring finger makes me wince as I type, but when I touch it, I now remember the constant injury it suffered when I played girls’ high school basketball.   Our bodies hold memories, sometimes ones that seem to surface unexpectedly.

For the past several years, due to the reality of growing older and the times my body has failed me, I have sometimes struggled with the inevitability of a body in slow decline.  In his book, The Wounded Storyteller, author Arthur Frank examines the effects of serious illness on one’s body.  His first word immediately caught my attention: “Serious illness is a loss of the ‘destination and map’ that had previously guided the…person’s life: “ill people” (and I would add “aging” people”) have to learn to think differently.” (p. 1, 1995).

Learning to “think differently” about one’s body and its changes is not easily mastered.   The person we were gradually fades into the person we’ve become or are becoming—whether the impact of illness or aging.  Yesterday, I had a follow-up conversation with my orthopedic doctor.  A few years ago, I had fallen, twice in one month, landing hard each time on my right knee.  Since then, I’ve experienced a gradual descent into constant knee pain.  The doctor had recently tried another, stronger injection to relieve the pain, but it not only failed but seemed to make it even more uncomfortable.  

When I put on my knee brace this morning, another old memory surfaced of a time in my thirties when I was hit by a car.   I was out for a morning jog and, at an intersection, started crossing the street as the light turned green.  A driver who was stopped by the red light began turning right but was not paying attention to anyone being in the crosswalk.  The next thing I knew, I was struck by his car, flying up in the air and landing on all fours on the hood, staring at the driver’s horrified face seconds before he suddenly braked.  I flew off the hood and landed on the pavement on my right knee.   A few hours later, after the emergency room physician had examined me and sent me home for bed rest, he remarked, “You know, you are going to have arthritis in that knee one of these days.” I hadn’t remembered his words until today when I began writing.   Then, I was only in my thirties, and words like “grey hair” or “arthritis” were not in my vocabulary. 

But I remind myself that I’m still lucky.  Thanks to extraordinary medical care, I am living well with heart failure, and other serious surgeries, illnesses or childhood mishaps are now faded scars on my body. The other changes, the ones impossible to escape, now sometimes weigh my spirits down.  Like it or not, we all grow older, which requires us to face our natural, but not necessarily appreciated, bodily changes like greying hair, eyeglasses, visible lines in our forehead or around our eyes, age spots—and more.   My sense of a younger self, which still resides in my head, is constantly challenged by the slow but steady inevitability of aging, mirroring Nature’s seasons from Spring to Winter. 

 The seasons of Nature have been on my mind these past weeks.  I gaze out our windows and see the brilliant colors of the autumn leaves, a canopy of pale yellows, oranges and scarlet.  The leaves are beginning to fall now, and the chill in the air signals a shift to winter coming soon.  Every year at this time, I recall a film I saw many years ago during my graduate school years, when the Toronto Film Festival was just a few years old.  One of the characters in the film was mourning the loss of his youth.  A companion kindly listened to his complaints before offering him a different way to think about aging.  Using the metaphor of seasons, she replied, “Remember, autumn is just the other side of spring.”  The fall has always been my favorite season in Nature. Now I remind myself, just as the actor in that long-ago film, that there is beauty in the autumn of life–and color too!

I recall a writing retreat I led several years ago.  As we neared the end of the day, I offered the group a “fun” writing prompt.  I spread several dozen colored paint chips on the table.  None were “ordinary” colors, like “red,” “blue,” or “green.” Instead, each colored chip was labelled with wildly amusing names like “Sultry Burgundy, “Autumn Queen, “Moment of Promise,” Poised Taupe,” “Crushed Oregano, or “Almost Ripe.” I invited the writers to choose one or more oor the paint chips and use them to inspire a short written piece.  The responses were often humorous and sometimes captivating.  All were novel.  Yet one writer’s poem, written in less than 30 minutes, was extraordinary, enthralling us all.  She had selected a single paint chip, a grey shade named “Hickory Smoke,” as her inspiration.  Her poem was wonderfully celebratory of grey and greying.  When I asked, she volunteered to read aloud. We were all captivated.  That one chip, the grey of “Hickory Smoke,” had inspired a poetic celebration of aging!   Here’s an excerpt from the complete poem:

… Grey is the color of “yes, life has been here,”

and “don’t you know I have a story to tell?”

Grey is the color of pregnant clouds,

waiting to gift us with all they’ve held up inside…

Grey is the color of tree bark,

weathered into cracks, a kaleidoscope of “not white, not black…”

a bumpy canvas for green shoots,

for shocking white buds waiting to gain the wisdom of grey

White is before, but give me the after

Give me the ninety-year-old under her old grey comforter.

Has she lived? Well, tell me the color of her soul.

Show me the spots of grey, and tell me how you’ve lived,

the story printed dark and true in the deepest, most imperfect,

ugliest and sweetest shade.

(From “Grey,” by S., April 2016)

Whenever I re-read this poem, I smile. Her words remind me to embrace life’s seasons and be grateful for a life that includes grey.

Writing Suggestions:

Whether you’re wrestling with bodily changes due to illness, accident or aging, write about your body.  

• Pay it tribute or complaint. 
• Write about its aches or pains or how your body has betrayed you. 
• Have you come to terms with a “new” normal? 
• What makes your relationship with your body a “difficult friendship?”
• How have you made peace with your altered or changing body?