A Brief Comeback: Am Too

   
     The last time I wrote on Creative Late Bloomers, dated 10/10/16, I entitled the post "The Last Book, The Last Lecture, The Last Chapter: Lessons in How to Live." I talked about three books: Oliver Sacks' last book called "On the Move: A Life," "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch, based on the final lecture given by a 47-year-old computer science professor who had metastatic pancreatic cancer and the then 98-year-old Diana Athill, author of "Somewhere Near the End," who miraculously had written another yet another book delightfully entitled "Alive, Alive Oh!" The authors of those first two books already had died when their books were published. Athill turned 100 last December.

     That last post was prompted by the fact that my eldest sister Joan had recently received her own diagnosis of matastatic pancreatic cancer, so lessons of life and death were very much on my mind.

     Just after my "last book, last lecture" post, I visited Joan in Milwaukee. I returned to visit her again in January, 2017. She died at the end of February, 2017.

    During my Christmas visit, Joan was lively and hopeful. With my two other sisters, we helped trim her Christmas tree, pawed through the final boxes left after my mother's death that Joan had stored in her attic, went to see "La Cage aux Folles," accompanied Joan to her chemo treatment, enjoyed an evening of cabaret music, had several dinners on the town and spent an afternoon pampering ourselves at a day spa at the Pfister Hotel. In between all this frenetic activity, I drove Joan to Marquette University where she was still work at the College of Education. She was the oldest of us four sisters, but the only one who hadn't retired. There she is, at right with the jazzy scarf, surrounded by her family, getting an award as a Marquette University Faculty All-Star in November, 2016.

     So why am I returning to this blog now?

     No one else has died (yet) or is dying (although, of course, we all are). I'm back because I've read another book about life and death that I want to recommend. It made me sad to think that Joan never made it into the category that author John Leland addresses -- the oldest old (people over 85) -- but that during her illness, she acted very much like the people Leland followed around for a year. They had nothing in common with the over-achievers I have heralded on this blog -- people, as Leland puts it, like the "remarkable old lady who seems to defy aging altogether, drinking martinis and running marathons in her nineties" nor do they dwell on the declines of their bodies and minds. They merely savor the little moments that are left in their lives, the days they can get out of bed despite their aches and pains, the days they win at mahjong, the days they hear once again a favorite opera recording.

     These elders that Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, spent time with, like the vast majority of older people, didn't fit the stereotypical story lines of the elderly as victim or the elderly as super hero. Like Joan did, they were living life as fully as they could, no matter what their circumstances.

    "They lived with loss and disability but did not define themselves by it," he writes of these oldest old, "and got up each morning with wants and needs, no less so because their knees hurt or they couldn't do the crossword puzzle like they used to. Old age wasn't something that hit them one day when they weren't careful. It also wasn't a problem to be fixed. It was a state of life like any other, one in which they were still making decisions about how they wanted to live, still learning about themselves and the world."

      I may still be inspired to post about an octogenarian marathon runner, but for now, I'm going with being happy I can finish the New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle.

      The title of this post, BTW,  is inspired by a clue I solved from the November 25, 2017 New York Times puzzle. Clue: Brief comeback. Answer: Are not.

The Last Book, The Last Lecture, The Last Chapter: Lessons in How to Live

   
     In an essay in the New York Times called "My Own Life," neurologist Oliver Sacks announced to the world with characteristic bluntness that he was "face to face with dying." An eye tumor whose treatment nine years earlier had cost him the lost of one eye had metastasized. The 81-year-old best-selling author was counting his life in days and months, not years.

     Three months later Sacks published his Last Book: On the Move: A Life. In reviewing the book for The New York Review of Books, Jerome Groopman of the Harvard Medical School admitted that Sacks' revelation changed the way he read the autobiography:

    "Reading On the Move and knowing that Sacks is facing a terminal illness heightens certain parts of the book."

      Even the title of Sacks' autobiography -- On the Move -- resonated differently when you realized that this would be Sacks' Last Book.

      Readers sense that authors writing "somewhere towards the end," to use the phrase that nonagenarian Diana Athill chose for her very late-in-life memoir, have a unique perspective to share. They aren't wrong.

