Happy Birthday! You’re looking fabulous as you blow out ninety-seven candles (and one for good luck) on your special cake. Your labs show you’re as healthy as ever; blood pressure of a teenage athlete, glucose levels within “range.” You enjoyed the schnapps of your favorite sweet wine to celebrate. Kol Hakavod! However, you continue to have doubts about planning that longed-for trip to Israel this summer. You think it’s just too much. “Go for it!” writes Judith Viorst in her latest book, Making The Best of What’s Left. With assurances, it’s never too late to find joy and fulfillment so long as you accept the inevitable, “getting old is not just a state of mind.” Viorst reminds it.” It’s reality!” But promises, “you can get really good at it.”
A widow at 94, accomplished poet and best-selling author Judith Viorst’s skinny book is a sensitive, compassionate and at times uber-funny real-time story about contending with life following her beloved husband’s death ---after 63 years of marriage. Positive, perky, never defeated, Viorst recognizes getting old is “non-negotiable” But she refuses to “flunk old age.” In fact, she determines to get an A+ as she gets older and make her life as good as she can after dealing with a host of cascading loses.
Having to move out of her “rambling old Victorian home”, after 51 years was a monumental change when Viorst moved to a Retirement Community into a space that felt like “a cabin in a cruise ship.” The upside? Her new home was close to the family house and near a few dear friends –also candidates for a similar move. She enjoyed being in a familiar community environment. Viorst writes her sensible choice made her feel less like an alien in another galaxy or on an ice floe where old folks were “sent out to sea.”
Balancing the inescapable with dignity and wit, Viorst acknowledges the fragility of old age. She recalls several sobering reality checks. “What does it mean that I spent an hour searching all over the parking garage for my car?” or “I kissed a person I thought was –but wasn’t –my son?” and “Why the meat loaf I put in the oven an hour ago still isn’t done?” “Happens a lot when I don’t turn on the oven,” she muses. She acknowledges, it’s easy to have our feelings hurt as we age ---- to feel “marginalized, neglected, left out’’. Even with those of us who are still “compos mentis”, people don’t seek our opinions much anymore---and relatives don’t visit often enough.
No fan of “downer” feelings Viorst encourages readers, at any age, to connect to community, “vaccines against loneliness.” Her book inspires “to get the chairs reupholstered” even at one hundred. And this writer adds, never stop planning to travel, especially to Israel.