SALON

Wednesday, Oct 31, 2012 9:00 PM UTC

The horrors of aging

The Halloween-loving novelist, now 50, suddenly finds mortal crises in the holiday's every image

By

Topics: essays, costumes, Williamsburg, Aging, Halloween, Halloween 2012: What's scary?, ,

The horrors of aging (Credit: Frank Jr via Shutterstock)
What is scary? And why, when many of us bear witness to real horror, do we find the macabre and the terrifying so entertaining come Halloween? This Hallow's Eve, we ask our favorite writers to reflect on the meaning of scary. Read the intro.

‘Tis the season of horror and fear, along with sweets and disguises. On Halloween, kids get to assume for one night the outward forms of their innermost dread, and they’re also allowed to take candy from strangers, the scariest thing of all. Grownups, likewise, get to unleash their Ids – women dress as sluts and tarts without fearing judgment, strutting around in push-up bustiers and hanky miniskirts and stilettos, while men, gay and straight alike, can go in drag or let their inner Village People macho man out in a mustache, cowboy hat and tight pleather vest. It’s a communal bacchanal of campy, ritualized spookiness before the onset of winter, when we all retreat to our couches in elastic-waist PJs to hibernate and wait for Mardi Gras.

I haven’t worn a Halloween costume since way back in my 30s, when we hipster chicks all marched in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade dressed in our sluttiest, fishnettiest attire, a cabal of blood-red-lipped medieval serving wenches, Mad Maxine dystopian sci-fi wet dreams, and Morticia-vampiras in satiny black slip dresses with glow-in-the-dark fangs (I plead extra-guilty to the latter). Back then, my chief fear was that I would fail to achieve and do and be all the things I wanted; I frequently lay awake in bed in a wee-hour welter of panic, imagining obscurity, failure, and thwarted ambition.

Now that I’m 50 and respectably settled in New England and markedly happier and more contented than I was in my youth, I modestly hope there’s time to realize some of my youthful goals before I croak, but I’ll take what I can get. Now my middle-of-the-night fears are different ones. And all of a sudden, those fake grey spiderwebs festooning windowpanes aren’t the fun, cool decoration they used to be. Now, they reverberate for me in a bone-chilling way. To put it bluntly: spiderwebs represent decay, which means death, and getting older means getting closer to dying, and therefore spiderwebs = death = me, eventually, and probably before I know it.

Even more than dying itself, I’m scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down. I’m terrified of being decrepit and gaga, weak and feeble and old — and it’s coming for me. BWAhahahaha.

When I was younger, I knew aging happened to other people, but I secretly never believed it would happen to me. I was immortal, my body was indestructible, I was hardly ever sick, my memory was a sharp crisp photograph, my intellect was a keen slicing knife, and I looked hot in a slutty vampire costume.

However, like most people my age, I love being older. I love feeling sane for the first time since I was eleven. I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I’d love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.

Jack O’Lanterns, those severed heads sinisterly grinning on porches and stoops, scare me now, too. They’re weird harbingers of mental decay, with their missing teeth, heads about to rot and dripping with dangling seeds on pulpy fibers, lit by a flickering candle easily blown out by any passing 5-year-old. If my mind goes, the world goes. Jack O’Lanterns remind me with visceral immediacy that I’m riding along in my skull, a wet floppy mass of cells, vulnerable and fragile.

Some day, maybe even tomorrow, those spiderwebs draped in the windows above the Jack O’Lanterns will start threading themselves across my cortex in a thickening blanket, dampening my neurons, muffling my thoughts. The spider will be waiting there, just out of sight.

Kate Christensen is the author of six novels, including "The Great Man," which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner award, and, most recently, "The Astral." She blogs about food at katechristensen.wordpress.com. She lives in Portland, Maine. More Kate Christensen.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 3 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations