As Francis marks a decade as pope, what does it mean to be 86?
NOVARA, Italy — Stefano Spaini woke up on his birthday, his dog bounding onto the bed, feeling pretty good overall, but still noticing the signs of his age. His phone still buzzed with calls from friends — just not as many. He needed pills for his heart, his blood pressure, his cholesterol. Recently, he’d seen evidence of decline even in his fingertips, as he fumbled with his shirt buttons, sometimes unable to feel them.
“Eighty-six,” Spaini’s wife, Luciana, said when he walked into the kitchen.
“I’m still here,” he said. Eighty-six. For most of us, it’s an age beyond the realm of what we’ll ever experience.
Several advanced countries have average life expectancies of 85; nowhere does the average person live to 86. And in many poorer parts of the world — places with food shortages, wars, meager health care — reaching 86 requires such a constellation of fortune as to almost feel mystical.
Eighty-six is the age of people who lived their childhoods without television.
It is the age of people who remember World War II. It is the age of actors Robert Redford and Vanessa Redgrave, novelist Don DeLillo and Apollo engineer Margaret Hamilton.
It is the would-be age of the late John McCain, Wilt Chamberlain and Yves Saint Laurent.
It is the age President Biden would be at the end of a possible second term.
It is the age of Pope Francis. The pope, who on Monday hits the 10-year mark in his pontificate, shows the potential of life at 86 in the modern world.
He travels to conflict-torn countries, gives speeches to full stadiums and recently said he feels no reason to give up the job anytime soon.
But 86 can be fragile, unforgiving.
Francis has had to significantly slow his pace. He has persistent knee pain and requires a wheelchair. He takes a daily nap.
The hardest thing about this age, many 86-year-olds say, is not knowing how much time you have left. The U.S. actuarial tables say five, six years on average.
But about 8 percent don’t even make it to 87. Only half make it to 91. In Italy, one of the grayest societies on earth, fewer than in 1 in 30 people are 86 or older.
“At this age, you don’t know if you’ll be alive in five years,” said Luigi Guantario, 86, who once worked for Italy’s space agency, and said he’d always lived with goals, only now they are shortterm. Maintaining friendships. Continuing to drive. Remaining active, some days reaching 10,000 steps by noon. He says he can imagine a similar dynamic at play for the pope, though on a grander scale.
“The commitments he has as pope are helping to keep him alive,” Guantario said.
Francis’s election 10 years ago broke new ground in so many ways — he was the first Jesuit pope, the first Latin American pope. A decade later, “the oldest” is invoked more frequently than “the first.”
Only three other popes over the past 500 years have reached age 86 on the job.
Like many 86-year-olds, Francis’s activities are often assessed in the context of his age.
No longer is he just the pope traveling to the Democratic Republic of Congo; he is the 86-year-old pope. Across the church, bishops a full decade younger are being ushered by rule into retirement.
On his trips, in his meetings, Francis is now almost always the oldest person in the room. And whatever doubts come about his capabilities, they are invariably generated by those who are younger.
As Francis has gotten older, he has talked a lot about this stage of life, though rarely in personal terms.
Last year, he devoted several speeches to the “meaning and value of old age,” decrying how the elderly are often seen as a “burden,” and making a case for the value they have to offer — through wisdom, and even through their slow pace, an antidote to the pressures facing the young.
“Old age is a gift,” Francis said.
Never before, he said, has the planet had so many old people.
How they are treated, and perceived, “is one of the most urgent issues facing the human family at this time,” he said.