The Next Time You Encounter a Problem, Ask Yourself, “What Would My 90-Year-Old Self Do?”
Currently and quite unexpectedly, I am hosting Marianne Landre Goldscheider, an 88-year-old German woman who fled the Nazi regime as a child and who has been living in New York City for more than 50 years. She’s a writer, an eccentric, a strong, fascinating woman with a brilliant mind that is still intensely-sharp, even as she approaches her 90th year. Our mutual friend Pim connected us; Marianne has been avoiding her NYC-apartment since the start of the pandemic and is trying to continue avoiding it for as long as possible.
When Marianne first arrived at my home last week, I saw a frail, elderly woman with a walker. I quietly wondered how she would manage on my very non-handicap accessible property. There was no way my practically-immobile guest would make it up the treacherous wooden staircase with no banister to the bedroom I had prepared for her stay. The only viable solution — setting her up in the living room for the next three weeks. Fortunately, there’s an adjacent toilet, and French doors leading onto a back deck so that — with some help getting in and out — she can enjoy a few hours of fresh air each day, reading, visiting with Pim, and listening to the birds and cicadas.
I’ll admit, at first glance, I wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew with this particular house guest. But our culturally-ingrained fear of aging, which is intimately connected to our western fear of sickness and death, proved to be the sole driver of my initial concerns. The vibrant human underneath that frail facade quickly assuaged my fears.
Yes, Marianne requires a bit more care than previous house guests. Each morning, I come downstairs, make us both a cup of coffee, ensure that Marianne’s dishes are clean and within reach, and bring her two eggs (which she likes to eat raw, the way she did as a child in Prague), half-and-half for her coffee, and a fresh glass of water. Repeat at dinner time.
On the first day, I wondered if these extra daily chores would quickly become an inconvenience, but now I find myself actually looking forward to the routine. Or maybe it’s just that Marianne is one of the most fascinating humans I’ve ever met. Talking with her is like a portal into a quickly fading past.
I love to read history books, but nothing compares to sitting in a room with a real, live person who’s lived 1000 lives, who ended up in a Czech children’s home when her parents were sent to concentration camps, who grew up in a house with “tons of books but no money”, who asked her Harvard-educated husband for an open marriage back when women didn’t ask for that sort of thing, who still lives on her own in Manhattan, despite being almost entirely immobile, and who continues to make daily entries to the stream-of-consciousness blog she started in 2007.
Like myself, Marianne is a writer. But I see myself in her in so many ways, beyond just the writing. A few times, I’ve even had somewhat of an out-of-body experience while listening to her talk; I’m suddenly 88-years-old, telling a similar story to my 42-year-old hostess, who thinks she knows so much about the world, but who knows practically nothing.
Sitting around the dining room table the other night, having dinner with Marianne and my two girls, listening to her stories of Hitler-era Germany, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. To hear such stories from the mouth of a person who lived them, while she’s sitting at my table, is an experience that will cease to be possible within only a few years. But most of us are too preoccupied with the minutiae of daily life to notice, let alone care.
We treat old people like shit because we don’t want to face our own aging, nor the inevitability of our own sickness and death. Yet old people, especially the rare few whose minds remain sharp as a tack, are the true embodiment of historical wisdom.
When we read the pages of a history book, we must infer how the people who lived at that time experienced the events. We must guess how they felt, what they hoped for and feared, and why they acted the way they did. We read the words and project our own limited knowledge and experience onto those words. But when you are with someone who was actually there, you needn’t infer. She will tell you. “This is how it happened, this is how we felt, this is why we did what we did.”
Sometimes you get really lucky, as I have, and you stumble upon a born storyteller with an extensive mental library of captivating tales. A radical sort of woman who has always lived how she chooses, fuck what anyone else thinks, who can effortlessly transport you back to a proverbial film festival of memories that will — before too long — vanish from this world along with their mortal host.
When Marianne talks about periods of her life that must have seemed so important and been so challenging at the time (marital woes, child rearing, boyfriends, jobs, lack of money), she does so as though she’s recounting the details of another’s life.
Stress, anger, jealousy, passion, pride; that b.s. is reserved for the young. It’s easy to believe that we are the center of the universe, that our trials and tribulations are terribly unfair, and that it really matters whether we buy the car or remodel the guest bathroom, win an argument with our partner, or post a witty retort in a self-imposed Facebook battle. One day, if I am lucky, I too will be regaling a younger version of myself with tales of my long, storied life. As such, I embrace anything interesting that happens to me, good or bad, as a new story to add to my ever-growing collection.
Words on a page may last forever, but words spoken by the one who lived them are precious, imbued with a kind of magic that only exists in life’s most temporal gifts.
