bitter widow alert

I got into the car after yoga class this morning and caught a minute or two of the news at the top of the hour. Just breaking? The Matsumotos of Japan have been confirmed as the world's oldest living spouses. They've been married for eighty years. When asked the secret to her long marriage, Mrs. Matsumoto replied: patience. 

I rolled my eyes. No, Korva, I said aloud, steering my busted minivan down Mulberry Street in the already blazing heat. The secret is not dying.

As a therapist who has worked in campus counseling centers with students for years, and as the widow of a college professor, many colleagues and friends and I have often sighed together over what sometimes seems the squandered abundance of those fleeting college years. Youth is wasted on the young, we say, shaking our heads. If they only knew how lucky, how beautiful, how smart, how energetic, how funny, how capable, how young they were, young people would enjoy so much more about being nineteen.

But maybe sometimes, also, age is wasted on the old.

Once, in the thick of a very terrifying time with Mike's cancer, I was in the Y locker room and overheard two elderly women talking as they changed after using the pool. They were complaining of how long it took them to do anything, how going for a swim took up nearly the entire morning, all because of how old and slow they were. How irritating it was that their bodies protested and rebelled. How effortful it was to put on a bathing suit!

I resent it, said one. I do. And the other said, me too. And I stared at them, and thought to myself: get the fuck out. You get to be eighty years old. You get to be here. How can you resent your body that you have been blessed to live inside of all these years? Those arms that have hugged your loved ones, those legs that have carried you over thousands of miles, this form that propels you through water and then sits on a dripping locker room bench alongside your friend twice a week?

I have always hated upbeat celebrations of long marriages, of being ninety years old, of sitting at the same desk for forty years. Maybe the Matsumotos haven't talked to each other since their children went off to college. Maybe they were real assholes to their neighbhors. Maybe all they did was not die, and decline to divorce. Inertia is a real thing. It's usually easier to stay than to go. And if you keep doing the same thing long enough, and don't die, eventually you get a real big party.

But what about my mom, who has loved my dad since she was eighteen? Who would undoudtedly be married to him today, if cancer hadn't taken him from us when he was young and vital? Where's her party for being married and then widowed to the same man for forty-two years? Isn't her love also an act of endurance, of patience, of beauty? What's her secret?

And what would I give for eighty years with Mike! What a blessing that would be, to live and grow and age and die together, as the Matsumotos have and will do. I wouldn't decline to divorce Mike; I would keep working towards an ideal of loving him as he was, and allowing him to love me as I am. I would fight to stay connected to the twisting, tightening, loosening, chafing, supporting, powerful bond between us until I was one hundred and four years old.

Life isn't something that happens to you, my dad told me and my sister one day when he was in the hospital. It's something you work at. He wanted us to know that after he had died, when he couldn't be there to remind us not to opt for inertia and passivity, and not to blame external circumstances for our hesitation to choose the right thing. He wanted us both to take responsibility for our own life, to work at it and make it good.

When we ask Mrs. Matsumoto what's your secret what we really mean is tell us what to do so we won't die. Tell us what to do so we can live with someone we love who also won't die for eighty years, too. That question comes from our collective delusion; we like to think that we're in charge.

But it's not up to us. Not really. Not even very much at all. That's why it's annoying to celebrate longevity for longevity's sake as if it were an accomplishment. It suggests those that didn't live so long didn't try as hard, or as well. They fell short of the goal of mastering and managing their own lives. They didn't eat enough superfoods, or meditate for ten minutes daily, or write a list of everything they're grateful for each night, or walk 10,000 steps before bed, or hug their children enough.

It's cool that Mrs. Matsumoto is 100 years old, and still married to her husband, who is 108 years old. It's very cool. What might I say to her, instead of what's your secret? I might say: what great good fortune you have had, to be given so many years in which to become your self and live out a full life, and to be given so many years to to learn and grow and love together with your husband! What a beautiful gift you have been given - not a reward for being good, but an unearned, precious blessing. A very good gift. Tell us what that's like.

It is the spirit with which we accept our gifts that seems worth celebrating. I know that Mike graciously accepted his, with God's help, in a spirit of humility and love and gratitude before he died.

His life wasn't long. His life was extraordinary.