THE PRIVILEGE OF AGING

Along with the physical decline of old age comes self-understanding, a reordering of priorities, and gratitude for the small pleasures of life, argues this luminous meditation.

Kapur, a 77-year-old Indian-American playwright and poet, mordantly catalogues the difficulties of age, such as an initial sense of uselessness after retirement, lack of energy, aches and pains, and the increasing awareness of death as she and her husband, Payson Stevens, struggle with cancer. Yet she finds consolations, like a new capacity to adapt and pace her energies, a shedding of obsessions with appearance, the blessings of “Mother cannabis, the green goddess [she] eat[s],” who “whisks away [her] depression and malaise,” and an ability to live contentedly in the moment while doing nothing in particular. Kapur’s autobiographical recollections explore themes of love and loss—they include grief-stricken homages to her deceased parents and dying sister, and a harrowing account of the suicide of her previous husband, Donald Powell, who, in the throes of depression, shot himself after a marital squabble. The book is also replete with scenes from her complicated relationship with Payson, some testy (“I lost it and called him an asshole, twice, even though the first time he went ballistic when I used the word”) and others affectionate (“I lean on him in my feebleness and he is present most of the time, regales me with the piano when he is in the mood, heats water in the kettle and fills my hot water bottles”). Kapur’s writing is clear-eyed, evocative, and wryly humorous in its kvetching portrait of advanced age, of “feeling tired, depressed, old, my stomach distended with trapped, ballooning gas like a dirigible, my right knee creaking, a heavy-duty brace on my left wrist from severe tenosynovitis”; but she also offers lyrical paeans to what remains: “I move my finger on the keyboard and am grateful I can move my finger; I see and feel the rays of the sun hitting my face and give thanks.” Readers will find much hard-won wisdom here.

A moving celebration of life before death, balanced between plangent reflection and exuberant affirmation.