What Matters in Old Age: Rereading, Reconsidering and Reassessing“Late-Life Love” is an easier read than “Memoir of a Debulked Woman,” although there are moments when pain sears through. One night Gubar has an “accident” — her excrement-containing ostomy bag, girdled to her stomach, oozes with messy seepage. Cleaning up, she catches sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. There’s “every mark of an old crock: a tall scarecrow with a balding head, no eyebrows or eyelashes, a bump on my chest where a port was embedded, abdominal surgical scars, no pubic hair, a plastic bag hanging from my belly, what little flesh there is hanging downward too. I don’t look like the person I used to be; I am not the person I used to be.”Well, as Bette Davis said, growing old ain't for sissies.There is also, as for life in general, no one-size-fits-all.
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