The scales fell from his eyes
The very same week I wrote here about the arrival of my presbyopia, I had a conversation with 85-year-old ‘J’ about a very different life milestone — cataract removal.
“I was depressed for a while after the surgery,” he told me as we stood in my kitchen, trying to find the source of a mysterious under-sink leak.
“Depressed?” I asked in surprise, thinking I’d hear stories of re-seeing the morning sunlight playing gently on the leaves.
“Yes, depressed.” His son’s blonde hair, he suddenly realised after the scales had fallen from his eyes, was now grey. The hairline cracks he’d observed on the driveways of his rental properties, were now gaping canyons. (As a landlord, he’s concerned about anything that can be classified as a “trip hazard”). The perfect walls he’d We’re always reluctant to phone him about leaks and other issues, because though his hands shake and he’s unsteady on his feet, J will be at our door before 9am, carrying a box of tools, trying to get his hands to listen as he places a spanner around a tap, or takes apart a washer.
Recently, the heater failed in our house, and even though he had a helper, the size of the job overwhelmed him. He snapped at my wife and started shouting, and then crying. “Sometimes I just want to burn these places to the ground,” he yelled. “I’m too old to be doing this.”
Maria Popova, in her wise commentary to her even wiser selections on her blog Brain Pickings, wrote, “Perhaps the greatest perplexity of ageing is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror.”
As we start to cross the peak of that hill, many of us feel young inside, but culture tells us it’s time to slow and ease up. At the same time, we don’t have the safety nets of large families, and increasingly, older people need to stay independent and active. It’s a confusing set of messages.
‘Not good for the body’
“After 35 you shouldn’t be running and exercising hard,” said an older person recently to my wife, who still runs her five miles a day, five days a week. “It’s not good for the body.”
This older person then proceeded to down her set of daily high blood pressure pills, and combat the wave of fatigue and negativity that seemed to rule her days. In some cultures, the indignity of losing control over one’s body is written deep into the code of the “dignity” of old age. Few things illustrate the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy with as much fragile, heartbreaking beauty of the idea that old people must not challenge their bodies any longer.
And then technology steps in and confounds this issue of simple decline, by abruptly handing shards of youth back to us. The cataracts disappear, the arteries open, the knees stop hurting. The void Popova described turns inside out. Living alone as he does, J needs his clear sight. But the truth contained in his now youthful vision is that the cataract remains over everything else.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the United States.