I’m 78 and I realized last week that no one in my current life knew me before I was sixty, and the version of me at twenty-five is now a person only I remember

My granddaughter Mallory was over for dinner last Sunday, and I was telling her about the time I almost got fired from my first real job for laughing in a meeting.

Halfway through, I said something like, and then Patricia threw an eraser at me and told me to get it together, and Mallory looked up from her plate and said, “Wait — who’s Patricia?”

Patricia, who sat across from me at that job for four years. Patricia, who came to my first wedding. Patricia, who I lost touch with sometime in the late 80s and who, for all I know, has been dead for a decade. I’ve told stories about her to so many people over the course of my life that I genuinely forgot, for a second, that she isn’t a person Mallory has any reason to know.

I rallied and explained who she was, and we finished the story, and Mallory laughed.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about her question since. Patricia was one of the closest people in my life for almost a decade. And the fact that I had to explain her to my own granddaughter is, when I really look at it, a fact about my whole life, not just about Patricia.

Almost everyone who knew me before I was sixty is gone, scattered, or out of touch. The young woman who sat across from Patricia in that office — who married the wrong man, who was sure she’d be a painter — only exists in my head now. Nobody else carries her.

I am the only living archive of my younger self

The version of me at twenty-five lives in exactly one place: my head.

Everything she did, everywhere she went, everyone she loved, every dumb thing she said at a party that she replayed for a week afterward — all of it is in me, and nowhere else. When I go, she goes.

I don’t know what to do with that exactly. It isn’t a tragedy. It isn’t quite a regret. It’s just a fact about being old that I didn’t expect, and that I don’t think most people think about until it happens to them.

Once I started thinking about Mallory’s question, I could see it everywhere I’d already been adapting to it. The biggest one is how I talk. When I was forty-five, if I mentioned my brother Hal at a dinner party, the people around the table knew who Hal was. Now, when I mention him — he died a long time ago — I have to explain who he was. Every casual reference comes with a small briefing attached.

I’d been economizing without realizing I was economizing. There’s a story I used to love telling about Hal and me that I haven’t told in years, and until this week I couldn’t have told you why I’d stopped. Now I can. The setup-to-payoff ratio had stopped making sense. The audience had changed, and I’d quietly adjusted, and I never noticed the adjustment.

It’s not new behavior. It’s newly seen behavior.

The people closest to me now have never met the woman I used to be

Most of the people I spend real time with — my book group, my neighbor down the hall, the woman I walk with on Saturdays — I met after I turned sixty-three.

That’s not unusual for someone my age. The old friends are dying or have moved away. The new friends are who’s left, and they’re real friends, and I love them. But they are loving a sixty-five-and-up version of me. They have never met the woman I was at twenty-six, the one who cried in a phone booth on her lunch break because the man she thought she was going to marry had just dumped her. They have no mental image of me as a young person at all.

When they picture me, they picture this — the woman I am now, with the gray hair and the slight limp and the strong opinions about everyone in our book group.

I’m not complaining. They’re not supposed to have known me then. But there’s a specific kind of loneliness in it I didn’t see coming, and the part of it I miss most is the smallest part. I miss having someone to fact-check with.

When my second husband was alive, we used to settle little memory disputes all the time.

Was that the summer we drove up the coast or the one we stayed home? Did your sister come to that dinner or was she still away? What was the name of that restaurant? Neither of us had perfect recall. But between the two of us we usually had it covered, and the gap between his memory and mine got filled in by the other person.

That’s gone now. If I can’t remember whether Patricia threw the eraser or whether the other woman in the office did, there’s nobody to ask. The few people who might know are people I haven’t spoken to in thirty years, and tracking them down would be its own production, and at the end of it I’d probably find out they don’t remember either.

So I sit with the uncertainty, and most of the time I make my peace with the version I have, even though I know parts of it are probably wrong. That’s a different kind of loneliness than I expected.

It’s only been a few days, and I keep noticing it

Mallory’s question was on Sunday. Today is Thursday. And I keep catching it happening.

I’ll start to say something, and then I’ll feel the calculation kick in — whoever I’m talking to, do they know who I’m about to mention? Have I told them this story already? How much background will I need to give before I can get to the actual point?

Most of the time I just keep talking and do the briefing. Sometimes I trail off and let the moment go. Either way, I’ve started noticing the calculation, which I never used to notice. I think Mallory’s question gave me a frame for it, and now I can’t put the frame down.

What’s strange is how much editing I apparently do before I open my mouth, without ever realizing I’m doing it.

The part I’ve started to make peace with

After a few days of chewing on this, here’s where I’ve landed, more or less:

Everyone who lives long enough ends up here.

Patricia, if she’s still alive, is doing the same thing on her end — the people closest to her now have never met the version of her who sat across from me. The people I knew at twenty-five who are still alive are all of them, each in their own kitchens, carrying versions of themselves that nobody around them remembers. It’s the standard issue of being old.

What I’ve stopped doing is hoping someone will come along who can see all of me at once. My second husband, came closest. He died nine years ago. After him, there was nobody who knew the whole shape, and there isn’t going to be. That sounds like a loss, and it is. But it’s also just the situation, and at some point you stop arguing with the situation.

What I’ve started doing instead is writing some of it down. Not as a memoir or anything that grand. Just notes, in a spiral notebook on the desk by the window. When a memory comes up, I write it down. Patricia and the eraser. The phone booth. The dumb thing my brother Hal said at our mother’s funeral that still makes me laugh.

I don’t know if anyone will read it. Mallory, maybe, someday. Probably not. The point isn’t really the audience. The point is that the woman I was at twenty-five has been living inside my head alone for a long time now, and the least I can do, while I’m still here, is put some of her down on paper. So she’s somewhere besides just my head.

Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.

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