Fairy Tales, Myth, and the Lived Experience of Elderhood
Copyright © 2026 by Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN
All rights reserved.
There comes a peculiar moment in a woman’s life when she discovers that she has become the elder in the room. No ceremony announces it, and there may be no identifiable day on which the crossing occurred. One simply looks around and realizes that many of those who once stood ahead have disappeared, while those who have come behind are beginning to look in one’s direction, although sometimes, and this too is part of the crossing, they are not looking in one’s direction at all.
This is not the elderhood I imagined when I was young. Old age seemed then to belong to another country inhabited by grandmothers, wise women, retired teachers, women with sensible shoes and recipes written on index cards. I did not understand that the elder I would someday become was already traveling with me, gathering experience while I was busy believing I was becoming something else, nor did I understand that when I finally arrived in that country, some of the maps by which I had traveled would no longer work.
Perhaps that is why I found myself writing of the Moon.
The Remembering
I have been
to the Moon
through the depths
of inner space.
The first depth
luminous
as a silver path
across dark water.
Invitations
to follow
what shimmered
but could not
be held.
The second depth
silent
unmapped
alone.
No borrowed light
no familiar voice
only the long
slow falling
into myself.
The third depth
dream making.
Images
moving
in every direction
through time.
The child
the mother
the elder
appearing
in the same moment
each carrying
what the others
had forgotten.
The fourth depth
numinous
many chambered.
Here
what had been scattered
began returning.
Shadows
memories
bones
ancient stories
gathered themselves
around me
and within me.
Nothing asked
to be explained.
Only gathered
tenderly
inwardly
illuminated.
I returned
from the Moon
carrying no proof
that I had been there
only the pieces
of myself
I had gone there
to find.
Remembered.
The poem arrived before I fully understood what it was telling me. Only afterward did I recognize that its movement was not upward toward achievement but inward through luminosity and silence, through dreams and finally into a many-chambered place where shadows, memories, bones, and ancient stories could coexist. Somewhere within that lunar journey came another recognition, that the old maps don’t work anymore.
There is grief in discovering this, although I am not sure we speak of it often enough. The maps that once organized a life were drawn around destinations such as education, profession, marriage, children, accomplishment, recognition, and contribution, while even our inner maps seemed to contain arrows pointing toward something not yet reached. Then one day some of those arrows begin disappearing because the destinations have been reached, abandoned, transformed, or revealed as never having been destinations at all. The road continues, but the markings that once assured us we knew where we were going have become unreliable.
Fairy tales know this territory well because sooner or later someone leaves the road and enters the forest, where the map that brought the traveler to its edge becomes considerably less useful. The poem’s gathering of the child, the mother, and the elder opened something similar for me, a recognition that we do not leave our earlier selves behind as neatly as we once imagined we would. The little girl may suddenly appear in the old woman’s delight, the mother may return in the gesture of a hand, and the professional woman who spent decades acquiring knowledge may discover that knowledge itself has become less interesting than knowing when to speak and when to remain silent. Even losses thought long resolved may return carrying something they could not have given us earlier because we did not yet possess the life with which to receive them.
The old woman at the edge of the fairy-tale forest is rarely there by accident. She lives beyond the organized kingdom, beyond the place where youth, beauty, marriage, productivity, and succession determine value, and to reach her someone usually has to become lost. Vasilisa must enter the forest to find Baba Yaga, the girl in Frau Holle falls down a well before arriving in the old woman’s strange country, while Hecate waits at the crossroads with her torches, belonging neither entirely to what has been left behind nor to what lies ahead.
The elder woman can occupy such places because she has lived long enough to know that a crossroads is not necessarily a problem requiring immediate solution. She may have learned, often through considerable difficulty, that there are moments when standing at the crossing and allowing one’s eyes to adjust to the available light is itself an action. Baba Yaga may possess the fire, but Vasilisa has to enter the forest to find her; Hecate may hold the torches, but someone has to arrive at the crossroads; Frau Holle may possess the knowledge of her strange country, but the girl must first fall through the well. What happens, then, when the elder has lived long enough to have something worth passing on, but no one comes to the hut?
