Tide In, Tide Out: Anne Lamott on Growing Old and Making Peace with Death

The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and when you are older, around the time when you stop feeling like you’ve crawled into somebody else’s shell, old friends begin to die with appalling regularity. If life made sense, they would all be older when they went. How did they get old enough to die?

My father’s death feels like it was twenty years ago but it was more than forty-five. It races, like scrolling through microfiche, zzzzzip, and nothing anyone says can make this less awful. Well, maybe one thing: Kitty Carlisle’s mother said the good thing about being older is that every fifteen minutes, it’s time for breakfast again. Karen has tea, an OxyContin, and orange Jell-O for breakfast now.

She is so sick and sad that it can be hard to be with her, but until I got COVID recently, I showed up and listened. Most of the time that is all we have to offer, and it is enough. Come to think of it, it was also hard in its own way to be with her many times over the years because she can be a curmudgeon and contrarian.

Plus, horribly for me, her three grown kids, who are all pretty amazing, were also extreme achievers, which my son Sam was not. All those years until 2012 when my son got clean and sober, she and I would be on a trail at Deer Park and she’d tell me all about the grad schools her kids had graduated from or just been admitted to, and then ask what Sam was up to.

“Ah, well, still living in the Tenderloin,” I’d say, a young father, scaring us all to death. But he was alive—I was one of the lucky ones, and I knew that, and this gave me a shaky hope. But I lived in the minus tide of long-term fear, where most of life’s safety and predictability seemed to have been sucked away to unknown places. All I had throughout were my friends and faith that the tide would come in again.

The worst phase was one year when Karen’s son was in medical school, and she rejoiced in recounting the details of his summer job as a runway model in Milan. She’d asked what Sam had been up to. He was at his lowest point—we both were—but he did have a decent job and a wonderful girlfriend and so I ran with that. Then when grace beckoned to Sam and lured him back and into the company of some sober guys in San Francisco, I got to tell her the minutiae of our miracle, and she cried with relief for me and we got to be two proud braggy mothers.

It is so hard for Karen to stay alive right now, and we both know she is about to die, but when I pay attention, I see that this takes a back seat to her being alive, stroking the luxurious fur of her cat, sipping her tea with a best friend, watching videos of her grandchildren. And her face brightens when she sees me; her light is still on in there, like a nightstand lamp between those dark, dangerous lungs.

Sometimes when I sit with her on her bed, memories float up to her of our earliest adventures that I’ve forgotten. Doing the Banana Dance twenty-five years ago to accompany our folk singer friend at a bookstore whose carpet was tiled in young children, singing along to the song of the same name. Scantily dressed, we were a couple of foxes shimmying. Oh, did we peel.

And another memory: When I helped out at the dance classes she held for developmentally disabled adults every Tuesday for years, one young man told her later: “I liked that girl. She was a helper, and she danced.” This will be in the swag bag of general instructions I leave behind for my grandson when I’m gone. Be a helper, and dance.

The small walk-in closet in Karen’s hilariously tiny apartment is stuffed with clothes and shoes, heavy on Doc Martens. Recently while instructed to move things around in the hopes of locating a clean tube for her emergency oxygen machine, I found two heavy winter coats. I said, “Do you want to give one away?” She doesn’t: It’s been freezing and she doesn’t know which one she’ll be in the mood for the next time she goes in for treatment, the dark gray one or the navy blue. I love that so much.

It now takes friends an hour to help her get awake, dressed, and down a flight of stairs, and the whole time she’s in pain and gasps for breath.

The other day when I talked to Tom about how some days everything sucks, his roommate, another Jesuit, was listening on speakerphone and called out, “Yes, Jesus was full of compassion for those suffering, but also says to look for hope one day at a time, to see that if the lilies of the field and the sparrows were cared for, how much more would we be?”

“That’s very nice, Jim. It would be easy if you were a bird or plant,” I countered.

“You have a choice,” he said. “What are you going to focus on, Annie?” he asked. “All the things that suck, or sparrows and lilies?”

I thought this over. “Can I get back to you on that?” As I’ve said before, I have a PhD in morbid reflection, and in a strange way it centers me.

Karen loves to look through photos in her albums and on her laptop. The last time we were together, she showed me photographs of the last extreme minus tide. Looking at the pictures, you can’t help but wonder where all that water goes. It looks as if it has all been sucked up in a great inhalation by a sea monster; what if she gets sick of the routine and expels it all at once, causing a tsunami, burying this gorgeous tidal creation and darling me? Will these tide pools disappear forever someday as the sea levels rise? Luckily, I suppose, we’ll be gone, but our grandchildren won’t and this shakes me to my core.

I scare myself with recreational morbidity by wondering when will my last day come, and if I will be very afraid. But these are the wrong questions to ponder. Watching Karen, the question is how do you notice your own life force now?

She has a photo of herself with a walking stick on the reef at the last minus tide. She’s smiling. She was always beautiful and loved that about herself—she’d been a model as a young woman—and now she looks rather like some sherpa’s favorite grandmother in her wool cap and layers of warmth. What brought her here to this point? Well, what brought any of us here with her? An unimaginably complex and infinite number of intergenerational variables that made her specifically herself.

The theologian Frederick Buechner wrote: “The grace of God means something like: ‘Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.'” Being at all, living, is a miracle, and—note to self— attention must be paid.

Karen started planning a party on the beach a couple of weeks ago. She called it her last hurrah, a wake to be held while she was alive, with a few of us in the sand with torches, barbecue, singing, she in a wheelchair that can travel in sand. But then the rains came and the party has been postponed. I’d give almost anything to sit with her in the sand one more time.

I have been with many people who were dying, and what is revealed besides the worry is all that they loved, both what they will miss and what still fills and feeds them. Karen in bed with her cat and us, photos of her family; my father happy as a child that last morning on the beach, wet pants and all. Those ornate ordinary times, the grip of a hand as you walk up the trail to the car, laughing in spite of it all, vanilla pudding.

I show up, and Karen and I look at things together. Sometimes we make each other laugh. Her imagination is intact, as are her flights of fancy and her glorious plans for revenge. I make her tea with sugar.

When I last saw her, she told me a story about how once when she and her son were about to head back to the car from the tide pools, they saw a coyote come trotting out of the chaparral and run down to the beach, frolicking in the water, running in and out of the foam at the shore, the way you would if you were a dog, or a kid, as my brothers and I did when we were small, as some children will almost certainly do later today when the tide is in.

Talk about the joy of living. Talk about life making sense.

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Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott is available via Riverhead.