Will you still need me when I'm 64?
Birthday reflections across the decades as I turn 64 today. Marking the fourth year of my sixth decade, the Beatles classic echoes. A life review a la Jane Fonda reveals the answer: I need me.
I suppose it was inevitable that the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which came out when I was 7 years old, would be the song playing in my head today. It’s a jaunty song painting an optimistic picture of a couple growing old together, an invitation that seems assured of a positive response:
I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for moreWill you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four
That isn’t how the story will end for me. When I initiated my divorce , I knew that in choosing myself, for myself, I wouldn’t be getting the answer I might have once wished for when the Beatles sing: “When I get older/losing my hair/many years from now/will you still be sending me a birthday greeting/bottle of wine?”
I do anticipate birthday greetings, though. I am blessed with two amazing daughters, my mother, my sister and brother, extended family and so many wonderful friends. In fact, I teased my friends while in Arizona that they would have to sing me the Beatles song on April 12. And if not, like Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself,” “I celebrate myself, and sing myself:”
I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
And yet, despite Whitman’s entreaty, I am inspired today to write about the beginning if not the end, and those periods of “inception” at every decade, starting with age 4.
Over millennia, the number 4 has come to signify what is solid, can be touched and felt, Wikipedia tells me: “Its relationship to the cross (four points) made it an outstanding symbol of wholeness and universality.”
The number is sacred to many Native Americans: four sacred mountains, four directions, four colors, four worlds. It’s also the number of order in the universe: the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. The four seasons. The four points of the compass and the four phases of the moon. And then there are The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, which I am sure my friend
at could share in great depth with me.So it seems fitting to do one of the “life reviews” as described by Jane Fonda in Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ inspiring podcast “Wiser Than Me” where she gets “schooled” by older women wiser than her. Fonda said she spent the year between age 59 and 60 “researching myself, very objectively, like, it wasn’t really me, it was somebody else. And what I discovered was that I’m really brave. I didn’t know that before. I’ve been brave all my life. And that gave me a lot of confidence.”
I’ve been doing a deep dive into myself since 2020, that punctuation point in our modern lives where, amid all the suffering and loss of the pandemic, we were forced to go quiet and inwards. This self-examination, this “life review,” has delivered huge dividends—painful ones, like knowing I wanted to leave my long marriage—and exhilarating ones, like taking charge of my own destiny in a way I never had before. And most rewarding, this inner work has enabled me to understand myself more intimately and compassionately than I ever have before.
So here I share a brief life review where “4” makes its sacred appearance, including today. And in the spirit of birthdays, I’ve lifted the paywall on this second weekly essay complete with my voiceover. Also today, I offer another gift: 20% off a paid subscription, monthly or annually, valid until the end of this month. As I evolve my writing career in a new direction here on Substack, I’d love your support to continue to afford to do that. If that’s not possible for you, I understand. I am simply glad you are here, reading my work.
Age 4
Born in Manhattan, I was scooped up and planted on a grassy lawn in suburban Long Island the day my mother came home from a walk in the city with me in my baby carriage with my blanket covered in soot. “I won’t raise my baby in this dirty city,” she informed my father and off we went to Islip Terrace and the fenced-in yard complete with plastic pool for hot summer days. By then I am the older sister of my little brother, who I immediately declared “my baby” when my mother brought him home from the hospital. I was distressed, however, by the strange appendage between his legs as I peered into his crib. With big brown eyes, on the verge of tears, I turned to my mother: “My baby has a boo-boo.” After being reassured that all is well, boys and girls are different, I solemnly step into the identities I would assume for the rest of my life: mother’s helper, big sister, role model.
Age 14
Ninth grade. I am a mess of wants, desires and constant striving. I work hard for good grades. I have begun to attach my self worth to popularity and being liked by a boy. A pimple in the middle of my forehead is a disaster that makes me want to stay home from school. “I am so ugly. Who will love me now?” I scrawl in my diary. My identity as a writer is growing, nurtured by English teachers who teach me how stories are made. My imagination becomes my favorite hiding place.
Age 24
A newly minted graduate of Simmons University (then Simmons College) with a double major in English Literature/Journalism, I am working at my first job as a newspaper reporter for The Ipswich Chronicle, so poorly paid I can only afford to get around town on a bicycle to report the news. In a town where the annual strawberry festival is the front page headline, it hardly mattered. My greatest delight was sharing a house with three other girls on the same road where John Updike used to live and his ex-wife still resided. I’d walk by, thinking, “That’s John Updike’s ex-house and ex-fence…and wow, his ex-dog.” Alas, I never got a glimpse of my literary hero. In my 20s, reporting the news but really wanting to write stories like Updike, the seeds were planted for this lifelong dichotomy—a bridge I found hard to cross.
Age 34
I am a mother of two little girls, living in Sweden. I’d always wanted to be a mother and I loved it all: dancing with them around their bedrooms or playing make-believe games with boxes of dress-up clothes as they twirl in front of the mirror, enchanted with this vision of themselves remade into a princess or fairy. And best of all, cuddling up in bed with a book, their skin warm and damp and sweet from the bath. But the moment they were tucked into bed, I’d retreat to the couch for mommy time with a glass of wine and the latest episode of the hot new series, “Sex and the City” and remind myself that there was more to me than the all-consuming identity of mother.
Age 44
In my early 40s, a growing knowledge that something is not as it should be in my marriage and my attempts to repair what feels so wrong. Then my best friend since freshman year of college suddenly dies from post-surgery complications, leaving a devastated husband and two young daughters. I feel adrift in a way I never have before. While I have friends and family to hold me through it, I sense it—this demarcation between a certain kind of innocence before midlife, and a reckoning to come.
Age 54
We have spent four years living on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea as a family adventure, but are now homeward bound (for me) to the U.S. after 22 years in Europe. My father has died after his battle with pancreatic cancer and I want to be closer to my mother and siblings. One daughter in college, the other finishing high school. The empty nest looms. And still, I circle around the uncomfortable questions that would make me look closer at my marriage and the dreams I somehow abandoned along the way. Life is good, I think, isn’t it? I am lucky. I am loved by so many. What more do I want? What more do I think I deserve? But still, the questions linger and they are getting impatient for answers.
Age 64
The 60s bring my moment of reckoning. This new decade for me begins with a global pandemic, altering life as we know it. After a 45-year love affair, I put down alcohol at 61. It is numbing me to seeing what I need to see. At 62, The Knowing about my marriage is no longer a whisper in my ears. It’s a full-throated yell. So I listen. And he and I, we get through it, better than I ever expected, and even celebrate our 63rd birthdays together with our daughters. And now at 64, I am navigating life newly single and doing the best I can to care for my mother with dementia.
What I’ve come to believe is that all those sacred 4s—and all the years in between—are as much a present part of me as they were then. The child, the teenager, the young reporter and new mother, the midlife warrior—they all are here, part of this braver-than-she-knew, happier and wiser me. It turns out I am lucky after all.
LET’S TALK! I’d love to know what points of resonance you find in this essay, and if you’ve done a similar retrospective look at your life, and what it’s revealed. Please share in the comments! And please leave a “heart” if you enjoyed this and share with a friend who might appreciate it. My deep gratitude for your time and presence!
I'm so happy for you. I divorced in 2011, and never looked back. It was so incredibly freeing. I also quit alcohol four years ago at age 57 and it's given me so much clarity. I love the way you wrote this piece. Well done!
Wonderful life journey so eloquently described by pinpointing certain years and highlighting the changes that happened in between. Lovely to read