The Invisible Woman

Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.
Ruth Rendell

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.
Jenny Joseph


Men die before women do. That’s a fact. As someone who has worked in a couple of nursing homes it is also something I’ve observed firsthand, as the ratio of women to men in these places is often about five to one. I’ve also worked with a number of widows as a therapist, and was particularly struck by a woman named Susan, who became a widow at the age of 53 and came in complaining that she was invisible.

When I first heard this I wondered if she actually meant she thought she was invisible, and if I was going to have to call for the guys in the white coats. Upon talking to her I learned that she was referring to the fact that she honestly felt that she didn’t even exist in the minds of most people she encountered on a daily basis.

One fortuitous byproduct of working with Susan was that she turned me on to the wonderful show Six Feet Under, which follows a family that owns a funeral parlor through all of life’s triumphs and tragedies. In particular she felt a kinship with Ruth, the widowed mother on the show who struggled with dating, connecting with her adult children, and facing her own impending mortality. In one scene in particular. Ruth’s friend Bettina informs her that women their age are invisible, and that therefore they could get away with murder.

I liked that second part, and wondered if that portion of the statement might hold a key to our future treatment, but in the meantime I wanted to learn more about what it was like to be invisible. Ruth had been a widow for a little over a year when she originally came to therapy, and had suffered from feelings of depression from both her original grief as well as the events that followed her husband’s death, which made her feel that she was increasingly of no importance to people.

The first step in cognitive-behavioral therapy is to see if a person’s thoughts actually match up with their experience in the world, but in Susan’s case I wondered if this would be a dangerous exercise. I knew from working with several members of this age group that there was in fact some validity to her invisibility hypotheses, and that the situational events of her life would in fact induce depressing feelings in almost anybody.

So how to proceed? Some people in therapy don’t need you to make earth-shattering interpretations about their childhood, but instead just need a supportive, encouraging person to listen to them. This can help people slowly find their confidence again and start to reconnect with the bigger world around them.

Sounds good, right? In theory yes, but Susan had almost totally lost her hope, and that is a very dangerous thing. As a married woman her every action had been based on doing things as a married couple, and now that she was alone she found her social circle no longer welcomed her.

What Susan did have going for her was a wonderful sense of humor, and it has been my experience, (and very personal bias), that if someone has this quality than they can survive nearly any circumstance life has to offer. Still, she was in therapy and she was in pain, and we had to come up with some kind of plan to deal with her invisibility.

Susan had never been in therapy, but took to it very quickly, as she was both an avid reader, and eager to try any suggestions that would make people start paying attention to her again. We discovered that Susan had for the most part of her life gotten validation from being the kind of wife that people expected her to be, and in the process she had never really explored all of her individual dreams, goals, and desires.

People have an ideas sometimes that therapy is just about exploring things that are wrong in a person’s life, and how all this started with some significant piece of their childhood. This is not true. In some cases, really in all cases, it is also important to find what a person’s strengths are, and then encourage these strengths and collaborate with them on how to maximize the things that are going right in their lives.

So in Susan’s case it was clear that, although she was depressed, she was also open to trying new things, and in this sense I knew she had the kind of resilience that would make her an excellent candidate for therapy. About 6 weeks in to the sessions I got an idea about how she might begin to feel a little less invisible.

When I was young I remember my mother told me quite often that when she was an old woman she would wear purple. The idea comes from a poem by Jenny Joseph, enclosed here,

When I Am an Old Woman

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and a pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprise

I have a very interesting history with this poem beginning obviously with my mother who recited the idea often and purchased the book for us to look at as well. I was always intrigued by the idea of an eccentric old woman with mismatched clothes who reeked of brandy, and I actually really liked the idea of my mom becoming this very woman as she got older.

Cut to years later and I am a waiter on sunny Mackinac Island up on the upper peninsula of Michigan. It is a wonderfully fun place, with no cars, dozens of bars, and nothing to do but enjoy the scenery and drink Rum Runners.

One afternoon I was waiting tables and a bit bored with the tourist crowd, when I suddenly saw a thundering heard walking towards me. I looked up and saw a sea of red hats and was told that they were members of the infamous Red Hat Society. I made some inquiries and found that they visited Mackinac Island every summer, and the result was the herd marching down the street directly towards me.

As a relatively new waiter at this establishment, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Soon everyone on the waitstaff began bitching about the “old ladies” who came in and acted like fools, and arguments ensued about who was going to actually have to wait on them. I knew a little bit about the Red Hat society, and in particular that they were a group of women over 50 who got together to eat drink, travel, and generally beat back the rigors of getting older by having a lot of fun.

I told them to give them all to me. All of them. Every last one of them. I knew immediately that there was something special about these ladies, and soon there were about 40 of them all sitting in my section grabbing my ass and ordering drinks like it was their last day on earth. And you know what? It was one of the funniest afternoons I could ever recall. I talked to a number of the ladies that afternoon, and heard several stories about widowhood, loss, resiliency, adventure, and even romance. It was incredibly insightful actually, and I knew that the events of that afternoon would one day prove to be useful to me at some future incarnation of my life.

So cut to years later and I’m a therapist with a funny, open-minded widow in my office, and the light bulbs started clicking like you wouldn’t believe. I had actually stayed in touch with several of the women I met on that fateful afternoon all those years ago, and I put Susan in touch with them with the hopes that they could share with her what they knew about overcoming invisibility, as it was my experience that these women were anything but invisible.

Susan eventually found that there was a wild, uninhibited woman waiting to get out inside of her, and finding the Red Hat Society helped her begin to develop this long dormant side of her personality. In finding this new gear in her life, Susan eventually became a mentor to a number of other widows that also felt like life had left them behind, and in doing so became empowered in a way that was truly remarkable.

I would like to say that therapy was responsible for helping Susan make this transformation in her life, but it just wasn’t true. She had some amazingly creative potential inside of her that was just dying to come out under the right circumstances, and the one thing I did was share information with her about how to find these circumstances. The Red Hat society speaks to the power of community as an antidote to substitute feelings in such a wonderfully creative way, that I can scarcely do it justice in writing. The sense of fun, adventure and camaraderie that I found these women possessed convinced me that as long as we are drawing breath we have a chance to stand up and give notice that we are here. It’s kind of wonderful actually.