     Remember Randy Pausch? He was the computer science professor who was scheduled to give a routine end-of-the- school-year speech at Carnegie Mellon entitled "Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" when he was disagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Professors commonly call these talks "Last Lectures," but this time the label took on a more poignant meaning: It really was going to be the last lecture for 47-year-old Pausch. Suddenly phrases that he uttered, phrases that we might have heard before and even thought of as cliches -- "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think" -- took on a burning intensity. Pausch's Last Lecture, posted on the Internet, instantly went viral and was later published in book form.

    Those who measure their time in months -- either because of terminal illness or advanced age -- have a different take on what matters. They are no longer projecting far into the future. They are feeling the fierce urgency of now.

     In his New York Times essay, Sacks expressed that sense of exigency:  "I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."

    Sacks said he took inspiration from the last words of philosopher David Hume who, upon learning of his terminal illness at age 65, wrote "My Own Life," a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776: 

    “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

     Life becomes more, not less, intense when we are aware of its shortening. What characterizes these Last Books and Last Lecture is not their focus on death, but their focus on life. With death in sight, life does not diminish but is augmented.  A life of striving to achieve some sort of recognition -- a job, a sale, a marriage proposal -- gives way to a life that concentrates on internal measures of success: "ardour in study...gaiety in company." No wonder the words of someone who is "somewhere towards the end" take on heightened meanings.

     I first wrote about Diana Athill and her memoir Somewhere Towards the End in 2013.  Back then I lauded her for her late blooming publishing successes: a memoir, chronicling her 50 years working as an editor, published at age 83; a second book about her English childhood published two year later, and, best of all, a National Book Critic Circle Award for Somewhere Towards the End, written when she was 91.

     "Success in old age, when things have stopped really mattering, has a frivolous sort of charm unlike anything one experiences in middle age," Athill said after receiving that award.

     In quoting Athill's reaction to all the attention she was receiving, I conveniently glossed over that phrase "when things have stopped really mattering." Now I realize that one of the "things that stopped really mattering" to Athill were all those pats on the back from others. Not that she didn't enjoy her late-in-life fame. I'm sure she did. But what really mattered to Athill ran far deeper than a search for celebrity.

      I should have been tipped off by Athill's choice of title. Calling her book Somewhere Towards the End reveals just how acutely aware she was that that memoir might be her Last Book. When facing such a formidable main event as death, success is a side show.

       Of course, even when we think death is in sight, we can never be certain just when that end will come. When best-selling author and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was told at age 40 that he had a deadly cancer with a median mortality of only eight months, he reasoned that the median is a halfway point. That meant that 50 percent of those with his cancer would die in eight months, but another 50 percent could live longer, even a lot longer. He was determined to be on the latter side of that statistic. Gould lived another 20 years before dying of a totally unrelated cancer at age 60.

     As for Athill, Somewhere Towards the End wasn't her Last Book after all. Now 98 and living in a retirement home with others who are 90 and older, she is still writing and publishing. Last year she came out with her sixth memoir with a title that tells us she's as surprised as anyone that she is still Alive, Alive Oh!  

     In that memoir, subtitled And Other Things That Matter, Athill evokes French philosopher Michel de Montaigne who suggested that we think about our deaths every day in order to get used to it as a natural part of life. When my grandmother reached her late nineties, one of my sisters complained that all she talked about was death. "Well," her wry husband pointed out, "it is her next big event."

     In Alive, Alive Oh!, Athill devotes the Last Chapter to her "next big event." Calling death not an "end of life" but a "part of life," she writes about her own death -- and the death of her fellow residents -- in a stark, unsentimental way:

     "Death is no longer something in the distance, but might well be encountered any time now. You might suppose that this would make it more alarming, but judging from what I now see around me, the opposite happens. Being within sight, it has become something for which one ought to prepare."

     Oliver Sacks, who died six months after his New York Times essay appeared, also talked about preparation and about focusing on things that matter in the months that he had left:

     "Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

     On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well.)"

     A good prescription for all our lives, don't you think?

 

   


 


   

Fashion's New Role Models: Never Too Thin? No, Never Too Old!

Runway models have never been role models for me. I am not particularly tall and, except in elementary school, I have never been thin. I have never worn make up and have never been over-concerned with how I look.

But runways models -- and models in fashion magazines -- have affected, no doubt, the way some men have looked at me. And they certainly have affect how millions of young girls look at themselves.

