A gradual process of erasure

I’m part of a book club with good selections and lively discussions (that don’t always stick to the book). Our reading for this month was Kristin Harmel’s The Book of Lost Names, an historical novel based on the people who forged documents to help Jewish children escape capture by the Nazis. The book deals with the problem of a person’s identity being lost or “erased.”

In the first part of the story, the protagonist, now an older woman, has this encounter with a younger co-worker in the library:

“Mrs. Abrams?” It’s Jenny again, addressing me by my surname, though I’ve told her a thousand times to call me Eva, just as she addresses the younger librarians by their given names. But alas, I am nothing to her but an old lady. One’s reward for marching through the decades is a gradual process of erasure.

While Eva is obviously not a Jewish child being given a false identity, erasure happens in other spheres of life. Old age is one of them.

Erasure leads to invisibility. A gradual slide into invisibility is a challenge of growing older.

I remember my first hint that this would someday be my experience. My pastor—a funny, intelligent, and very outgoing man—said the hardest part of aging for him was becoming invisible the moment he stepped out of his home. A youth-oriented culture stereotypes people in different ways, “old man” and “old lady” being examples. “Old man” and “old lady” don’t have names, just white hair, wrinkles, and maybe a cane or a walker. Easily overlooked.

This may be changing somewhat, due to an aging population that makes up a greater number of voters. At certain times in the political calendar, candidates running for office see us. Sort of. And numerous TV adds attest to the value of aging consumers. I’m not sure if this means actually seeing older people or merely tweaking the stereotype.

In a sense I’ve been invisible a good part of my life, due to being an introvert. Especially as an adolescent and young woman, I was painfully shy, hardly daring to speak up in a class or group of over three people. No kidding. I remember once at the end of a church party, a friend ran into me at the door and exclaimed, “Nancy! Have you been here the whole time?” I had been. And it wasn’t a big party. That remark has stayed with me.

Through the years I gained experience and a measure of social confidence. In short, I grew up, got married, had a career, and somewhere along the way stopped being invisible. But now that I’m growing older, a different kind of invisibility is raising its ghostly head.

I talked with some of my friends here in the retirement community. The moment I asked the question, “Do you ever feel invisible?” I got emphatic Yeses. One friend told me, “When I went to Paris as a young woman, men ogled me. When I went back a few years ago, no one even noticed I was there.” To combat invisibility, this friend wears bright colors and talks to as many people as she can. This comes naturally to her as an extrovert, but she still feels invisible at times.

Novelist Ayelet Waldman said in an interview, “…I’m used to being taken seriously professionally. And suddenly, it’s like I just vanished from the room. And I have to yell so much louder to be seen…. I just want to walk down the street and have someone notice that I exist.”

Living in a retirement community such as ours helps. Since all of us are more or less in the same age group (roughly 70-100, quite a range!), we don’t need to feel alienated because of age. At least from each other. But even that’s not always true. Another friend told me that because she is not part of the Friends Church, the group that founded this retirement community, she often feels invisible, noting all the long-time relationships and shared values among the Quaker population. She often goes to the local coffee shop when she wants to engage in conversations and feel “normal” again.

Several have told me that the sense of invisibility is most painful when it happens in the context of the extended family. One of my neighbors told me of a recent multi-generational family reunion where the younger generation totally ignored her. It was as if she wasn’t in the room. She confronted her erasure by walking around and speaking with each youngster.

I understand. As a child I sang the old song, “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go,” and imagined that when I became old, Grandpa and I would host holiday dinners and be the center of the expanding circles of the generations.

That’s not how it happened. Our apartment here in the retirement center barely has room for small dinner parties. As the family grew and kids married and had their own kids, the center shifted. We are no longer in the middle, which is right and good. But it doesn’t always feel good. We increasingly find ourselves on the periphery. Sometimes we feel more like relatives than family. We’re visible only when someone makes the effort and actually looks at us.

Why is the invisibility of aging so painful? Maybe it’s because we’re still fully human beings and we want to be seen as such. We want to be known as we really are. The stereotypes make that difficult. Changes in family structure make it difficult. Changes in the way we look and the ways our bodies work (or don’t work) make it difficult.

I love that old movie, Avatar, a fantasy about life on a distant moon. I especially enjoy the idealist depiction of relationships between the inhabitants. The way friends greet each other is by looking into each other’s eyes and saying, “I see you.”

I see you. Whatever our age, we need people to see us. And we need to see them back.

[To be continued….]