Somewhere down in my to-read pile of books is the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. It is about a young man who purchases eternal youth at the cost of his soul. What piqued my curiosity enough to want to read it was a line from the novel I came across somewhere that resonates with me as I contemplate the reality of growing older: “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.”
Now in my 70s, I think more and more about aging, particularly as I increasingly experience its effects. So far, though, (and that is a big proviso), I am fortunate in how aging has treated me. I am in my 51st year of running and still run well over an hour three or four days a week and usually go to the gym on the days I don’t run. I often say that I feel almost as good as I did twenty years ago. That is hyperbole, of course. I have more aches and pains than in the past, I run more slowly, and my recovery time from any sort of physical activity is longer. At the same time, I find it much easier to go out and exercise than previously, to put on my shorts and shoes, open the door, and begin—perhaps because when I consider taking the day off, I wonder if that might mark the beginning of the end. In general, I accept what my body gives me on a particular day, whether it is nine blocks or nine miles. I like to say about my running ability that while I may be old, I am slow, too.
I think I am doing okay mentally, as well. I feel as engaged intellectually and socially as I ever have. Now that I am retired, I have rid myself of the burden I carried for years of doing work I disliked and that I felt was contrary to my values. While I lack the income from working and worry about finances, I have enough money to live fully. Moreover, without the pressure and perceived obligation of pursuing a career, I have the freedom to follow my own interests, to understand and be myself. I keep bees, study Spanish, write essays and poems, play with photography, and often wander off the worn path to see what lies over an interesting hill. I try to follow the maxim that life may be short but it is wide, too.
When it comes to aging I am not deluding myself, however. I fully realize that wearing out is inevitable and that soon enough I will be worn out, that some part will irreparably fail, and that I will die. Although I am wearing out, I am doing my damnedest not to rust out. I believe that if we don’t engage our body and mind regularly and intensely with the world, both will rust out due to disuse. I want to savor the years ahead, while at the same time accepting my age and not present a façade of youth to the world as many people try to do.
I recall a line from Charles Bowden that offers a useful perspective on aging: “We wish to live forever and because of this desire we hardly live at all.” The fact that we don’t live forever makes each day a gift, one that must be used and appreciated at the time for it is so fleeting. Except for memories, days cannot be stored for the future. As I enter old age, I want to do my best to slip out of the current and step onto the shore where I more fully see, hear, and, most of important of all, appreciate. I would like to live a long time, but not too long.
When I take classes, almost always I am the oldest person in the room—by far, including the teacher. Yet most of the time, the other students treat me as a peer. This has been especially true in the heritage Spanish classes I have taken in which most of the other students are Latino native Spanish speakers. I like being in class with people that age—to hear their opinions, to absorb their energy and optimism. I realize that those young students know much more about contemporary society than I, for it is their world, whereas I am from two or three generations back.
The big frontier I have crossed with aging is technology. The rate of technological change has been so great over my lifetime, and even over the past two decades, that the world in which I came of age has disappeared in many ways. Often I feel like a character in a story similar to Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” but rather than coming to Earth from Mars, I come from the mid-20th Century. In a pre-calculus class, I mentioned to a fellow student whose major is engineering that I was the last of the engineering students who used a slide rule in college. His response was, “What’s that?”
I experience more and more the inevitable marginalization and that comes with age. Young people call me sir, a title that is jarring, but I respond by replying sir or ma’am to them, to make a point, which most don’t seem to get. And I jokingly say that in the past women remarked that I reminded them of their father, perhaps as a polite dismissal; now they comment that I remind them of their grandfather. As Billy Pilgrim famously remarked, “So it goes.”
I enjoy the euphemisms of nouns and adjectives for old people that litter advertisements and public documents. “Senior citizen” is ubiquitous, and “elder” is common. The National Park Service used to issue a Golden Age Passport to people over 62 but changed it to a Senior Pass. The transit system in Portland, Oregon, offers an Honored Citizen discount. When I first came across the term “honored” in that context, I thought of the comment Abraham Lincoln made about the presidency: “I feel like the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. To the man who asked him how he liked it, he said: ‘If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.’” Then there are the less pleasant terms that occur in general conversation: gaffer, geezer, old fart, and so on.
In addition to young people using honorifics like sir and ma’am, I see—although fortunately have not experienced yet—the way old people are often subjected to a sort of condescending politeness. A common example is the way some caregivers and medical assistants use nicknames like “sweetie” or “honey” or assume an attitude similar to someone using the informal “tu” in Spanish instead of “usted” which would be more respectful.
I read a book recently in which the author states that ‘…although old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are to be loved unconditionally….” That comment is wrong on at least two levels. First, old people are the mortar of our society, holding us together, reminding us not only of the past but serving as wise guides for our future, showing us the way on the path ahead. Further, the author’s statement that old people are “to be loved unconditionally” is condescending and disrespectful. It would be just as correct to enjoin old people to love the young unconditionally.
My mother is still alive in her late 90s. Physically she is healthy but she is suffering from memory loss as do so many people her age. Even in that state she is aware of her condition and often comments on it, for example ironically observing that she now begins each day anew having forgotten so much from the recent past, even the day before. Despite her age, increasing frailty, and memory problems she is generally content and is a guide for that unknown territory that most of us will enter all too soon unless we fall by the wayside beforehand for some reason. Every time I speak with her, she says, “I like my old age,” and remarks that she’s “going to have a good day, every day,” comparing herself to my father who died at age 69: “He just sat and worried and his dark mood allowed cancer to come in and kill him.” I suspect that a bigger factor was his decades of smoking, but I think she is on to something. I believe that if one lives with a sense of possibility, of anticipation of the new day, that optimism will nurture a sense of contentment and help fend off disease, decrepitude, and alienation that are too often burdens of aging.
I spent twenty five years as a hospice patient volunteer, working with more than 200 patients and their families. Through that work, I encountered many old people—not just the patients and their relatives and friends but residents of skilled nursing facilities, the VA, and the state veteran’s home. One thing that struck me is that although those people were old, often in their 80s and 90s, many, maybe most, did not think of themselves as old. In their own eyes they were young in many ways. As I interacted with them, I often thought that although their features were old, their eyes were young, that a young person was looking out through them.
It seems to me that how to die is the last lesson of a parent for a child. I hope that I can be a good teacher in that regard for my daughters. Of course, neither I nor anyone else can predict how those last days will play out. There is no lesson plan. I do know from the years I was a hospice volunteer, however, that pain and frustration often accompany dying as do sadness and sometimes despair. I hope that I can maintain a sense of contentment and acceptance as my mother has done so far and not wrestle with fear and unhappiness as my father did.
In the splendid book on writing, “Bird by Bird,” the author, Anne Lamott observes that at the end of life people become “…who they are when stripped of the surface show…. Often the attributes that define them drop away—the hair, the shape, the skills, the cleverness. And it turns out that the packaging is not who that person has been all along. Without that package, another sort of beauty shines through.”
My take is less idealistic. I agree that in old age, our real self emerges as we cast off the costume of personality we consciously and unconsciously don to assume the roles we play in life. I question that what lies underneath is always beautiful, however. Rather there are scars from wounds we all have acquired over the years, wounds such as envy, cynicism, pessimism, sadness, defeat. Sometimes those wounds have not healed, and we carry them in how we engage the world.
I hope to live out my remaining years as does the narrator of this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and ah, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.
A late old friend of mine noted that tempus really fugits, to which another friend added that we must carpe the fucking diem. The Latin may be butchered, but the wisdom shines through.