So it's good news that the industry finally has begun to rethink its part in perpetuating the idea that the paragon of female beauty is a tall, anorexic 25-year-old. Movements against fat-shaming have been working. More and more fashion magazines have been featuring models who have some meat on their bones. We've been telling men for years that size doesn't matter. It's great to get some reciprocity.

Still, it wasn't until my niece, Christine Kavalauskas, sent me a video about an older runway model that I realized I had my own set of stereotypes when it came to thinking about who deserved to walk the catwalk. It never occurred to me that never too thin could be replaced by never too old.

Meet Deshun Wang: male, Chinese and ripped -- and, at 80, the world's oldest runway model. The actor turned model became an internet sensation in 2015 when -- at the age of 79 -- he walked the catwalk for the first time during China Fashion Week.  In his inspiring video, which Wang created and posted on Weibo and which he made available on YouTube this month, the 80-year-old known as "The Hottest Grandpa" tells his story: "When you think it's too late, be careful you don't let that be your excuse for giving up."

I challenge you to watch this without a smile on your face:

Wang's story got me wondering: Were there other "role models" in the fashion world challenging our expectations of who gets to end up on the runway? (Feel free, by the way, to take "runway" as a metaphor for other successes in life).

Plenty, as it turns out.

Last year The Huffington Post offered up five uplifting moments from the previous 356 days as proof that "The Fashion Industry Is Getting More Accepting" -- fashion projects that honored women of all ages, races and backgrounds:  a Dove ad celebrating girls with curly hair; a photo shoot showing black women of all shades; 80-year-old author Joan Didion as the face of the French label Céline; the first Down Syndrome model participating in New York Fashion week, and the first plus-size model in the Pirelli calendar.

The inclusion of older models, like Joan Didion, has been a trend of sorts. Last year 93-year-old Iris Apfel modeled for both Alexis Bittar, the fashion jewelry company, and upscale Kate Spade. Earlier this year Nicola Griffin, at 56, became the oldest model ever to appear in the infamous Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, the magazine's annual display of, um, beachwear. "More of this, please," said The HuffPost, referring to Griffin, not the scanty bathing suits.  In April, Griffin appeared in a steamy lingerie shoot for the U.K.-based Slink magazine, with the heading "Size 16 & 50 plus still has it!" More of this, indeed.

Iris Apfel, 93, models Alexis Bittar

Nicola Griffin, 56, in Slink Magazine

"Older," however, I discovered is a relative term.

In a slide show offered by the Los Angeles Times with the heading "Demand for Older Models Grows,"  a blurb read: "Models 35 and older are in demand as boomers want ‘to see someone they relate to." Yet only two in the slide show came close to the age of baby boomers -- people born in the baby boom just after World War II: 58-year-old Pia Gronning and Carmen Dell-Orifice, described as "in her 70s." All the other models were under 40, young enough to be children of boomers.

Tracey Norman's story, however, shatters all the runway stereotypes -- of age, race and gender.  Norman is a black transgender model who, at 63, is enjoying a sensational comeback after being ostracized from the fashion world for decades.

In the 1970s, Norman was the Clairol's first black transgender model, but the hair dye company didn't know about the transgender part. Given the intolerance of the times, "I had to hide my truth," Norman explains in a video posted on YouTube. Then during a photo shoot for Essence magazine, a hairdresser betrayed her secret. The photos from that shoot were never used. The agency she worked with told her there were no jobs for her. No one admitted why the jobs had dried up, but Norman understood.

She moved to Paris and, still guarding her secret, found modeling work again, but when she returned to the U.S. she found the doors of the fashion world were still slammed shut: "Oh, oh, you're the Tracey." She ended up getting involved in the drag-ball world, winning a beauty pageant sponsored by Sally Jesse Raphael. She worked in a shoe store.

Then at the end of last year,  The Cut did a profile of Norman that brought her story to a wider public: "The First Black Trans Model Had Her Face on a Box of Clairol. No one knew her secret. Until they did."

Clairol saw the profile and called her. The company wanted the trans model to be part of its new ad campaign encouraging women to celebrate what makes them unique.

"I just had so many emotions going through me. I was being accepted for who I was, and they wanted me to come back as that person, and not be something other than what I truly am—a woman of color, of course."

Norman's face was on a box of Clairol again -- at age 63.

The irst Black Trans Model Had Her Face on a Box of Cl