100, with grace and style

On Wednesday my mother clocked up 100 years of life.

It’s not something she ever considered achieving, not an ambition in any way, and so she’s a little incredulous when I remind her that she is the oldest person ever in her maternal and paternal line.

But she should not be hugely surprised, when all her female elders lived into their eighties and nineties and the very oldest bowed out not long before her 100th. Her two sisters are both in their late 90s and none of the three has a non-communicable health condition. Her brother made it to his eighties.

In truth, my mother may be 100 and have shrunk in height from her perfectly proportioned four foot eight to four foot six, but she is as she was all along – formidable.

I always joked with her that the Almighty knew what he was doing when he packed her into that tiny frame. She really is ten feet tall. As a child I feared her fierceness, but we were well bonded after sharing my near-death birthing, me coming in at ten pounds, and from the age of about 11 I feared her less and began to fall in love with her strength in the face of great adversity, her brave heart, sharp intelligence, integrity, tenacity, generosity, sense of justice, fair play and her liberal views that allowed others to live their lives, although she stuck to her own considered opinions and modus operandi.

By my twenties, we were good friends, enjoying many holidays together.

We decided to retire back in Trinidad from different parts of the world. Her retirement (mine never really happened) has been some of the happiest years of both our lives. We did everything together, provided she was keen.

Living alongside my mother is a great privilege. It has been an enlightening experience to witness the human cycle of life into the twilight years, to see how someone who grasped life and lived it as fully as she could, came to accept retirement with such ease, slipping from being at the top of her profession into days with no agenda. Except, of course, days were never lazy.

The effortless transition from super-busy to healthily busy was encouraging to notice. Then came, at 91, the very difficult giving-up of her independence. when she stopped driving and travelling abroad on her own for summer sojourns to visit relatives abroad.

She would not allow me to sell her car, and could only rationalise the situation by allowing her much younger best friend to purchase it as a favour. Therefore, there was no loss, but an exercise of control.

Also aged 91, she learned to use an iPad with little difficulty after I translated the flat screen into a 3-D office, with icons representing a phone, a stamp, an in-tray, a postbox etc. It was the only way we could communicate while I was away in China for several weeks.

That’s when I observed that her extraordinary professional skills had become redundant. Someone of her age would recognise nothing in a modern workspace or understand its new ethos. Their experience would have no value. I do not know how she ended up with a Facebook account, but she objected to its invasiveness and overweening familiarity. But I got regular e-mails and Skype calls from her as I traveled, which she managed mostly on her own.

In her 80s, feeling fit as if in her 50s or 60s and actually becoming more beautiful as life’s trials waned, she complained about being a “has-been.” Experience, my mother insisted, is worth diamonds.

She was referring to the way in which society excludes the old, assuming them unable to contribute, participate or enjoy new experiences, as if they had never been young, never loved, yearned, erred or excelled. Our notion of the old is skewered by the over-valuing of the physical power of the young, but as the French proverb says, “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait,” meaning, “If the young knew, if the old could,” or rather, that youth is wasted on the young.

My mother never speaks of death; instead, she strives to command what she can of her reducing world. Her biggest challenge is maintaining her dignity among people who really do not know how to treat the old, even those supposedly trained to do so. People assume she cannot hear, and raise their voices and speak about her as if she were not present. It disturbs her.

They also assume frailties she does not have. Her short-term memory is diminishing and confusion is setting in but that has not touched her highly developed sense of self and her survival instincts. She gauges how she can command respect while having to surrender herself to indignities related to her personal care. She picks her moments to stand on her dignity, to decide not to co-operate, when to charm, dissemble, play coquette, overrule, insist, threaten.

On Wednesday, she rose beautifully to the occasion of a long international family Zoom celebration and a small physical gathering, attended by a special guest. She knows she is the matriarch, and plays the role with great grace and unswerving elegance. We are all in awe of her and what she has taught us.

The messages, phone calls and social media plaudits from people of all ages and continents for a remarkable human being, who I am fortunate to have as my begetter, are still rolling in, and all our vases and tables are full of splendid blooms. Long may they last.