We were sipping espresso at a Paris café when my young cousin blurted: “I’m 59. In a few months I’ll be 60. What’s it like to be —?” She choked on old. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.

Of course she is. Fear is what we mostly hear about aging. Fear of abandonment, pain, loneliness. It’s fear exacerbated by a 48.4 billion-dollar beauty business, hawking 18-year-old airbrushed skin. I am 88. I’m old. I’m told I’m old. I don’t feel old. I feel about 60, and I find this one of the most fascinating and interesting periods of my life. Who could imagine, studying the muted grey and dark hues of Whistler’s mother, seated in her rocker, that inside she is emblazoned with color, that inside she is a bell ringing: Joy! Joy!

True, I am privileged. I’m not a migrant fleeing war and climate disaster. I’m not a Black woman dying of an abscessed tooth in Mississippi (with the worst health care in the world, on a par with Mali, in Africa!), because she cannot afford a dentist or the transportation to reach one if she could. But I am not alone in finding this period fascinating. One Brookings Institute study by Carol Graham and Milena Nikolova find happiness increases with age Their chart shows a huge smile, beginning in childhood, dropping to the difficult ages 40 to 50, then rising steadily, right up to 98.

This is a time of stillness, of going inward, a time of remembering and reliving my life with a deeper awareness and with such compassion as I would not have imagined I could have felt for either my younger self or for those who shared my journey. Sometimes, waking in the night, I twist in anguish at memories and regrets—often concerning my relationship with my mother, or with my father after his stroke, or with a lover of long ago. But as I re-enact them, the stories shift, revealing undercurrents of understanding. I find myself washed by waves of loving-kindness. I’m now older than any of them. I see the stories differently. Sometimes I lie awake overcome by the gallantry of merely being human, and by the goodness underlying our bumbling, stuttering mistakes. At the same time I have become more radical with age, intolerant of ignorance and lies, the product of greed.

What is interesting is that, looking back, I feel that everything makes sense. I can’t tell you how, but all those baroque byways, blocks and detours that interrupted my determined march toward my goals led to unexpected surprises, often to other success. More importantly, they led me to be me. In my old age, I have become me, and, curiously, I’m who I was at five, or nine. Pure.

What I want to say to you is how rich is this period of being old, how replete with gratitude and love. Much of my happiness arises from the intensity of my awareness of death. Never again will I see that leaf shiver in the wind, this squirrel swarming up the tree, that woman opening her car door. Each moment holds a teardrop of eternity, temporary, and even—do you understand me?— perfect. I, too, am temporary, one ear cocked for the doorbell, announcing death. I think it is this awareness which creates my deep, ringing happiness, this hurry to look and love even more.

Love in old age is not the emotion of earlier years, sparkling on the surface of the sea, attaching possessively to one person or object and skipping happily to another. It is rather the silence of dark and profound ocean depths. It emanates outward, pouring prodigally onto . . . everything. The German poet Rilke, wrote,

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”

In old age, I am learning love. I’m learning how to love. Such happiness.

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