On living in a body in its second half-century

Dear Grandma Ruth,

I’m not sure what all you see where you are now, but you may have heard that I have once more messed up my knee.

Let me rephrase that. My knee is once again messed up. Yes, I know that I should avoid the passive voice and that we’re not supposed to end sentences with a preposition. I also know that these rules were largely invented by men who aren’t writing from their study in the middle of a heat wave while practicing the surprisingly complex art of bending and straightening their leg.

Besides, there is no identifiable agent who caused this particular knee crisis. I was minding my own business, and boom! it happened. I lost the ability to walk (a temporary condition, thankfully) at the same time I discovered I am a woman over 50 (a condition that appears to be irreversible).

If you blow out your knee in a ball game when you’re a teenager, you attract a certain kind of attention and care. If you do it again moving a couch in your twenties, this is largely still the case.

Years then pass in which you have minor surgeries and cortisone shorts until one rainy morning in Lexington, you overhear an x-ray tech telling a nurse, “this lady’s a mess.” You realize with a wave of cold horror that the lady in question is you. Now you have to swallow your pain, look stronger than you feel, convince everyone you’re okay until you can get home and cry yourself to sleep.

I am not telling you anything you don’t know, of course. Your body, like mine, started slowing down way before your mind and heart did. In your papers, I found a draft of a guest column for the Democrat & Chronicle from fall 1990 in which you wrote:

I was and still am determined not to be “old…”. I continue to learn through reading, travel, whatever new experiences are offered. I do admit to having “old knees” that slow me when climbing stairs.

You were approaching 68 when you wrote this, trying to come to grips with the fact that 70 was on the not-so-distant horizon. I am more than 10 years behind. And yet your words hit me like the swift hoof of a tetchy mama cow. I had to acknowledge that some people already see me as “old,” even though so much of me feels as good if not better than ever.

I am just now beginning to come into my own as a writer, with a completed manuscript winding its way into the world and a short story recently accepted for publication. I am launching a new certificate program in the academic department I run and have a daily meditation practice that has sustained me since the pandemic (be thankful you weren't here for that). Most of the time it doesn’t bother me that few can see the whole of me. When the only thing they see is my current physical weakness, however, I admit it does.

Which brings me to the reason for this letter. I want to apologize for all the times I saw you as “old” and worse, treated you as such. I see now how self-centered and thoughtless I too often was. Some might attribute that to my age, to the arrogant, still-developing brain of a young person in her teens and twenties, but that is no excuse. I had the whole person that is Ruth Cornwell Dennis right in front of me all along, and I did not acknowledge her nearly enough.

With each passing year, I find it easier to imagine how frustrating it must have been to watch all of us with our still-able bodies running, climbing, jumping around. How it felt to have to ask for help from these same bodies when you had always been independent, always knew how to get things done. I think I see why you didn’t leave your trailer on its dead-end road, despite our urging, despite the access to community and care you would have had in town. So much gets taken from people as they get older, especially women and especially rural folks. I don’t think I’d give up the last things that still felt like mine either.

They say, “better late than never,” and I want so badly for that to be true. I want this apology to count for something, and I want the fact that I’m now sharing your wisdom and words to count for something too. Then I think about how little this summer has gone as planned, how much I’ve had to cancel or put on hold. No writing conferences, no nights with friends at Hindman. I yearn for long hikes and quick dips at Laurel River Lake, but go to physical therapy instead. I have time to read and time to write, for which I’m grateful, but still don’t quite feel wholly me, which is how I understand that this is far too little, far too late. It feels important to say it all the same.

With love,

Your granddaughter, Laura Lynn1

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