On aging

I read an article recently in which the writer described a man as a septuagenarian. My first thought was that the man was ancient. Then I realized that I, too, am a septuagenarian, accelerating toward 80 with 70 disappearing in the dust of time.

Age is indeed breathing down my neck. Sometimes I can’t recall names, and too often things on the tip of my tongue end up being stuck there. As a young man I frequently went to weddings; these days the events are funerals and memorial services. I recently attended a reunion of a group of fellow engineering students from the University of Oklahoma, seeing friends for the first time in five decades. What kept going through my mind is that they all look so old. But then I realized that I am little different—other than having more hair and less belly than most.

As I contemplate my wrinkles, sagging skin, and gray whiskers, I am reminded of a phrase from a Leonard Cohen song, “Crazy to Love You”—“I’m old and the mirrors don’t lie.” How true. I see evidence of that all the time. In fact, I often get a glimpse of my father looking back at me in the mirror when I am shaving. When I show people a photo I took of my mom a couple of weeks before she died at age 99 last fall, they almost always remark how much I resemble her even though I am more than twenty years younger.

Although I suffer some of the maladies and challenges that inevitably come with age, I generally don’t feel my years. I realize how lucky I am. I still run about six miles every other day, although my pace is inexorably slowing, and I go to the gym on most days I don’t run for a light upper body workout and to look at women. I am not fooling myself, however. I know that this relative well-being is tenuous and that as much as I would like to deny it, I have one foot on a banana peel and the other foot on the pickling vat at the local medical school or the furnace at a local crematorium. The cone of sand is piling up at the bottom of the glass.

I have become more aware of my mortality in the last year as well. Part of that awareness was seeing my mother’s decline and death. My thoughts about death are not negative at all, though. My view of life has changed greatly, even in just the past couple of years. The understanding that I am nearing or in the last phase of my life feels almost liberating. For example, I have started to get rid of possessions that I doubt I will ever use again. While letting go of them is difficult, the process is freeing in a way as I lighten the load I have borne and realize that many of my possessions possessed me.

This eloquent poem by Jim Harrison offers a wise commentary on aging.

BARKING
The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

“Age swept past me/ but I caught up” captures the inevitability of aging with a splendid metaphor. The last two lines are my favorite, though. Indeed, how liberating it is to have slipped the chain.