Growing older and older is her dream

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 22, 2000

Being suddenly presented with the possibility of your death works a brutal kind of magic.

All the petty details of your life are swept aside. What matters is one small point of light ahead of you. You cannot take your eyes from it.

So it must be for Candy Conklin, a librarian from Brandon.

Last Sunday, I wrote about giving a speech to a group of retired women in north Pinellas. I admitted to them I didn't often write about the elderly, the mainstay of Tampa Bay's population, because I was afraid of getting old.

Candy wrote me a sparely worded letter after reading the column.

She had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She underwent a hysterectomy. She faces six months of chemo.

She is 55.

"Right now, I'd give anything to be facing the certainty of getting old," she wrote. "Getting old isn't pleasant, granted, but I'd like to know I stand a chance of getting there."

Later, when we met at her home, Candy apologized for upsetting the apple cart of my thinking.

Not necessary, I said. I needed to be reminded that there are worse things in life than growing old.

The wooden chairs with the Windsor backs in her kitchen are the only ones she is comfortable in since the surgery. So we sat in the kitchen and talked about what her imagined picture of old age had been -- until now.

She used to vow she'd be cranky and impossible to please, like some of the old people she served when she ran the talking books section of a Manatee County branch library.

She certainly wouldn't be chipper. "All the chipper people got on my nerves, because some days I didn't feel chipper and cheerful."

But there was this other woman she'd met at the library, neither cranky nor chipper, but with her arms wrapped firmly around life. She was 77 when she volunteered as a guardian ad litem in the courts, to represent the rights of abused children.

"That's what I wanted to grow up to be, active, and willing to do the hard stuff."

Candy now has her own, highly individualized package of hard stuff.

"All I want is that you tell me the honest to God truth," she'd told her doctor.

She had the most aggressive form of ovarian cancer. But it had been caught very early, the doctor said.

"He's not making any promises, which I like. He can't promise me it's all gone."

Living five years is how the statisticians usually measure a good outcome when the diagnosis is cancer. Candy's doctor has given her a 75 percent chance of getting that far.

So maybe she'll make it to 60.

She got wistful, stared down at the ashtray for the few cigarettes she still smokes to ease her nerves.

"Another five would be nice."

So she is looking at maybe 65.

Still shy of the usual allotted three score and ten.

She flitted back and forth between a dignified fright and an impressive display of backbone.

First the backbone:

"Please don't make it "poor Candy,' " she ordered me.

Then the fear.

"I was always the fat kid," she said, so she never worried about her looks fading as she aged. Now her appearance is a fixation. "You mean, I'm going to lose my eyebrows, even my eyelashes?"

She can't bring herself to write a living will and formally name her husband, Ed, her health care surrogate, so he would decide what to do if the doctors ran out of things to help her.

"Is that denial?" Candy asked.

Then she made a small request, out loud to herself, of a sort I'd never heard.

"Please let me get old," she half whispered. "Please."

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