Zibby Mag

By Sheila Grinell

For most of my adult life, I’ve felt like I was still eighteen years old. That youthful girl lived inside of me and dictated my approach to life, always hungry to learn new things, travel independently, try new cuisines, dance, ski, and ride her bike.

But as the years passed, and I continued at the same pace, I had to make accommodations for lesser physical strength and greater vulnerability. I was far from blind to the realities of aging.

At age sixty, out of curiosity, I decided to start keeping track of the physical changes. In the back of a notebook I labeled a page “Things Falling Apart Post 60” and added items as I noticed them. These were mostly little things: small, red moles appearing on trunk, base of right thumb occasionally aches, and so forth. Time passed, and then I labeled another page “Entropy After 65” and continued listing incremental changes. (When the irises of your eyes turn gray around the edges, it’s called arcus senilis. What an unkind name!)

I continued the chronicle of curiosities—that’s what my eighteen-year-old self called them—and labeled the next page “Patching it Together Post 70.” The principal entry was a list of foods I now found harder to digest (including red wine, but not white, thank goodness).

When I hit seventy-five, I labeled the new page “75—Now I’m Old” with a little chuckle. But the issues I was chronicling had suddenly become more complex, and the entries were turning into paragraph descriptions instead of one-liners. Consider rising blood pressure: was it due to aging, genetics, the stress of the pandemic, or too much salt? I went back to the label and added the words “no more fooling around” in lower case.

At long last, that eighteen-year-old living inside of me lost her primacy. I no longer had confidence that my body would respond to the fun stressors, like playing with kids or jumping over puddles, with the requisite resilience. It wasn’t a question of practice; deep down, I knew that I would not be able to recoup my former elasticity no matter how hard I tried.

My attitude toward my body has changed from cataloging limitations to celebrating gifts. I’m not “settling” for life in a reduced state; I love what my seventy-something body can do, with the support of twenty-first century medicine when required.

At the start of the pandemic, a friend had said, “Don’t worry, it won’t kill you.” I wondered how she could be so sure. Lack of resilience affects one’s response to all kinds of stressors, infectious as well as metabolic. I’d enjoyed exercising and eating organic food for decades, and I was in really good shape. But a careful lifestyle doesn’t make up for the natural effects of aging. Every time a DNA molecule replicates, it can lose a little something. Those losses accumulate, and cannot be reversed.

When my mother was my age, she sprinkled lemon juice on her French fries instead of salt. At the time I thought it was gross, but she ate them with gusto. (She hadn’t told me her doctor had demanded she change her diet.) I recently tried squeezing lemon on my fries; different, but not bad, and something I could live with. I finally understood what my mother had been up to.

My attitude toward my body has changed from cataloging limitations to celebrating gifts. I’m not “settling” for life in a reduced state; I love what my seventy-something body can do, with the support of twenty-first century medicine when required. It’s a privilege to grow older in relative health and comfort in these challenging times.

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At the end of her forty-year career as a creator of science museums, Sheila Grinell turned to fiction. Her debut novel, Appetite, was published in 2016, and a second novel, The Contract, was released in September 2019. Born in a taxi in Manhattan, she studied at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in Phoenix.