Aging Is Not a Failure of Youth

Or: What I Really Wanted to Say to
The Woman in the Grocery Store

Not long ago, I was making my way through the grocery store, gripping the cart as usual, instead of my walker. I moved at my own pace, minding my own business, when a woman I recognized stopped and stared. Her face arranged itself into something between surprise and pity.

“I thought you couldn’t walk anymore,” she said, having heard that I have a new powerchair I can use when I need it.

I smiled. I mumbled something. I kept moving.

But inside? A small fire lit.

What I wanted to say, and what I’ve thought about many times since was this: “I wear glasses, but I am not blind.”

The Story We’ve Been Told

Somewhere along the way, we absorbed a story about aging that is, at its core, a story about subtraction. Youth is the standard. Everything after is measured against it and found wanting.

A cane means you are less than you were. A walker means you have fallen behind. A wheelchair means you have arrived at the end of something.

I know this story. I’ve lived inside it, bumped against it, and — over fifty years of living with MS — had to find my way out of it again and again.

Because here’s what that story gets wrong. It mistakes the tool for the truth.

What the Tool Actually Is

My new power wheelchair is not a white flag.

It is, in fact, one of the more practical decisions I have made in recent years. Not because I cannot walk. I can. But because it extends my energy. It lets me go farther into my day. It lets me take my dog Dekker through the neighborhood on a morning that my legs would have cut short at the end of the driveway.

The wheelchair gives me more life, not less.

And yet I watch my neighbors, good people, people I love, refuse a cane because of what they fear it signals. To others, yes. But more painfully, to themselves. As though accepting the tool means accepting a verdict. As though needing a little help getting where you’re going is the same as admitting you shouldn’t be going at all.

It is not the cane they are refusing. It is the story attached to it.

The Glasses I Wear Every Day

I’ve worn glasses since I was a child. No one has ever looked at me with pity because of them. No one has ever said, “I thought you couldn’t see anymore.”

Glasses are understood for exactly what they are: a tool that corrects for what the eye cannot do on its own, so the person wearing them can get on with their life.

Why is a cane different?

Why is a walker different? Or a wheelchair?

Why, when we adapt intelligently and gracefully to what our bodies need, do we absorb it as evidence of failure rather than as proof of the same practical ingenuity we’d admire in any other context?

The woman in the grocery store wasn’t cruel. She was just fluent in the same story the rest of us have been reading our whole lives. The one that says a younger body is a better body, and any movement away from it is a loss to be mourned.

But that story is wrong. And it costs us something real.

What the Measuring Costs

When we hold our current selves up against our forty-year-old selves, our fifty-year-old selves, even our selves from last spring, and call the difference decline, we do violence to the present moment.

We stop inhabiting where we actually are. We spend our energy grieving a version of ourselves that was never meant to be permanent.

And we miss what is here, now, in this body, in this season….

There is a particular kind of clarity that arrives with age. A willingness to say this is what matters and mean it, and to let go of what doesn’t without too much ceremony. There is patience. A lighter grip. The gift of having outlived a few of your worries.

These are not consolation prizes for losing youth. They are the real thing. They take decades to arrive.

A Different Question

What if we stopped asking what have I lost and started asking where am I now?

Not as denial. Not as forced cheerfulness. But as genuine curiosity about the terrain we’re actually standing on.

Fifty years of MS has taught me (slowly, not without resistance) that my body is not my enemy. It is my companion.

An unusual one, sometimes an inconvenient one, but mine.

The cane, the walker, the power chair: these are not evidence that my companion has failed me. They are evidence that we have learned, together, how to keep going.

Aging is not a failure of youth any more than autumn is a failure of summer. They are different countries. They ask different things of us.

And some of the most beautiful days I have ever lived have happened in this one.

A Word for Anyone Who Has Refused the Cane

If some part of this has landed near something you’ve been feeling…. you’re not alone.

The refusal makes sense. The feelings inside it are real. But you don’t have to keep paying that price.

The tool is not the verdict. It is just the tool.

And wherever you are going, at whatever pace, with whatever help, you are still going. That is not failure.

That is a life, still being lived.

Sending you blessings for a full and meaningful life, and inspiration to live it!