My Accomplishment This Year

By Marjorie Roth

At age 100 it’s a little hard to say I’ve accomplished anything but survival this past year. I feel a little like Ukraine: fighting as I can but slowly losing ground. I have to recognize I’m living an altered life. I’ve begun to think that realization applies to life in toto, if we start with Shakespeare’s Ages of Man. It starts with the infant mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms, and finishes with walking on three legs, one of them a cane. Well, I can only walk on two legs and a counter, or on two legs and four wheels that will move me along. If Shakespeare had known about driving a car, he would have used it for adolescent age and the absence of it for old age. That stage alters life drastically. If I want to go anywhere I need someone to drive me, and then I need to be sure when I get out of the car I will have my walker and that there are railings and not too many steps to climb.

This eliminates a lot. And, eventually, it eliminates the theatre, the symphony, concerts, different theatre groups, lectures, and physical activities that were once so important. I don’t mean this to sound like a complaint, just a description of what happens in life. And of course that includes husbands and wives dying or becoming ill and dependent, losing friends the same way, children moving away, grandchildren moving into their own adult lives. All of this means I have much time alone: an adjustment for someone whose life was full of people, even my profession was fully people-oriented.

My life changed gradually, usually one adjustment at a time. And I was making decisions that reinforced these limitations, staying in my home which was so tied up with my entire family who were able to visit for a week or two at a time, with enough beds to accommodate everyone. I was fortunate to have Claudia who started working for me when she was sixteen—I couldn’t do without her. As I write that I know it isn’t true: it would be one more very difficult thing to accomplish.

I am aware of how lucky I am to be able to afford this.

And I have to realize that my husband’s moving us to California so he could join Kaiser has made life easier because of the retirement advantages. Also, in an age of Zooming so much is possible: we can write, discuss books, take courses, be with others.

So what is my accomplishment this year? It’s all of the above and accepting the Ages of Man applies to me. I can do less and do it more slowly. When I toss paper to the wastebasket my judgment has become poor and I have to use my walker to go get the reacher so I can pick up the paper. I am aware that my accomplishment is only partial. When I drop the Times, or miss the wastebasket, I swear, which sometimes tells me how angry I am about this stage of life and its frustrations.

I even console myself with thinking I won’t live long enough to see either Trump or our country destroyed. Though I dread it, I want to see what happens.

Photo by Nancy Rubin

Marjorie Roth
Born in 1924