Out of Time (19 page)

Sarton made myths about her life, and many people tried to emulate them. Her fellow American, Alix Kates Shulman, for one, experiencing a writer’s block and general loss of confidence in her fifties, managed to regain her serenity and find spiritual renewal, so she wrote, restoring her old hope and confidence in meditative solitude, in relating to animals, the earth and the sea, when living for a summer in a cabin on a rain-swept beach, also off the coast of Maine. She recorded this new sense of joy in her memoir
Drinking the Rain
(1995), feeling herself in tune with the rhythms of life in the plants and animals she tended. Indeed, she closes her book contemplating the ocean, somewhat ecstatically expressing her by then firm embrace of ecopolitics: ‘Perhaps the tides will heal the hole in the world.’
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The buoyancy of these public spokespersons, insisting upon women’s capacity for ageing ‘liberation’, is somewhat at odds with any closer reading of Sarton’s memoirs or journals, with their indications of suppressed rage and recurring depression. For all that, ageing remained an ‘adventure’ for Sarton, and in her final journal, written at eighty-two, she could still depict the
‘lovely glow of happiness’ she experienced meeting friends, or simply sitting on her terrace, although she also confessed that much of the time she was suffering from ‘a serious depression’, which she had always found it ‘hard to talk about’ and avoided putting into her diaries.
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Sarton did less to hide the complexities of ageing than many she has influenced.

The Art of Losing

Second-wave feminists were mostly young and busy struggling for more choice and control over their lives – whether in the home, the workplace, or the world at large – when they first found their voices around the start of the 1970s. This meant that it was childcare and housework, not old age or debility, which came to the fore when questions of intimacy and care were brought into the political arena. Feminists then also devoted much of their young lives to trying to build supportive friendship and community networks, sometimes experimenting with alternative family arrangements. It was the division of labour in the traditional family, feminists argued, that had for so long defined, subordinated and constrained women. Nowadays, however, earlier feminist attempts to politicize personal life are usually dismissed as foolishly utopian. What caused the most disapproval, however, was the criticism of marriage and the family.
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For it is this institution that has remained the authorized way to live, still seen as providing the only haven in a heartless world, with the politics of the moment geared more to expanding its parameters to include same-sex couples than to any attempt to overthrow it.

Conventional families are indeed often the crucial bulwarks
of defence against worldly stresses, yet in relation to ageing it is worth revisiting some of the problems of the overriding respect and importance given to that institution. As we have seen, through choice or circumstance, one of the most common experiences of older women is that they live outside any nuclear family, or even coupledom. This means having to confront a situation in which, as Michèle Barrett and the late Mary McIntosh wrote in 1982, it can be hard facing the pervasive ideology of pity or contempt for all those outside the remit of the traditional family: ‘It is indeed a place of intimacy, but in privileging the intimacy of close kin it has made the outside world cold and friendless, and made it harder to sustain relations of security and trust except with kin. Caring, sharing and loving would be more widespread if the family did not claim them for its own.’
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Moreover, just as feminists had revealed the domestic misery, violence and abuse once kept well hidden behind the closed doors, nowadays it is increasingly necessary to reveal the frequent distress and isolation of elderly caregivers and those who depend upon them within what can be profoundly fraught family settings. This is all the more necessary today when for some time the social supports for domestic life have been chipped away both by state spending cuts and the greater isolation produced by job mobility undermining old extended family and neighbourhood relations.
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As things turned out, feminists could not solve the problem of how to make caring and sharing better resourced and more widespread, beyond family ties, but it was not for want of trying, and we were certainly adroit in raising the problems.

Sometimes it is the very same feminist voices that were once most passionate about women’s isolated situation in the home as young mothers that can be heard again rethinking the politics
of personal life as they ponder the hopes, fears, anxieties or rage they feel entering old age. One feminist who posed such ‘burning questions’ over forty years ago is the indomitable Alix Kates Shulman, mentioned above.
²³
To huge controversy, she published ‘A Marriage Agreement’ in 1969, when her children were young, insisting that her then-husband share responsibilities for household chores and childcare. Today Shulman writes of all the readjustments she has had to make in her life over the last few years of caring for her much loved current husband, Scott, after he suffered a traumatic brain injury from a fall, at seventy-five, causing a form of dementia similar in its effect to late-stage Alzheimer’s.
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In her latest memoir,
To Love What Is
, Shulman says she is often teetering on the verge of despair. Having no short-term memory, Scott is now unable to concentrate on anything, or to pursue his old art work, and requires her constant and unwavering attention.

