Recently I found myself around a seminar table with people of vastly different ages. We were discussing A.S. Byatt’s novella The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. After listening for a time waiting to see if anyone else had anything to say about the narrator, wondering if I noticed only because I was a 50-year-old woman, I pointed out that Byatt had chosen a very particular narrator to tell this tale, a woman in her fifties who in many ways had passed beyond some of the challenges of life described in the fairy tales she studies as a narratologist. The narrator knows that she is no crone as the tales describe crones, but rather “an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money....” She calls herself redundant, pointing out that no one needs her, an unusual state for a woman.
A young woman in the group, mid-20s, objected that the narrator wasn’t really an independent woman, that a couple of the other characters seemed more independent and feminist. I responded rather impatiently: the narrator wasn’t claiming anything about her own character here, she’s observing that she lives at an unprecedented time in history, where a woman in her fifties is not dead of childbirth fever, or influenza, religious persecution or human sacrifice. She has her teeth, she has her sight and she has money. A man my age, early 50s, murmured, “She’s godlike.”
I thought I knew everything about loss already. I thought I’d been tested and taught through grief as much as is possible. I thought I was wise and full of acceptance. Yet, at 49, when I suddenly lost a lot of hair, I went into a tailspin. None of my previous losses - not the baby, a shocking end to a normal labor, the baby who declined to take up living on her own once the cord was cut; not the brother, dead, on Christmas Eve, of a drug overdose at 25, like so many similar deaths, both a surprise and also long expected; not the father, dead of sepsis two years after a paralyzing stroke brought on by smoking crack in his 60s. None of these shocking disappearances prepared me for the loss of my hair. I stared mortality in the face: I felt in my bones the impossible fact that I had no control over the aging of my body. Could I even call it mine? Sure, I lived in it, I’d claimed its glories - the hourglass figure - and obsessed about its shortcomings: too fat, too short. But it had a life of its own and that terrified me. Of course, I could eat right, exercise, floss, eat fiber, take vitamins, avoid cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine. I did all those things, but I couldn’t make my hair grow. And I couldn’t live with the uncertainty that it might get worse not better.
Or that even worse things might happen. That same year, two women I knew, two healthy, right-living, 52-year-old women with children still at home, died of brain cancer. I was paralyzed: how could I keep living if I didn’t know what was going to happen?
