“You stare into the mirror and an old person stares back. And you think, Who the hell is that?”
Jennifer Finney Boylan
The blessings, and curses, of memory
Ideas
Issue
Wisdom
The
Writers of a certain age on the challenges, delights, surprises, preoccupations, and freedoms of growing older.
JUDY KUGEL
The worst decision of our lives
“We had a house to sell. We had stuff to get rid of. We had to wrap up more than 50 years of our life in Massachusetts. It wasn’t easy.”
CLAUDIA KALB
Is how we age a choice?
“As longer life spans have become a reality, our encore years have taken on a new kind of urgency: What will become of us? How can we flourish rather than wither?”
SEBASTIAN JUNGER
Sebastian Junger was minutes from death. Then he saw his dead father.
“When you finally encounter death . . . life suddenly achieves this sort of luminosity. It just glows like, ‘Oh my god, it’s all incredible.’ ”
PHOTO ESSAY: REINVENTION ARTISTS
“My friends can’t believe I am doing this. They are cracking up because I have all these outfits.”
— Martin Kaplan, dentist by profession, tango dancer by passion
RENéE GRAHAM
The cherished two-word heirloom my mother passed on to me
“The hard-earned wisdom I carry as my mother's legacy — take no guff, speak my mind, and always respect myself.”
MARK SINGER
What Roger Angell knew
“We spoke about whatever — the magazine, the Mets, his dreams and anxieties, what his shrink had had to say, our concerns about our children, and still wince-inducing memories from our marriages.”
BETH WOLFENSBERGER SINGER
The Wise-Old-Lady Merch I Wish For
ANDREA FLECK CLARDY
I’ve let go of multitasking, chaos, and stuff. In their place, I’ve found an attentive calm.
“Slowing and simplifying are among the blessings of mortality.”
READER SUBMISSIONS:
WHAT IS ONE MISTAKE YOU DO NOT REGRET?
“The second-best bad decision that I don’t regret: buying a boat.”
CHARLES E. KRAUS
Who will be the last one standing? What if it’s me?
“I now find myself wondering how and when each of us in my circle will die. It’s a hobby.”
MARGO HOWARD
I don’t like old people
“There is the age I am — 84 — and there is the age I feel: around 30.”
BOB REGAN
Who you callin’ ‘young man’?
“Maybe I’m not a blameless victim of ageism. Maybe I, too, am a perp.”
ANNE BERNAYS
This is a love story, with some life lessons thrown in
“His disappearance was so painful that sometimes I found myself wishing our marriage had been fraught instead of the partnership it was.”
JON GARELICK
Learning to ‘play it like music’
“I was learning something about virtuosity, about the difference between the technical details of playing it ‘like music’ and certain unscalable heights.”
Project editor: Kelly Horan
Ideas editor: Brian Bergstein
Design: Omar Vega and Heather Hopp-Bruce
Digital editor: Rami Abou-Sabe
Audience engagement editor: Karissa Korman
Developer: Andrew Nguyen
Copy editor: Barbara Wallraff
Illustrations by Monica Hellström
