My Mother, Bettye Brown, turned 76 years old a few days ago. While shopping for her birthday card, I noticed that most of these cards – although funny – portrayed a negative view of old age. Turning a year older is a bad thing…a thing to dread. According to these cards, if you are 50 years old, your life is over.
Growing older, however, does not mean that life must stop and that you must wait for death to come. In fact, many people have taken advantage of growing older. Their experiences, lack of fear, and broad perspective have allowed them to do great things during their senior years.
Did you know that Lauren Bacall, the beautiful actress who taught Humphery Bogart how to whistle, went back to Broadway at the age of seventy-six? As she put it, “I am not a has-been. I’m a will-be.”
Emily Post did not write her famous book of etiquette until she was in her late fifties.
After a crazed gunman killed her husband and wounded her son on a Long Island train, Carolyn McCarthy, a nurse, ran for Congress to fight gun control. She was elected at the age of fifty-two.
Fashion designer Anne Klein founded her women’s clothing company “somewhere between the age of forty-seven and sixty-three.”
Knowing about these people and the truth about growing older meant that I could not, with a good conscious, give one of these negative birthday cards to my Mother on her birthday. My only alternative was to create a birthday card for her myself. When looking for wording to use, I searched on the Internet and found a few positive – and more realistic – statements about age and growing older.
“Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” -- Leroy Paige (1906-1982).
A reporter was interviewing a man on his ninety-ninth birthday. “I certainly hope I can come back next year and see you reach the century mark,” he said. “Can’t see any reason why not, Young Fella,” the old-timer replied. “You look healthy enough to me!”
“I am not young enough to know everything.” -- Oscar Wilde
“The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.”
-- Joan Borysenko
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty, the youth of old age.”
--- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” -- George Eliot
Ahhhhhhh, now THAT’S more like it! Are you listening Hallmark?
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