On Bodies That Age and Break Down

some wisdom from a couple octogenarians (including my dad)

This last Sunday I filled in for my friend Suleika on her Substack,

The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad

; I wrote a short essay about being a very tall girl, the way my father helped me feel proud of my height, and how those things relate to my first tattoo.

It’s gotten me thinking about elderly parents, change, and having an aging body and I wanted to write a follow up but first, if you missed that post Sunday, here’s the bulk of it again:

The Rose Tattoo

I was in high school at the time, and not legally old enough to do most of the things my twenty-year-old boyfriend was introducing me to, but the biker dude at the tattoo shop didn’t ask my age. We were in and out of the dingy little converted bungalow in half an hour, my body forever altered. As was my attitude. The long-stemmed rose newly inked on my right hip set me apart, since not a lot of teenage girls were tattooed in 1986.

Only a few years earlier, I was sitting at a military banquet table with my Air Force officer of a father when a colleague of his offered an observation about me, but to my father: “Major Bolz, your daughter is quite tall.”

“Yes,” my father responded to him, while looking at me. “She’s a bit self-conscious right now. She doesn’t realize yet that she’s just a long-stemmed rose.”

As a girl, my body grew remarkably tall in a remarkably short time. Hems of jeans would rest atop my sneakers one week and hover shamefully above my ankles the next. At the time I did not want to be any more noticeable than was entirely necessary, thank you very much. That’s hard to do when you’re not quite fourteen and towering over grown men. But my father never allowed me to slouch. Rather than a stern command to stand up straight!, his refrain was always an affirming reminder to be proud of my height.

Bodies take up space. They just do. It is an inescapable truth of having these things. They just are in the world, and mine takes up more than most women. There have been times when my body has taken up more space more quickly than I could adjust to with grace or ease. Like those two weeks in middle school when I hit my head on the top of the school bus every morning before I could remember how tall I really was. And the time I was eight months pregnant, had short hair, and was wearing a flannel (it was the 90s after all), and the clam chowder sample lady at Costco asked me and my then-husband, “You fellas want to try some soup?”

At times, being tall is not exactly convenient—like on airplanes, or when every dress (no matter the style) has an “empire” waist on me. But anyone who knows me will tell you that I love being tall. Love it. For one, I am very helpful for reaching things on the top shelf. Also, I tend to not be patronized at the same rate as other woman, and for this I give thanks.

The space my body takes up is just the space my body takes up. And she has given me so much: beauty and ambulation and hard work and protection and babies and pleasure. I refuse to apologize for her. In part, I have my father to thank for that. Perhaps had Major Bolz known that the image he used to affirm me would become the image I etched into me, he would have chosen differently, but perhaps not. My father has always seemed simultaneously befuddled and delighted by me. As I’ve gotten older his befuddlement has felt less important than his delight.

Getting Schooled by the Old Man

My siblings and I trying to pull our dad down into the soft sand of a Maryland beach in 1974

A couple weeks ago my father spent six days in the hospital, his body weakened by two progressive diseases - one pulmonary and the other neuromuscular. In tandem they have systematically stripped him of muscle and breath. We who love him have watched as, over time, he has needed to make use of a cane, then a walker and now for the past many years, a motorized wheelchair.

Though 26 years his younger, I too am aging. My feet ache when they first meet the morning ground, my hair is more salt than it is pepper, and everything is just sort of softer than it once was. A few years ago, I thought I had a hand injury. The heel of my left hand just under my thumb hurt everytime I did yoga and when it didn’t improve on its own, I finally went to the doctor, thinking I had sprained it.

“Ms. Bolz-Weber, you have osteoarthritis of the basal thumb joint”, I was unceremoniously informed.

To which I responded “Are you sure there hasn’t been some kind of clerical error …because I’m pretty sure I’m 35.”

“Sorry ma’am, but you’re 53.”

All those crazy arm balances I used to do in yoga? Done. I can no longer hold a plank, something that just a few years ago was no problem for me.

Let’s just say I am not as accepting of this as I could be but more than I was even a year ago. It really helps having people around me who are showing me how.

Like a few weeks ago when I spent a day with my dad in his hospital room and was SCHOOLED.

Those who have experienced it can tell you that watching a parent’s body deteriorate is not easy. But my father is once again my guide, even in this.