A most interesting article on estrogen in the New York Times magazine this week. Cynthia Gorney, an entertaining Mary Roach-like stylist, writes about her serious perimenopausal depression and the latest thinking on hormone replacement. Near the end is this:Every midlife woman I know keeps redrawing for herself the defensible lines of intervention in the “natural” sequence of human aging. Obsessive multiple plastic surgeries are silly and desperate. Muscles kept in good working order are not.I saw the truth of these assertions at first hand in the mountains of southwest North Carolina. My husband’s parents spent the last several years of their lives at a place called Tryon Estates, where hundreds of people, almost all in their 70s and 80s, lived in accommodations ranging from freestanding “villas” to apartments, from assisted living to memory care to nursing home beds. Beginning in late 2001, we visited at least twice a year until my mother in law Evelyn died in early 2009. Tryon Estates gave me a new model for old age.
It wasn’t until my second or third visit that I had my aha moment. Every day we ate breakfast and dinner in a dining room that might have been a hotel ballroom, with loud wall-to-wall carpet and muted tablecloths and wait staff wearing tidy black and white. At these meals we got to know many of Evelyn’s friends quite well. (Thanks to Evelyn’s keen memory for unflattering details, we also knew the back stories of many of the residents, their children, grandchildren, ex-spouses…and they knew ours. Krang of course had met many of his mother’s friends on visits with his second wife, whom we call Maris….but that’s another story for another hour.)
One day at breakfast, I realized that there were no seriously overweight people amongst the dozens we saw regularly. It had never occurred to me because I had never been in such a large group of old people, but it’s pretty vivid: fat people don’t get old. Or maybe the members of The Greatest Generation, who grew up in the lean years of the Depression, never got fat to begin with. Or maybe it has to do with social status and income: you have to be reasonably well off (and white, and Gentile) to buy yourself in to Tryon Estates.
In any case, I also noticed that pretty much every woman who lived there looked—there’s no other word for it—old. Sweetbriar girls who had been careful about the sun, staunch New England Republicans who had had every privilege including hired help and second homes and magnificent husbands—every last one of them looked old. Their hands were ropey with blue veins. Wrinkles, age spots, gray hair—all common currency. Because there was a dress code at dinner, residents had to put themselves together enough to be admitted to the dining room—but there’s no getting around it: regardless of how much their clothes cost or how artfully their make-up was applied, the women just looked old.
In short, they were way past feeling bad about their necks.
However. The women who stood upright, the women who wore walking shoes to breakfast because they were headed outside afterward, the women who didn’t need a cane or a walker or a little motorized cart to get around—these women looked youthful despite their lines and spots. And it came to me all in a rush at some point: given finite resources of time and funding, we’re best off to invest what we can not in Botox, not in a Myotonology Micro-Current Face Lift, not even in peptides, but in getting stronger physically.
There’s no substitute for youth. There is also no substitute for luck. Once the first is past, you really need the second if you’re going to make it into your 80s without catching an untreatable cancer, sustaining some sort of injury that will eventually incapacitate you, succumbing to heart attack or brain attack or melancholia or alcohol, losing your marbles, or all of the above. Here’s the deal, as Cynthia Gorney puts it:
Should luck and longevity cooperate, we are going to grow old. We’re already old, by the standards of our children and our ancestors, but the generation to which we belong expects to live a rich messy life full of extremely loud rock music for another 30 years after menopause.I would substitute “extremely loud Verdi” for the rock music, but never mind. Estrogen is a big issue and luck is essential. But we can take some steps now by, well, taking some steps now. Working out with weights. Building up our bones and muscles.
We need to not tarry. We’re not getting any younger.
Two choirs, usually situated on opposite sides of the nave or cross-bar of the cathedral, or on opposite sides of the church doors, address each other with the first two and second two lines of this short paraphrase from the Vulgate Bible. The "three Marys"* come to his tomb on the third day after his crucifixion only to find the stone rolled away from its door and an angel standing in the doorway. The angel asks them the question in the first line, they reply with the second line, and the angel answers their request with the last two lines:
