I just turned 75. Do I feel irrelevant? Sometimes. But old age has its privileges
Every age has its highlights, some more agreeable than others. Turning 65, for instance, brought me to the safe harbor of Medicare, and 70 is when I started drawing Social Security. But 75, which I reached this month, feels like a different and more daunting milestone. It brings with it a sense of quiet dislocation, as if I’d traveled a long distance to a destination much closer to the end of the line than I’d expected.
How close? I was surprised to learn that the life expectancy of the average American male has dropped to 75 or lower depending on the estimate, pulled down by the weight of COVID deaths. Does that mean I’ll be checking out a month after my birthday? No, but I’m at a tangibly different station than I was even five years ago.
I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Life’s one guarantee is that it will end, and so there has to be a time between the peak of youthful vigor, when I really could carry three cases of beer down a flight of stairs, and the day when I’m the one getting carried out. I’m nearing the far end of that in-between time.
So how does it feel? Old age, to call it by name, is encrusted with metaphors. The fuel warning light is on. The hourglass is running out. My expiration date is showing. Like Alaska, this may not be the end of the world, but you can see it from here. I prefer folksier comparisons. My late father-in-law, a story-telling Lutheran pastor, and his friend, Walter, a local farmer, used to discuss the phenomenon of aging at a lake in central Minnesota. They once decided they were like old cars, still running but with rusty brakes and faulty ignitions. Another time, and this one’s my favorite, they concluded that they weren’t really old people at all, just young people who had something wrong with them.
As a historian who has learned a great deal from talking to old people, I also appreciate the bemused irony in
one of Garrison Keillor’s monologues: “I’m not that old but I know a lot because I used to hang out with old people back when there used to be real old people. Now everyone is sort of my age or younger, and most people don’t know much more than I do.”
But aging has multiple dimensions. The physical side of the ledger is undeniably one long column of debits. Our looks are the first to suffer. Once our bodies produce the next generation, or not, they no longer have any evolutionary reason to attract the opposite sex, and so they wilt like flowers — more slowly, perhaps, but just as surely. The ruling dynamic is deterioration. As gravity asserts its dominion, skin sags, eyelids droop and hair falls out. Last year, when in-person gatherings were still rare, I was giving a Zoom talk to the residents of a retirement community. In the few minutes I was on screen before the appointed starting time, one woman who had forgotten to mute herself said very clearly, “He looked better 20 years ago.” Didn’t we all, sister, didn’t we all.
There are mounting deficits on the social side of the ledger as well. Old people get to witness ourselves going rapidly out of style, losing more and more cultural literacy every day. I couldn’t tell a meme from a trope if one bit me, and the “celebrities” trotted out on the latenight talk shows are as unrecognizable to me as Andy Devine and Shirley Booth would be to my children. Current musical genres, from hip-hop to K-pop, seem just as alien. As the dense fog of fogeydom sets in, I find myself going back to the albums of my youth. Remember Buffalo Springfield? Ian and Sylvia? Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks?
As our long slide into irrelevance continues, the world returns the favor. Younger people question how someone so old and removed from the action could have anything useful to say. I can’t blame them, because I had the same doubts about my elders at their age. A friend of mine is a national expert on teaching cultural diversity. As recent social movements have focused new attention on issues of racism and pluralism in our country, she might have been an obvious source for inquiring journalists, but the retired professor’s phone has been largely silent. “I’m 71,” she said. “I’m not the first one they call anymore.” There is comfort in knowing that the same irrelevance will one day overtake every millennial on the planet — if they’re lucky.
Some of it is our own fault. I think I understand why we old people are so often, to be frank, boring. A pernicious dynamic accompanies retirement for many of us. As the insistent demands of our jobs recede, we have less to keep our minds occupied. As the just-as-insistent demands of our physical decline multiply, the mental vacuum is filled by concerns about our body’s aches and pains. Something always hurts. Our worlds contract, and we lose all sense of proportion. Troubles we would have weathered with relative ease a decade ago balloon into crises, and the broad horizons of our youth pull inward to a closing circle of possibilities. I find that dynamic cautionary, and I hope to avoid it for the duration. Want to hear about my new knee or my latest hearing test? OK, but I’ll keep it brief.
There are, to be fair, credits on the ledger as well, beginning with a surplus of leisure. If it’s all downhill from here, we might as well coast. I am responsible to no one but myself for how I spend my days. My wife may argue the point, but I do have considerable latitude. My choice has been to keep working, although at a slower pace. A collection of these columns will be published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in the fall, at about the same time that Milwaukee PBS premieres a documentary on Jones Island. My long-running conversation with Milwaukee remains too interesting to end just yet.
Old age also brings with it certain permissions. If we happen to be a little late, act a little eccentric or seem a little forgetful, younger people generally respond with tolerance. Some slippage is to be expected. Our poor brains, after thinking all those millions of thoughts every day for so many years, could hardly avoid showing signs of fatigue. Our cranial synapses are physical connections, after all, and they wear out as inevitably as spark plugs.
Not that some of us don’t resist. I was gifted with a pretty good memory. When a word, a name, or an event gets stuck in the folds of my gray matter and refuses to drop onto my tongue, I sometimes take it personally. A couple of years ago, my daughter, a woman known for her candor, said, “When you start losing it, Papa, you’re going to be a real pain in the ass.” Not yet, honey, but soon enough.
Perhaps the purest pleasure of aging is grandchildren. We have six of them between the ages of 1 and 8, all in Wisconsin and two literally across the street. The fierceness of my love for those little ones sometimes takes me by surprise. Holding them, watching them grow, and being a steady and benevolent presence in their lives — those are the sharpest joys I know.
The continuing challenge we face is one of adjustment. The typical response to aging has a trajectory comparable to the stages of grief. First comes disbelief. How could this be happening to me? Have I really become one of those fossils I used to observe at a distance? Then there’s fear: fear of losing our mobility, our marbles, and finally our pulse. As presumably the only creatures on Earth who can envision the future, we see the end approaching, and fear grades into anger. How dare this happen to me? Why can’t I be like I was? Finally, there’s a grudging acceptance. After attending enough memorial services for close friends, after our fourth or fifth surgery, after witnessing the unstoppable growth of grandchildren, mortality and its attendant pains become a default state.
We live with an accelerating sense of loss, but it’s pointless to grumble about the indignity of aging. It is manifestly the natural order. Whatever our birthdate, each of us is a timeless spirit set astride a dying animal. As my engineer father, who made it to 85, often said, “If we all lived forever, we’d be standing on each other’s shoulders.” Live instead with as much humor and honesty as we can muster. The fact that we are old is far less important than the fact that we are alive.
Aging is a terminal trip into progressively stranger territory, the landmarks thinning, the signposts faint. There are no personal precedents for any of this. In time we all become autumn trees, shutting down in preparation for the coming winter. Will there be a spring? Is there a season of light on the far shore of the dark sea that lies ahead? One of these days, I’ll be dying to find out.
John Gurda writes on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of the month. Email: mail@johngurda.com