As Shulman struggles for time to read, write, chat with a friend or just for moments to herself, Scott struggles for her attention: ‘And there it is, the paradox of our predicament. The relentlessness of his needs and the frustration of mine are one’, she writes.
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When things go well, she is able to hire Scott-minders, although it is hard to find ones whom he will accept, and in the time she has to herself Shulman is usually busy writing about the continuing joys and many sorrows, the constant hazards and remaining passion, of their ongoing life together. In the two years she spent writing that book, we learn that Scott retains his old gentleness, charm and affection much of the time, at least when she is paying attention to him. If he sees her crying, she writes, ‘he reaches out an arm to comfort me, exactly as he always has … he kisses me and says, “Don’t be sad. You’ve made me so happy. I didn’t know I could be so
happy” ’ (171–2). Every moment we’re together, she reflects, ‘in battle or harmony: he is my hub’ (166). They still cuddle up at night, and by day they go to movies, free chamber concerts, opera or dance matinées, while Shulman consoles herself about the losses his dementia causes:

That he forgets the concert or dance the minute it’s over hardly matters; even in undamaged brains sensual pleasure fades quickly. Like the flavor of an exquisite dish or the quality of a given orgasm, the sound of a particular performance, however transporting, won’t usually outlive the week. Whereas once I kept whole libraries in my head, nowadays I can recall only vaguely the contents of a book I read a month ago, but that doesn’t diminish my passion for reading in the slightest. (170)

I’ve heard most recently that things have got worse, leading Shulman to search for further sources of sustenance as she continues to care for Scott at home. She wrote about her support group in the
New York Times
: ‘Monday morning can be a downer, but for the dozen women and men in our support group, it’s a highlight of our week. That’s when we gather to speak candidly of what is unspeakable in polite society or even among closest friends and family … Often down or drained when we assemble, we part after 90 minutes buoyed and energized, week after week, year after year.’
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Alix Shulman’s book immediately brings to mind John Bayley’s thoughts on caring for his wife, Iris Murdoch, in her final years with Alzheimer’s disease. Seamlessly moving between past and present, Bayley’s account of the tribulations of the present are placed alongside romantic or peaceful reveries of their life together over the previous forty years. They
were so often together, and yet in many ways ‘together apart’, each always allowing the other the space to do their own work, think their own thoughts, even during mealtimes, where they’d sit together, each with a book reading. In those final years, however, everything reversed, and though in some sense they were increasingly apart, as the husband could not easily follow his wife into the anxieties and fears of her amnesia, they were at all times ‘together’: ‘It was very different from the life we live today. It was like being alone, and yet we were not alone … We were separate but never separated … Now we are together for the first time. We have actually become, as is so often said of a happy married couple, inseparable.’ Bayley does not ignore the rage he occasionally feels when his wife’s behaviour becomes intolerable, as on a bus trip they have to take. More often, however, he claimed to be satisfied, as he remained ever present accompanying Murdoch’s disquieting journey in those final bleak years. Especially at night, in bed, he feels free to hold and remember the wife he has always loved: ‘It is wonderfully peaceful to sit in bed with Iris reassuringly asleep and gently snoring. Half asleep again myself I have a feeling of floating down the river, and watching all the rubbish from the house and from our lives – the good as well as the bad – sinking slowly down though the dark water until it is lost in the depths.’
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Interestingly, I read that in Australia today there are more men over sixty-five than women caring for partners with dementia, and there are certainly a few other books by men providing accounts of this challenging journey.
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More generally, as seen in Linn Sandberg’s research, many of the older men she interviewed in Sweden stressed that the pleasure they received in touch and intimacy with their partners was a large measure
of their fulfilment in later life. Nevertheless, the language and world of caring, and indeed of letting go and loss, is still more often associated with woman’s world, even as more men come to share it in old age. Certainly, some women work especially hard to find just the right words, the right stories, the right rhythm even, to encompass and hence to try to surmount their losses. They are not, of course, always successful, even when their words move others to greater understanding of their own predicament.

With mordant humour, Elizabeth Bishop wrote one of her most celebrated poems on loss over seventy years ago, ‘One Art’, with its sharply parodic refrain, before naming the suicide of her lover as the ultimate catastrophe:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

…

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.
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It may look like, and sometimes it is, a disaster. At other times, the continuation of forms of love, compassion, attachment, even desire, can accompany the most extreme challenges and losses of ageing. Some women writers have skilfully rehearsed in fiction the unexpected joys as well as the difficulties of caring for fragile and ailing elderly partners, friends or lovers. At fifty-six, the late North American writer, Jane Rule, wrote her remarkably compassionate novel,
Memory Board
, a moving account of a lesbian couple in which one partner, the recently retired medical practitioner, Diana Court, suffering, as Rule did, from bad arthritis, is learning how to manage to care for her partner, Constance, now afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Despite the increasing confinement in which the independent and argumentative Diana now chooses to live to keep Constance secure and relaxed, she says she can still feel considerable contentment in her life. As she explains to her twin brother David: ‘It’s as much for my own sake as for hers that I don’t want it disturbed. I have had to cut off friends who have wanted to rescue me from it.’
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Entering his sister’s world after forty years of estrangement, David does not try to ‘rescue’ her, but is instead fascinated both by his sister and for him the still beautiful Constance. After working hard to rebuild his childhood closeness with his sibling, while struggling to win Constance’s trust (becoming, for instance, whichever person she takes him to be, from
plumber or gardener to garbage man), David eventually moves in to help his sister cope with Constance’s growing needs. Constance, like her carers, Diana and David, still finds much mutual pleasure in music, and other forms of physical beauty and contact, as Diana notes one time when joining her old lover in bed: ‘Constance turned and welcomed her into a sleeping embrace, the body’s memory flawless’ (35). Aware of what she owes to all the old friends and family members now helping her care for Constance, Diana reflects, more than once, that there are ‘miracles’ that became easier to recognize when everything else failed: