Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan wrote this when she turned 60:" How can people walk around holding this much of the past inside them? How do they possibly add in another two or even three decades of experience? I’m topped up! I’m going to have to start erasing the larger files. Maybe I already have and don’t know it."
She's a cancer survivor , or , rather, she's living with cancer, and so she observes this: "One thing that doctors don’t tell you about cancer is that even if you get lucky, there’s a price: The treatments add up in your body. I don’t look sick. But things have gone wrong inside me that have nothing to do with the cancer itself. The obvious symptom is that I’m tired. “Everyone’s tired!” other people my age tell me."
She says more, but those sentences apply to me, too. And I am way past 60: 73 this year, when I've read on Facebook that a number of famous poets and writers have died at my age.
But I live with four other sisters who are in their middle eighties. I observe their various abilities and disabilities, and wonder about myself.
And how much of the past we hold inside us?
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