I encountered something of this while presenting at the launch of The Alchemy of Fairy Tales. I was speaking from work that had occupied years of my life, drawn not only from study but from decades spent listening to dreams, teaching fairy tales, sitting with people in the difficult rooms of their lives, and discovering again and again that the old stories continue to know something about us that we have forgotten.
As I spoke, I became aware of something in the eyes of some of those listening. It was not hostility, nor anything I could reasonably name as intentional dismissal, but simply the unmistakable absence of interest. Anyone who has spent a lifetime teaching learns to recognize the moment when another person’s attention has gone elsewhere, although what surprised me was how deeply I felt it.
There had been other audiences and other rooms, times when I could feel the movement between speaker and listener almost physically, when an image offered from a fairy tale crossed the space between us and something came alive. This room felt different, and for a moment I confronted a possibility I had not wanted to consider, that there might no longer always be an audience interested in what I had to say.
The recognition followed me because it touched something larger than a particular presentation. I had assumed that if one continued to study, deepen, teach, write, and remain curious, what had been gathered would continue to have somewhere to go. I had not considered that one might arrive in elderhood with the bucket full and discover that fewer people were waiting at the well.
I have begun to wonder whether ageism lives somewhere inside this experience, not necessarily as a conscious judgment made by those sitting before me, but in quieter assumptions carried by younger people, institutions, audiences, and elders themselves. We speak easily about honoring elders and valuing wisdom, yet much of contemporary life remains organized around what is new, fast, emerging, expandable, and still becoming. The elder may therefore find herself told that her experience is valuable while discovering fewer places where that experience is actually sought.
The more difficult ageism to recognize may be the part we have absorbed ourselves. If I assume that wisdom must be requested before it has value, or that usefulness depends upon being visibly needed, I may still be reading my life through the very map that has ceased to work. If I measure the worth of what I know by the size or immediacy of its audience, I remain bound to a culture of productivity even while imagining that I have stepped outside it.
There may also be a shadow response to becoming less visible with age, one easily mistaken for continued vitality. The elder can become louder, repeating what she knows with increasing insistence as though greater volume might restore an audience that seems to be receding, while beneath that movement may live the fear that if I am no longer being heard, perhaps I am also disappearing.
Yet becoming louder is not the same as becoming more prolific. Elderhood may bring an unexpected urgency to create, with poems wanting language, stories asking to be written, books waiting to be completed, and images that have traveled beside us for years without yet finding their form. To respond to them is not necessarily an attempt to become more visible, but may arise from the recognition that time is no longer an abstraction and that what has been gathering across a lifetime now wants somewhere to go.
The difference may lie in the direction of the movement. Becoming louder reaches toward the audience asking, in one form or another, Do you still see me? while becoming prolific turns toward the work and asks, What still wants to be made? Both questions may be present, because the wish to be seen does not disappear simply because one has become old, but they do not arise from the same place.
Perhaps generativity is the better word for what I am describing, because productivity still belongs too easily to the old map with its measurements of accomplishment, recognition, usefulness, and outcome, while generativity feels closer to the ripening of what has been taken in across a lifetime.
A lifetime of drinking deeply from the well produces something in elderhood, for we have spent years lowering the bucket, sometimes knowingly and sometimes because life itself pushed us toward the water. We have drunk from education and work, love and disappointment, marriage and children, illness and recovery, books and dreams, mistakes we would not willingly repeat, and losses we could not have imagined surviving. We have drunk from beauty, friendship, betrayal, gardens, animals, conversations, solitude, and those inexplicable moments when something larger than ourselves seemed briefly close enough to touch, while not everything drawn from the well was sweet.
In Frau Holle, the girl reaches the other world by falling into a well, not by carefully climbing down with a plan for what she intends to learn. Some of what has formed us also came through descents we would never have chosen, yet what was encountered there did not remain below but became part of what could eventually be carried back.
The bucket has been going down for a very long time, and eventually something wants to come up. The poems, stories, books, images, teachings, gardens, carvings, conversations, and whatever other forms emerge may not be evidence that the elder is trying to prove she remains productive, but evidence that the well is full.
