A few years ago, when I was 82, I fell madly, wildly in love with a man, a younger man —22 years younger to be exact— and I might mention it was also to my shame, because there is something unseemly about an old woman falling for a beautiful younger man, even if he is in his 60s. We hear about men of 66 falling for 25-year-olds and believing they are loved in return. But I think that’s the difference between men and women: they actually believe they’re still sexy.

But we women absorb agism in our cells, and our cultural horror of “old.” We believe the mirror. We are crones, hags, witches, baba yagas, and millennia of DNA memory reminds us that not so long ago an aged widow, without the protection of her brother or father, was burnt at the stake, or had a millstone dropped on her, or was drowned. (Surviving proved she was a witch, to be destroyed again.) I, too, am a product of my cultural conditioning. I could tell tales about my battles with the mirror.

Nonetheless, I was in love.

For more than two years, we had the kind of restless love affair that made life as fascinating as if I were a teenager, and as uncertain: did he love me? (A daisy will tell.) When you are in love, everything feels new and beautiful. You rise up on emotional tiptoe, and it doesn’t matter whether you are 18 or 81. You Love! Your soul is singing. I woke up each day in anticipation of what might happen next. I felt alive.

At the same time, I was ashamed. How could he love me at my age?

As for our love affair, we broke up after two years, right on schedule, and I spent most of the next year in tears, my heart aching with grief, though, surely, I was as much at fault for our breakup as this man I loved. I’m ok now, but I sometimes feel the let-down, an absence of that flood of dopamine and oxytocin in my brain. Yet I had his love, and thinking of him makes me happy.

Recently, we met by accident on the street, and my heart flew up toward him with joy, taking pleasure in his beauty and grace. Our eyes met. In that moment, I knew he loves me still. No question that I am loved. We spoke a few words, touched fingers, parted, and for a full day I have found myself daydreaming and longing. Could we get back together? Would it “work” this time? But the longing means only that I love. I choose the loss that means I love.

Loss colors all our lives. As soon as we discover something of value, we’re afraid of losing it. Yet life is nothing but loss, change: beginning with the loss of warm darkness at birth into an explosion in light and noise, the loss of childhood, loss of friends and much-loved animals, the loss of investments, of homes with their creaking floorboards and cribs and cozy nooks, loss of jobs and marriages, loss of dreams, and always hanging over us the loss of self that will be produced by death. Which is to say the extinction of the whole world when we blink out. Even this body that I rent is temporary. I live in it like a suitcase, which gets so beat up over the decades that eventually it’s uninhabitable, and then I’ll pull myself out like a white shirt waving in the breeze, and I’ll move on. (I’m told I can always rent another, if I like. We’ll see.)

I never fell in love until I was in my 20s, and that was with the man I married. I never had a teenage crush. But as I’ve traveled through the years, I find that love—and I mean erotic and passionate love—has hit with increasing frequency. The older I am, the more I love.

I remember hearing about one gentleman of 96 who fell in love with a 91-year-old woman in the same nursing home, and she with him. Then the woman’s daughter moved her mother to live closer to her in New Jersey, and it didn’t matter that the mother was in love. She was snatched away, kidnapped without power to protest. It’s a cliché to say it broke his heart. He stormed in grief, convinced she had left him for another man.

So what do I have to say about love in later years? I grow silent before its majesty. Love springs up constantly at every age, like desert grass in rain. It attacks you suddenly, unexpectedly, the arrows of Eros, and it delivers always a heart-lifting surge of joy and creativity, the inexorable, desperate, painful uncertainty, the longing, helplessness, tears, torture, and release.

I remember when I was only in my 50s asking my dear friend Dorothy Clarke, then well into her 90s, whether she still felt sexual desire.

“Oh yes,” she answered. “The other night I had such a beautiful dream. . . . ” Her eyes glowed, her face shining. “I think it’s there until you die.” The great life-force energy, the sign and symbol of being alive.

When I was in my 40s and 50s, I was surprised by how erotic and passionate I had become. Freed of the fear of pregnancy, I found that sensuality blossomed and bloomed in ways I could not have imagined earlier—certainly not in my 20s, when I still thought that anyone over 50 was plodding gravely toward the grave. Even my 70s were times of sensual passion—and satisfaction, I might add. On the other hand, it’s death that makes this last period of life so precious. My friend, Sue, and her husband fought for decades like cats tied in a sack together—until Sam got cancer. He was given three to six months to live. He lived another six years, and in that time, they fell in love all over again. It was beautiful. But what felt different to them? Nothing but the sudden realization, principally on Sue’s part, that life is fragile, transient, impermanent. She fell head over heels in love with her husband all over again—and what a waste those years of bickering were.

Now at 88, I don’t have a partner, and I want no more passion, no more “barely controlled emotions,” thank you. But I can’t stop loving, looking, lapping life hungrily up. There is a difference, though, with love in your later years. My love is no longer the youthful sparkling light shining on the surface of the ocean waves. It is the dark and profound silence of the Pacific deeps…very quiet, very dark, very hidden, very true.

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