Two women have come into the library. From my seat facing the reading room, I watch as the younger woman deposits the older in a comfortable chair by the magazine racks. While I don’t know for sure, I surmise they are mother and daughter, not caregiver and charge. There is something about the way the younger woman heads over to browse the nearby new releases that tells me this visit is for her.

The mother, as I will call her, is quite elderly, at least in her 80s if not 90s. She sits quietly. She doesn’t flip through one of the many magazines on offer, doesn’t even seem to notice her surroundings.

The minutes click on, and the mother stares at nothing. Is she lost in her own thoughts, reliving another time in her life? Or is she just looking ahead to the mug of cocoa and plate of Fig Newtons that await her return home?

Suddenly, and it is sudden, there is a small crack in the mother’s patience. “I want to go home,” she says, quite reasonably I think, as the current environment obviously holds nothing for her. “Pretty soon,” the woman’s daughter says, still focused on the book titles in front of her.

I begin to have a sinking feeling. Not because I think ill of the daughter. Quite the opposite. She is surely taking care of her aged mother. No, it’s not the daughter’s actions that are making me uneasy. It’s the mother’s response.

“When are we going home?” she asks again, not with the sulkiness of a toddler but with the angst of an adult who has no power to control something most of us take for granted—the ability to leave.

I look at this woman and think, it wasn’t always like this. At one time she controlled her own life. She met and was courted by a man. (I say courted because I think of her as coming from a time when that was the appropriate term.) I picture her laughing with him over dinner in a restaurant, discussing the movie they just saw. In my romantic fantasy, they are in that phase of relationship when couples live only for one another, in that delicious, private world of two people with their life ahead of them.

Then what? Probably marriage, pregnancy, birth and the responsibility of motherhood. She cared for this daughter, fed her, soothed her. Maybe she even took her to this very library, introducing her to the magical world of books, a seed planted that has obviously borne fruit.

Anxiety steals into the mother’s voice. “I want to go home!”

I discover I’m angry. It’s all I can do not to shout at the daughter, this reasonable, soft-spoken woman engaged in the most benign of pastimes, “Take your mother home!”

It’s not much longer before the daughter does just that. It was, after all, a very few minutes that the mother had to wait. If she were a child, I would have thought good, she can sit there while her caregiver finds a book. But she isn’t a child. She’s a grown woman, one I continue to imagine has lived and loved and made a life for herself and her family. At her age, she most assuredly has suffered losses: husband? house? purpose? I don’t know. I wasn’t witness to any of those moments. I’m just a witness to this one. And in this moment, she has lost the dignity of self determination.

Why did it bother me so much? I know that the comment, “I want to go home,” resonated. If she had been saying she wanted to go out to dinner or asking when they were going shopping, I wouldn’t have had the same reaction. Home has always held great meaning for me. I remember being 9 or 10, sitting at a small desk in my bedroom. The desk was up against a window, which was covered with pink shears. I pulled the shears behind my chair, forming a tiny, fairy-tale-like enclosure. Another early memory places me watching my mother standing at the ironing board in our second-floor walk-up as she dreamed out loud about how she would like to turn the two floors into a single-family. Years later she got her single-family, and I spent hours helping her strip paint from the elaborate woodwork to return it to its natural elegance. Today, I have my own home, and there is nothing I enjoy more than sitting by the fire with a pot of tea. I realize now that home for me has always been about creating a world, a haven, a retreat.

So, yes, I wanted the old woman to be able to go home. But I think the reason her plight affected me so powerfully is because, like Dickens’ ghost, it presented me with a vision of my own possible future. Surprise, aging is happening to me.

Not long ago, I got my Medicare card in the mail. I knew it was coming. I had, after all, applied for it. The card was expected; my response to it was not. While I jokingly asked friends, “When did they start giving Medicare cards to 15-year-olds?” (because that’s how old I feel), this concrete reminder of the aging process has hit me hard.

I’m a senior citizen. What’s more, I have now lived longer than both my parents did. That’s a very strange feeling. We think of our parents (except during our teenage years, of course) as possessing the wisdom that comes from living longer than we have. Even after they’d died, I still thought of my parents as older and wiser because I hadn’t reached their age. But now I’m older than they ever were.

This realization that I am aging has made me think of Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s five stages of grief:

• Denial: It won’t happen to me. I won’t get old, or infirm, either physically or mentally.
• Anger: I am getting old. How is this possible?
• Bargaining: If I treat people nicely, they’ll take care of me.
• Depression: Everyone has their own lives to deal with.
• Acceptance: It will be what it is. I will manage as I always have.

Acceptance.

I have a friend. She’s 84 years old. I met her in book club. She has back pain that makes it difficult for her to walk very far, but she doesn’t let that stop her. We go out to dinner from time to time, especially around our birthdays. None of this I’m-too-old-to-care-about-birthdays nonsense for her. She insists on celebrating and tells her friends they have all year to do so with her.

My 84-year-old friend tells me that, not only would she not be 20 again, she wouldn’t be my age again. She knows the stresses of raising a family, struggling to make ends meet and feeling the weight of life’s responsibilities. But those particular stresses are behind her. No longer weighed down by the demands that dominated most of her life, she revels in the freedom to do what she wants when she wants.

I realize not everyone has the blessings my friend has. Many seniors don’t have enough to live on. Illness that often comes with aging takes its toll. I don’t know anything about the woman I witnessed in the library, but she appears to have lost some degree of cognitive ability. And let’s not even get started on the state of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

No, aging is not easy, and it’s harder for some than others. But at this point in my own journey, as I face what turning 65 means, I choose to take inspiration from my 84-year-old friend. She has accepted aging with joy and grace. God willing, I hope to do the same.

I have a good life, and I am determined to live it well for as long a time as I’m given. And, no, I may not be in complete control someday. We enter this world dependent upon others, and, if we live long enough, we must leave it depending on others. It will be what it is. I will manage as I always have, even if it means waiting a few more minutes for someone to take me home.

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