I am old. I am a woman. What, I ask myself, does that mean?

There is no hiding from the truth of the numbers. They stack relentlessly. There is no denying the testimony of the body. It fails over time with degrading regularity. Moving through my seventh decade I have entered the beginning of the end. I am old. I am a woman. What, I ask myself, does that mean?

I had fallen for the myth that getting old was one dimensional, a seemingly blank landscape limited to arid vistas located somewhere between pathos and parody. Let’s face it. We, the elderly, are seen as jokes, overlooked, bypassed, our less-than-shapely forms proof of life’s greatest fear. People glance at our crenellated necks and spotted hands and think, if they think of us at all, as faded beings, passively waiting for the last bus to arrive, opening its doors with the exhale of a sigh. But here is the surprise. Inside that less-than-juicy body resides a fecund mind and a fluttering heart, not in need of defibrillation, but beating with the powerful rhythms of life, even as death looms closer.

To my joy, I have discovered that in my 70s, from their start to their finish, every day is as vibrant, painful, joyous and, yes, sometimes as tedious as it was as a teen, a young woman, a mother, and an empty nester. This I didn’t anticipate. I thought, whenever I could face my fear, that 70 was exclusively defined by what had diminished, by what was less, by what I had and would lose. But I am, as I have been all my life, at the vanguard of the Baby Boomer generation, that fatted pig in the python of time.

The sheer size of my cohort and our strategic spot in history has meant we have rewritten the book for every chapter of our collective being, including that of being women. Old stories no longer held. We burst into our own in the ‘60s; hair, strictures, sexuality and selves flying free, basking in the glorious gift of birth control. When it did become time to birth our babies, we grabbed the handbook from the medicinal world and pulled it back to our bodies, ourselves. At work we stepped out of our aprons and into the overalls of the trades and the pantsuits of corporations. Children grown, we dragged menopause out of the closet and into the light of day.

Now we have a new frontier, ‘old’, a word laden with derision. And like women of every age who have learned to objectify ourselves, we, the old of all genders, have learned to disparage our value. But it need not be so. My generation is once again defining ourselves, facing the questions that have not altered over time, including the end of time, but in our own vernacular.

Through a combination of great good luck as well as some plucky perseverance and, of course, my place in time and history, I have the gift of longevity and health, a clear mind and an adequate wallet.

Facing our impending end takes great fortitude, especially confusing as we commit to the life force of the present. As a septuagenarian, I entered 70 more attached to my past. Moving through the decade I am pulled more to the future, one that brings me closer to death but still vibrantly committed to negotiating life. I am alive until I’m not, with the not, a dynamic part of the fit. And that, blessed be me, is the story I have come to tell, one voice from my generation, howling with fear and joy into the wind.