(With thanks to Bethany Dumas)

You think after all these years, I would have forgotten her way of saying it: "I can't be BOTHered," with a sort of rhythmic opening-out pause on the first syllable of the last word and an angry titter at the end. It was her way of giving up a particular activity: I can't be BOTHered to play bridge; I can't be BOTHered to go to church; I can't be BOTHered to go on driving. She was, at the time, in her early 80s, and she was slowly losing a whole series of bitter skirmishes with age.

It's in the nature of aging to do two things: to bring us up against our limitations; and to bring out the grain of our being--to peel off the veneer, if there is one, and show what's underneath, raw spruce or mahogany. People of her age and in her position find themselves having to do some painful giving up, and the process reveals what they've made of their souls in the course of their lives.

It can be a matter of many small deaths before the final big death of Dying. It's a struggle, a real loss, a terrible pain, to have to give over your driver's license if you've driven for 60 years. It's a struggle, a real loss, a terrible pain, to have to leave home and go into long-term care. It's hell on a person's pride and independence to have to face growing physical and/or mental limitations. No doubt about that.

There's giving up and giving up. It's one of those things like sex or nuclear power: what matters isn't so much the thing in itself, as the spirit in which it's accomplished and the ends to which it is put. You can take a neutral something--a word, a concept, an action--and, through the intention of your own will, make it a negative or positive thing. You can take a positive thing and give it the most negative possible twist. (Who was it spoke of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?) Or you can persist in making lemonade out of the lemons life hands you. Your choice.

I can imagine someone in her position saying "I can't be BOTHered" as a way of lightly letting go what had to be given up, of handing over with grace. You might have to get there by the road of struggle and grieving, anger and depression, but you could still come to that point of handing over whatever-it-is with real acceptance--even seeing the small death as a way into a new life. I remember another elderly woman facing her own painful limitations, but facing them with humour and patience and acceptance, and thinking "I hope I can do this when my time comes." I think of the people who have taken on celibacy, not as the negation of sexuality, nor as sexual repression, but as a wholly positive thing, a free choice, a gift, not a deprivation. There is relinquishing a thing and abandoning a thing; the action's apparently the same, but oh, the difference in meaning!

Under its apparent lightness, her way of saying "I can't be BOTHered" was full of anger. She wasn't setting things down; she was throwing them to the floor in a tantrum. If she couldn't have things her way, she wouldn't have them at all. If her focus on bridge wasn't as sharp as it had been, she was damned if she'd pick up a hand, even if that meant giving up a large part of her social life. In her pride and anger and her refusal to grow and change, she made choice after choice that steadily narrowed her life down, each abandonment leaving her more embittered, more rigidly defensive, more paranoid, more mired in the misery of her wilfulness. It was a terrible process to watch.

But she'd set her course long before, in a whole series of small, apparently inconsequential choices over the course of her life. We all do this: it's in the small stuff, in ordinary daily choices, that we shape our souls, little by little, in this way or that. We can chose, for example, to meet life defensively or openly, with judgement or with acceptance, trustingly or with angry suspicion. I can insist on others' giving me my own way or I can learn to keep our own quite formidable will on a fairly short leash. I can work at exercising my patience, or I can choose to snarl when something gets up my nose. None of these is a single Big Fat Decision; they are all microchoices made day in, day out, in how we deal with our own lives and the other people in them. There are a gazillion tiny choices a person can make between nursery school and the grave, and they shape and flavour the soul.

We make these choices both freely and non-freely: there are currents and patterns in our lives that tend to push us in given directions --issues of temperment and experience. And I can't judge someone whose patterns I know nothing about, or whose life is truly ruled by forces outside anyone's control--someone with schizophrenia, for example.

But ultimately, if we're in anything like normal health and circumstances, we do get to choose our approach: eu or dys, health or non-health, real God or one of the competitors. This woman's life got off to a terrible start, and no doubt that had much to do with where she fetched up. But she also had the choice to face her dragons, or to pretend that they weren't there, and she chose the latter. That's the one choice no one can take away from me: to look at myself with whatever clarity I can muster, and to ask for God's help in clearing up the mess.

It's in the dailiness of things that I will make my soul whatever-it-is that I take into old age, assuming I get there. It won't be a matter of huge heroic choices: it will have to do with very small and ordinary decisions. What matters most, however, is the spirit that underlies each decision, and the conscious willingness to turn that spirit Godwards.