Happier at 85

According to a recent NYT article, people get happier as they age. The "sad o meter" rises up until we turn 50 and then starts to decline as we age.

If this is true (and surely there are old people we know who need more love, attention, food), I think I know why.

By 50, every plan you have made since the age of ten has either failed or turned out unimaginably different than you had expected. So, you give up on making plans and instead watch as your life unfolds in all those remarkably surprising and unintended ways.

You have eaten enough mottled and bruised peaches to delight in the perfectly ripe one that melts in your mouth and sends streams of juice down your chin.

You get more excited from the delicacy of the blooming orchid than you ever did from your first husband H (sorry H) and the birds singing, oh, more soothing than any drug.

You have given up on all attempts to look smoother, trimmer, fitter, shinier, sexier, and robust and take great pleasure from the rolls of flesh that hang unembarrassed from limbs that still move with a stubborn grace and harmony. Fed by spoon from the aids in the nursing home you feel the purest gratitude.

You have lost so much already, a son to suicide, a father to alcohol, a friend to depression, that letting go of your last breath doesn't seem so hard.