Imagining Wonder: What if…the best things happen? by Barbara O'Neal

LUCY BURDETTE: you’ve heard me say that one of my favorite writers is Barbara O’Neal. I’m reading her latest, Memories of the Lost, and trying to make it last longer so I don’t feel the sadness of it ending. I follow her sub stack and really loved a recent post, which she agreed to share with us. Welcome Barbara!

BARBARA O'NEAL: My sister, a lifelong nurse, visited me last week. We were talking about aging in general, and our mother in particular.  I made an off-hand comment that I supposed everyone gets frail in their 90s. 

My sister said, most emphatically, that that wasn’t true at all. She sees lots of very aged people in her work, and sees a lot of 90-somethings who are quite vigorous, who live their lives the same way they always have, doing things, traveling, having adventures. 

I blinked. A huge sense of…potential bloomed in my body.  Expansion. 

In that instant, I realized that the idea of looming frailty has weighing on me in the weirdest ways.  My mother is in her early 80s, but she’s suddenly facing frailty from a dozen directions. I guess my mind was casting me into that 80-year-old frail role, too.  My cats are getting older and I think about what it would be like to get new kittens, and then my brain says, but you’re getting up there, and who will take care of the cats if something happens to you? 

I worry about how long we’ll get to stay in this beautiful home by the beach, and if the medical care will chase us back to a city. I wonder how long I’ll be able to do the vigorous travel I love so much. 

All of this has very much in the back of my mind, not anywhere in view, but until we had this conversation, I had not realized how much I’ve been imagining myself frail at 80. While it’s fine to be practical and make arrangements for alternative outcomes (and I think it’s smart to do that), I don’t want to live in that space of vague dread. 

None of us know when something might befall us—an accident or a random disease or whatever—but in our 30s and 40s, we don’t keep looking up at the scythe hanging over our heads. We just go about our lives, make plans, looking forward to things we anticipate doing. 

I want to return to that sense of spaciousness, claim it, as my sister-in-law used to say. I claim a vigorous old age. I am visualizing lots more time to raise kittens, travel, explore long walks on my beach and around the world.  

My sister said that people who stay active stay strong. Which we already know, but it was a great reminder. I can focus on more exercise, less extra weight, more activity, tons of great nutrition. I’m going to start looking for examples of vigorous older people and focus on them. There are many in my community. My neighbor is almost 78 and she’s planning a hike on the Coast to Coast walk in England. 

I’m just going to live without looking up at that scythe and imagine a great future. What if I’m still writing a book every (other) year, traveling with my husband, enjoying my many grandchildren on active vacations in my 90s? What if, like Esther Hicks says, I thrive, thrive, thrive, croak?

Does aging weigh on you? If you allowed yourself a sense of wonder, what might you see? 

Barbara O’Neal is the author of many titles of women’s fiction, including When We Believed in Mermaids and the forthcoming The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth. She writes regularly on Substack and lurks heavily on TikTok.