Things to Do When You Turn 70

Last January I received an  e-mail from Sellers Publishing inviting me to contribute an essay to a forthcoming book called 70 Things to Do When You Turn 70.    The royalties, they said, would be donated to nonprofit organizations dedicated to preventing and curing cancer.  It would be a follow-up to their book 50 Things to Do When You Turn 50.  The series has been very successful, according to the Editor-in-Chief Mark Chimsky, and more than 300 notables have contributed essays,  including President Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, Garrison Keillor, etc. 

How could I refuse an invitation like that?

I haven’t received my complimentary copy yet, although the book is being published this month, but I thought I’d give “Rolling Crone” readers a sneak preview of the cover and the essay I contributed, which was based on a blog post that I wrote when I turned 70.  That was  two and a half years ago. So here it is. ( Would love to hear from other senior citizens their suggestions for making the most of one's seventies.)

Musing on the Joys of Cronehood

Joan Paulson Gage

When you turn 70, you can’t consider yourself middle-aged any more.  Let’s face it, you’re wicked old. Which doesn’t sound great, but in ancient times the entry into cronehood, the third period of a woman’s life – after Maiden and Mother-- was feted with ceremonies and rituals, because the crones were revered as wise women who could impart their knowledge to the tribe.

I used to think the best time of life was when children are young and future triumphs are still possible.  But now I think that, if you’re a woman and lucky enough to remain in good health, your cronehood is the best era, free of the drama, responsibilities, worries, and the insecurities of youth.

When women turn 50, they’re likely to give their husbands a big cast-of-thousands celebration and ignore their own birthday.  But when they turn 60, many of my friends celebrated themselves with the party or trip they’d always wanted.

At 60 women often channel the creative energy they spent on home, children, and jobs into some long-hidden passion-- designing jewelry, writing a book, gardening, volunteering. They allow themselves to try the things they'd always dreamed of, but never had time to do. A friend of mine went from wife, mother, and chef to law student, then lawyer, then judge, then a state chief justice. After a run-in with cancer, she retired.  Now, she’s enrolled at Tufts University’s Veterinary School so that, at age 70-plus, she can fulfill her childhood dream and become a veterinarian. (And she relaxes with horseback riding and tap dancing!).

I, too, went the “find-your-passion-at-60” route and turned from journalism (although I still do it) to rediscover art, which was my college major.  So, 12 years ago,  I started taking lessons at the Worcester Art Museum, exhibited in some local shows, and even sold some paintings.

As long as I can get around, I intend to travel to places I’ve never been, take lots of photographs and turn them into paintings. Just before turning 70, I spent a night on a beach in Nicaragua, watching sea turtles hatch and head to the sea, following our lanterns. For my birthday, I took a culinary tour in Mexico with chef Susana Trilling, and witnessed the migration of millions of Monarch butterflies at the El Rosario sanctuary—an amazing  experience! 

Since then, these “bucket list” experiences have been crowding in—some by design and others by happy accident.  But the biggest and best came in  2011, when my first grandchild, a golden-eyed girl named Amalía, entered the world. 

Hanging out with her and chasing her around have literally made me feel a decade younger. And no exotic bucket-list experience can compare with seeing the wonder on her face when I show her something for the first time:  patting a horse, throwing stones in a lake, putting the angel on the Christmas tree. I’m rediscovering the beauty in everyday things through her eyes.

To see everything as if for the first time—that’s what she’s teaching me, and that's what this crone would like to pass on to the next generation.

Is Plastic Surgery a Sin? (Re: My Vogue article)

The April issue of Vogue is out with my article on page 112 under the title “A Facelift Revisited”. There is a cover line that reads: “My Three Facelifts A 20-year Nip & Tuck Diary”.

That cover line really gave me a start when I saw it, because I have had two facelifts, not three – one when I was 51 years old —18 years ago -- another ten years later when I was 61. Last year, when I was 68, I had a third procedure that was NOT surgery but Fraxel - fractional laser re-surfacing-- using the new CO2-powered laser called Fraxel Re:pair.

If you want to find out how that worked, and how long the facelifts lasted, and if it hurt (which is the first question everyone asks) you’ll have to buy the magazine.

