My friend and I have an age difference I don't always appreciate. She's only a few years younger than my dad would have been, were he still alive. Occasionally she talks about some health problem or other, and I busy myself with gentle teasing. Here, in North America, one does one's best to stay young, and then if people lapse and act their age and worry about it, you provide them with excuses and denial. "Pas mal bon pour ton âge" we say in French, when our 83 year old mother-in-law does anything that surprises us. My friend is much younger. She's of the age when, were she to die, people would say that she died young. And since I am twenty years younger myself, I have poor perspective on the subject. Therefore it came as a surprise to read Mary Oliver speak so gently about ageing in her essay “Building the House”:

There is something you can tell people over and over, and with feeling and eloquence, and still never say it well enough for it to be more than news from abroad - people have no readiness for it, no empathy. It is the news of personal aging - of climbing, and knowing it, to some unrepeatable pitch and coming forth on the other side, which is pleasant still but which is, unarguably, different - which is the beginning of descent. It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one's time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.

I realize now that I must try harder not to impede the grace and attentiveness of people who know themselves to be ageing.