“Teacher, what is this?”

One of my English as a Second Language students was pointing to a phrase on a worksheet I’d just handed out. Answering machine. I thought for a moment, deciding to try and explain it using words she might already know in English, with hand gestures to help me along.

“When I was little, we didn’t have cell phones. We had one phone in our house. If someone called and no one was home, a machine would answer the phone and they could leave a message. An answering machine is like voicemail on a machine.”

She nodded in understanding. Then, she mimed dialing a phone number on a rotary phone, which fell out of favor in the 1960s, twenty five years before I was even a glimmer in my parents’ eye. Rude, I thought, wondering if she’d forgotten that I was only seven years older than her.

She laughed at me as I marched over to my desk to grab the small leather sandal someone gave me as a ‘chancla’ to playfully smack my students when they pronounce the word ‘suit’ as ‘sweet’ for the hundredth time or insinuate that I was born before cars were invented.

That story stands out to me because I don’t often feel old. Well, not too often. Recently, I was at dinner with my classmates from an art class and one of them used the word ‘cunty’ as a positive adjective. I choked on my chicken alfredo while the four of them looked at me in alarm.

“CUNTY? That’s a good word now?” I asked, incredulous.

“Oh, yes,” they assured me, while I shook my head and thought What will those crazy kids think up next?

Which is something a grandmother might think.

But, I digress.

Today is my 40th birthday.

Several people have schlumped up to me and patted me on the back. “How ya’ doing?” they’ve asked with sympathy in their eyes.

“Oh, I’m GREAT!” I’ll respond, practically bounding around with joy.

I love getting older.

Like love it.

In my twenties, it felt like the whole world was open to me, which was exciting and also maddening. Narrow it down a little, I yelled into the void as I changed my mind about what I wanted to do every week.

My thirties were consumed by parenting, but I found a little time for some self-actualization. I’ve become more confident, more self-assured.

You might know that I’m currently writing a book, based on a project where I did forty new things before I turned forty (read the first chapter here). I’m halfway done with writing the book, but I finished all of my new experiences.

The very last thing I did was a Living Funeral and Death meditation. I know that the hacky joke around your 40th birthday is that you’re over the hill, on the downhill slide toward death, so I thought I’d really lean in.

I hired a death doula to come to my house and set up a funeral for me and a couple friends. In my playroom, we settled on our yoga mats in the darkness. Battery-operated candles lit a memorial photo with the date of my birth and my death (the date of the event).

“Welcome to your funeral,” the death doula began.

She led us through a thought experiment where she asked us to say goodbye to all of the things that make us us.

My face-the one that my friends and family know me by- gone.

My job and hobbies, the 40 before 40 project, the things that I’ve done that make me an Interesting Person- done.

My name- not needed any more.

My relationships- altered forever by my absence, done, finished.

We wrote our final thoughts. We said our final words and then we laid down to die.

She covered us in gauzy blankets and dropped eye masks across our eyes. I was glad I had the blinds shut because it looked like naptime at an eerie in-home adult daycare. We laid under our shrouds for twenty minutes while meditative music played and then she called us back to life.

Was it morbid? Well, duh, of course it was, but I was glad that I did it, glad that I ended my project and my third decade on earth that way.

If I was going to die today, I would die feeling proud of myself. I’m not perfect. Never will be. But I feel like I know who I am more than I’ve ever felt before. I fought hard for that insight-it took a lot of work, tears, introspection. As I look back at my life, I am thankful for the good days, but I’m thankful for the hard ones too-even the ones I’m in therapy to forget.

What a gift that is, to know myself deeper than I ever have. That’s aging, baby. And I’m ready for more of it.

Tomorrow morning, the sun will come up and I’ll be forty plus one day. It might be a good day or it might be a bad one. There will be some things that I can control and some that I can’t. Some of the stupid things will be my fault and some of them will be fate. I know there will be days where I skulk around the house in my weighted blanket, like a morose worm. I also know there will be days that I can’t believe are mine, where I wonder how life could be this good, this precious.

I’m here for all of it.

Aging? Life experience? Totally worth a few wrinkles, a few chin hairs, and ankles that rattle like a tin can full of pebbles.

Bring it on.