I recognize this as I write more rather than less. One piece calls another forward, a poem opens a door into an essay, an essay remembers a fairy tale, a fairy tale introduces a mouse who apparently has something further to say, and what might look from the outside like increased productivity feels from within like something quite different. I am not trying to manufacture more but to give form to what has accumulated.
One morning Kevin found me considering all of this while I sat at my desk surrounded by papers, books, and the evidence of several projects moving in several directions at once. He had been occupying a corner of the desk for some time, although occupying may be too strong a word for a mouse who considers himself an observer of human affairs.
“You humans have a strange idea about old things,” he said.
I looked up from what I was writing and asked him what he meant.
“You think that because something has been here a long time, its important work must already be finished.”
“And mice don’t?”
Kevin looked genuinely puzzled before asking, “Have you ever been inside an old barn?”
Of course I had, although apparently I had not learned what he thought I should have learned there.
“Then you should know better,” he said, disappearing behind a stack of papers before I could ask what, precisely, an old barn knew that I did not.
I sat there for a while thinking about barns and the pathways inside an old barn that cannot be seen from the road. It knows where the boards loosen in winter, where the swallows return in spring, which beam survived the storm, and where generations of mice have traveled safely behind the walls. Its usefulness is no longer measured only by what can be stored inside it, while its remembering resides as much in the worn places as in the timbers still holding the roof.
Yet even an old barn cannot make anyone enter, which may be where the task of elderhood begins to change. Perhaps the elder spends the first portion of life learning how to make herself heard, only to discover that the later task is not necessarily to speak louder but to find the forms capable of carrying what she knows.
Sometimes that form is a story or a poem, sometimes a carved piece of wood or a garden, and sometimes it is a conversation in which another person finally asks the question for which experience has been quietly preparing an answer. A book may sit unopened for years before finding the person who needs it, suggesting that the audience for elder wisdom may not always be gathered in front of us but may instead be scattered across time.
There is something freeing in considering that possibility because if the immediate audience is no longer required to confirm the value of what has been learned, perhaps the elder can stop calling into every room asking whether anyone is listening. She can place what she knows into forms capable of enduring and allow some of them to travel farther than she will.
This brings me back to the meaning hidden inside the word remembering, not only as recollection but as re-membering, the drawing together again of what has become separated across a lifetime. The child, mother, woman, maker, teacher, lover, wounded one, and elder no longer have to stand in a line as though one replaced the other but can begin to inhabit the same room.
I am beginning to understand this gathering as part of the lived work of elderhood, not withdrawal from life but a different way of carrying it, not possessing answers but recognizing patterns, and not standing above those who come after but sometimes holding enough light for someone else to enter the woods.
Hecate carries torches, Baba Yaga keeps fire, and Vasilisa eventually carries a burning skull out of the forest. Again and again the old stories place light near the elder woman, although it is seldom the bright noon light of certainty. More often it is firelight, moonlight, torchlight, or simply the illumination sufficient for the next few steps.
Perhaps this is why the Moon belongs here, for she does not generate the light by which we see her. She receives light, alters it, carries it through darkness, disappears from view, and returns, offering another kind of radiance that does not depend upon remaining forever at noon.
The old map told me that usefulness meant being needed, while the new terrain is suggesting something more difficult and perhaps more enduring. Usefulness may also mean leaving something where it can be found, without knowing who will find it or whether I will still be here when they do.
This may be the lived expression of elderhood I could not have imagined when I was younger. After a lifetime spent becoming, I find myself gathering; after years spent acquiring a voice, I am learning where to place it; and after decades of moving toward the future, I find myself carrying the past without needing to live there.
The old maps could not have brought me here because they were maps for becoming, while this territory asks something else of me. It asks me to inhabit the life already lived deeply enough that its scattered pieces can begin to recognize one another, trusting that what has been gathered does not lose its value because I cannot determine who will receive it.
Perhaps somewhere beyond the edge of what I can see, someone is already walking through the forest toward the hut, while here at the desk there is still another bucket waiting to be drawn from the well.
Remembered.