More About Life's Later Years

Thoughts on Biden, Doctors, Poets, and More

I find myself resisting the term “old age.” It’s still too negatively loaded. May the time come when it’s seen as a time of special gifts as well as challenges. In the meantime, some further thoughts on the subject.

Political landscape: The panic about Biden’s age

The Economist described him as “an old man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.” I would prefer the description “a seasoned leader.”

A recent New Yorker cover showed Biden (with Trump, McConnell, and Pelosi) in walkers, a quartet of bent-over oldsters racing one another. The image invites us to chuckle at leaders who are old. (It also suggests that disability is disqualifying. But FDR used a wheelchair, and Tammy Duckworth is a double amputee.)

The thought of an octogenarian as president creates near-hysteria in some. Never mind that his achievements have been massive. The American Rescue Plan helped us recover from Covid. The infrastructure bill was bipartisan when that seemed impossible. He passed the first major gun-safety bill in decades. The CHIPs Act is bringing chip manufacturing back home. The Inflation Reduction Act was, in fact, a major climate protection law. All of this not in spite of, but because of, his age. His many years in office have taught him how Congress works and how to work with it.

He’s also made serious mistakes – the rushed exit from Afghanistan, among others. But they were not the mistakes of some feeble old man. Afghanistan, for instance, was a young man’s mistake, too bold, not thought through. In any case, evaluate him on his record.

Biden’s age is relevant, as an asset (a fact that is never mentioned) and as a liability (where attention is solely focused). Death and debility become more likely as one grows older. It’s also true that we need a broader spread of ages in our leaders, because each stage of life brings a different perspective. But the biggest way in which age is a problem for Biden is the ageism of the electorate, and of the pundits who feed it.

Medical landscape: The pleasures of benign neglect

I mentioned in an earlier post the disappearance of migraines and the replacement of cataracts with embedded corrective lenses. I would add that for most patients over 75 many previously routine medical tests are put aside. (Goodbye, colonoscopies and mammograms.) Doctors focus more on fitness than on weight, and in any case weight tends to stabilize.

I would never deny that these advantages are laced with loss, that physical crumbling is inevitable and can be devastating. For many of us the greatest fear is not of dying, but of degenerative diseases (Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and so on). But for most of us there are decades of good health first.

More adages

I asked for adages to capture the perspective given by long lives. I liked what I got and they kept me thinking. I’d now add “Not much is perfect, and nothing is permanent.”

More wisdom

From reader Bruce Curtis, this most thoughtful response to the first post. He focuses on its discussion of a briefer time horizon:

It may be true that the fortunate surviving elder can make peace with the past, can focus more intensely on living in the present, on enjoying past accomplishments, on being with loved ones and friends, on communing with nature, and so on.

I find, however, that I need as well to more directly and specifically examine how I have behaved at certain times, in certain ways, sometimes in relation to specific others—in short, to make amends.  Or to wish I could have, after it’s too late.

In brief, then, I find aging without looking back not only with satisfaction, but with regrets, incomplete.

He wonders if he’s an outlier in that respect. If so, only because he is unusually honest with himself.

Poets on Age

As the years go by we realize that death is coming nearer. We may be the only species aware of its mortality. Arguably that is a gift, an awareness that can bring with it clarity. But it’s painful as well. Writers can help us learn to see.

Louise Gluck, from Winter Recipes from the Collective

You have begun your own journey,
. . .  into yourself and your memories.
As they fall away, perhaps you will attain
that enviable emptiness into which
all things flow

Maxine Kumin, Our Ground Time Here will be Brief

Wherever we're going
is Monday morning.
Wherever we're coming from
is Mother's lap.
On the cloud-pack above, strewn
as loosely as parsnip
or celery seeds, lie
the souls of the unborn

I also recommend Jan Morris’s Thinking Again: A Diary, a gentle, reflective look at the world in 2021 and at her ninety years of life.

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