I’m expecting that this article will lose me some friends and will also label me as the poster child for plastic surgery. As I’ve already remarked to some, I suspect that the words “three face lifts” will appear on my gravestone (although, like I said, I’ve only had TWO.) In my defense, I am not Heidi Montag, a 23-year-old actress who made the cover of People because she decided to have ten surgical procedures in one day to improve what was already an excellent face and body.

Above are the medical photos (sans makeup) taken by Dr. Dan Baker back in 1992, before and after my first face lift. I was 51 and, as I think you’ll agree, looked considerably older than my real age in the “before” picture. The “after” photo looks quite a bit better. My goal in having that face lift was to stave off the jowls which I was certain were my inheritance from my father (while my mother never drooped or sagged or looked less than stunning until she died at age 74.)

Dr. Baker said the face lift would last about ten years and he was right. So I had another one, with a Boston surgeon, a decade later when I was 61. I was less pleased with the results, as I explain in the article. There were scars left on my eyelids and pull marks on the side of my cheek and, as I passed age 65, brown patches appeared on my jaw line. So I was in the market for some solution – although I didn’t want another surgery — when I learned about the new kind of laser and decided to try it and write about it for Vogue – to help off-set the cost, because by age 68, I had a lot less discretionary cash to pay for it than I did at the age of 51.

My New York friends (I lived there for 14 years) are okay with the idea of plastic surgery —many have had some experience with it—but not so my friends in Massachusetts. I belong to a woman’s group that meets in the Worcester area about once a month, and as soon as the rumor came up that I would do this article, about a year and a half ago, my closest friend in the group told me I should not even consider it. “All your sisters are opposed to you doing this, Joan!” she scolded me.

“All of them?” I asked in surprise, because I knew one or two had already opted for plastic surgery.

“Every single one!” my friend whispered, in a voice heavy with warning.

Well, I never considered rejecting the opportunity. I’ve been a journalist for nearly 50 years and have done a lot of strange things in the name of “research”. Also, I had been trying for several years to figure out a way that I could afford a “fix” for my brown patches, fine lines and those deepening parentheses on either side of the mouth.

Furthermore, I feel it’s my face and body, and now that I’m nearly 70, I can do what I want with it.

But that conversation did give me flashbacks to my high school days when my concern for the majority opinion of the other girls would have carried a lot more weight.

In high school, I was not pretty, athletic, nor self-confident. I did get high grades and academic awards. All these factors consigned me to the table in the cafeteria with the oddballs and outsiders, far from the table where the “Gang” held forth.

I’m still not pretty, athletic, etc. but somewhere around the age of 60 I decided I’d earned the right to do what I wanted without listening to the opinions of the “mean girls”. (This is one of the many good things about cronehood. As one former high school classmate remarked at our 50th high school reunion “Just by staying alive you level the playing field.”) Even in college I began to realize that there were places where good grades and talent did not make you a pariah. And life improved a lot.

So I’m not going to justify or explain to my women’s group the Vogue article and the laser re-surfacing procedure. And I do not feel plastic surgery is a sin.

(Although I was convinced, 19 years ago when I went to the hospital in New York for my first face lift that God was going to strike me dead as punishment for my vanity. He didn’t. But in the same hospital, in the years after my surgery, two or three women did die while undergoing elective face lifts. And one of them was Olivia Goldsmith, who wrote “The First Wife’s Club.” I heard that these tragic cases were mostly due to reactions to the general anesthesia. I think that’s better controlled now—and with laser resurfacing, there is no general anesthesia, just topical.)

Anyway, if I wanted to explain my latest round of plastic surgery to the women in my group, (which I won’t -- everyone is too polite to mention it) I would repeat something that I wrote in the Vogue article.

I am not undergoing “maintenance” on my appearance every decade or so with the purpose of looking younger than my real age. I have never lied about my age and everyone who reads Vogue or looks up my profile on Facebook knows that I was born on Feb. 4, 1941. Next year I hit the big seven- oh.

I do it for the same reason I try to exercise on the stationary bike an hour a day and go to Pilates twice a week – although I hate exercise.

As I said at the end of my Vogue piece:

This is an ongoing process, not meant to hide or deny my age, but to let me wear the years gracefully.
“You look good,” [Dr.] Baker told me as we said goodbye. “Fifteen years younger than your age.”
So that means I look….53. Or maybe, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem: In the twenty-first century, this is what 68 looks like.