Fearlessly Facing Aging: Poems by Grace Paley
By Nancy Snyder | On May 1, 2021 | Updated July 13, 2022 | Comments (2)

A poet has the ability to bring to the light our most inexpressible fears and doubts. When the subject is aging – the subject most of us try to avoid – it is the poets we turn to find the comfort and the clarity we need. Grace Paley is one of the poets who can instruct the heart and mind on living with death, as evidenced by this selection of her poems on aging.
For the last ten years of her life, Grace wrote poetry on the complexities of living with death as we grow older. “Nature takes its course,” is how we have been instructed to perceive our passing, but what about our other contradictory emotions and realities.
What about our spouse — who will die first and how will the other carry on with daily life. What about our extreme grieving — for a sister or friend — and Grace’s manner of coping seems to be the wisest one: having intimate conversations with her sister — who had died before her — on how to cope with that day’s challenges.
Then there is the misplaced grievance regarding our good steps to prolong our lives, only to be disappointed later on: nature does take its course and how we accept that is up to us.
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More about Grace Paley
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Grace Paley was born in the Bronx in 1922 and died in 2007 of breast cancer. She’s best known for her incomparable and experimental short stories.
The stories from Paley’s short story collections, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, The Little Disturbances of Man, and Later the Same Day, were published in one volume, Collected Stories, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Paley was also a renowned essayist and poet. Fidelity, her final collection of poems, was published in 2008, a year after her death in Vermont. The six poems collected here are presented with their first few lines, linking to the poem in full. They will offer the reader comfort and joy as we contemplate the final mystery of all, death and dying.
Further reading about Grace Paley as a poet
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Fear
I am afraid of nature
because of nature I am mortal
my children and my grandchildren
are also mortal
I lived in the city for forty years
in this way I escaped fear
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Sisters
My friends are dying
well we’re old it’s natural
one day we passed the experience of “older”
which began in late middle age
and came suddenly upon “old” then
all the little killing bugs are
baby tumors that had struggled
for year’s against the body’s
brave immunities found their
level playing fields and
victory
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Windows
this eighty-year-old body is
a fairly old body what’s it
doing around the house these days
checking the laundry brooms
still work what’s for dinner
there are the windows look oh
beyond the river Smarts Mountain
with the sun’s help is recomposing all
its little hills never saw it that way
before windows the afternoon story …
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Even
Even at pain’s deafening intrusion
my friend could not forget the pleasant
blasphemous jokes of our daily conver-
nations she said grace don’t take me out
of the telephone book of your heart and I
have not there she is under S for Syb and
Claiborne still under C
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My Sister and My Grandson
I have been talking to my sister she
may not know she’s been dust and ashes
for the last two years I talk to her
nearly every day
I’ve been telling her about our new baby
who is serious comical busy dark my
sister out of all the rubble and grit
that is now her my sister mutters what
about our baby he was smart loving
so beautiful …
Full text of “My Sister and My Grandson”
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One day
One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other
that has been
talked about but
lightly turning
away shyness this business of con-
fronting the
preference for survival …
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Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.
I am Grace. She is me…..kindred spirits. But I still inhabit my space on Earth . I have for 90 years. How much longer? Who knows?
Thank you for your comment, Shirley … may you have many more years! Also this proves why poetry is such a comfort to so many.