Aging, Dying, and J Crew

Ah, a lovely Sunday with nothing to do! I never know how to spend days like this. As of this moment I have eaten half a bagel and re-read my own blog entry from 3 years ago about the Mitford sisters.

It’s sad to read a collection of life-spanning letters. You get so into those crazy Mitford girls, and you follow their development from childhood, through the war, the births and deaths of various children, etc. etc., and you get to know them all, and then as the book comes to a close they start disappearing one by one, and you read about each disappearance in the letters the remaining sisters write to each other. So strange for your sister of 80 years to be gone. Diana ended up going blind and deaf but not before her ailing husband died while she was just out of the room for a second, something that haunted her for the rest of her life. She writes about how she can’t believe she wasn’t with him at that “tremendous moment,” which still makes me cry. And at the end, all these people with all their whole lives full of antics and beliefs and struggles, they just all end up ancient old ladies yelling at their nurse. Even when Diana’s husband finally dies you just feel sad and deflated, even though he was a dreadful Fascist. You’ve seen him for 1,000 pages through the eyes of someone who loves him and when he finally dies you just feel the death of that marriage more than anything else, it’s odd. Or like, horrible Unity with her devotion to the Nazi cause, she’s a monster, but there’s still something depressing about seeing her reduced to wetting the bed and stumbling around meaninglessly after a bungled suicide attempt.

Age really does make people Other and I can’t tell if it’s a good thing. So many people thought it was tacky of Michael Moore to go hassle Charlton Heston in “Bowling for Columbine.” He’s an old man! He’s suffering! etc. And on the one hand I totally agree–there is very little I hate more than seeing an old man mistreated or confused. On the other hand, just because you get old, are you no longer responsible for yourself? To say no one should hassle Heston is actually in a way stripping him of his personhood, it’s condescending. Dude had strong opinions, should he not continue to be identified with them? I don’t know. I mean obviously if someone has straight-up Alzheimers then in a sense they AREN’T a person anymore, or they’re not the SAME person, and probably you should just let sleeping dogs lie at that point.

I hate this thing where somebody gets old and dies and then we all have to be reverent about them. Ronald Reagan was a heinous piece of garbage and him dying doesn’t change that! But we all had to sit through all the testaments to what a great public speaker he was or whatever. This is why I was gratified when Thatcher died and so many prominent Britons were just unabashedly rejoicing. Pay the lady her due by continuing to despise her for her acts and beliefs! You don’t become an innocent baby just by getting old and dying.

I wonder where we draw our lines? Nobody feels this way about Hitler. Hmmm. If Hitler popped up and he was 100 years old, all saggy and shaky, wearing big ol’ suspenders and scared of computers, would we be like “aw poor guy, leave him alone”? I doubt it. Whenever they find one of those guys they hang him for sure, decrepitude be damned.

When I am old please feel free to heap scorn upon me just as you did when I was hale.

Yesterday I went work-clothes shopping and got a big pile of outfits including two jaunty blazers. I have decided to go blazer-heavy this year. It’s a good choice for someone who cultivates the pinched little schoolboy look as I do. I’ve realized I am a J Crew person and there’s nothing I can do about it–I can’t change my devotion to that totally middlebrow, square-ass fashion spectrum, but NOR can I actually purchase any of those clothes. I’m a J Crew person trying to buy Gap at Goodwill, alas.

The rest is silence