Aging may mean you can no longer go for a jog at dawn. But you can take a walk in the park, surrounded by nature.Pavel Bednyakov/The Associated Press
Philip Slayton’s latest book is All Remaining Passengers: Essays from the Edge of Eighty.
I turned 81 recently, a serious age. I’m old now, an octogenarian. According to Statistics Canada, there’s an estimated 1.96 million people in this country 80 years old or over. That’s a lot of people struggling with senescence. The circumstances of the aged inevitably differ, sometimes dramatically, but no matter how and where they live the old have many problems in common. Some of these problems are hard and we need fortitude to face them. Despite it all, there remains much to savour. There is still room left for beauty and happiness.
How should we think about our life as it draws to an end? “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion in her 1979 essay “The White Album.” What story should we tell ourselves in old age, when time is running out? What story will help make sense of our personal history, allows us to understand what has gone before and properly live what life is left?
It takes courage to look at and try to understand your life, since all long lives perforce contain not only success and perhaps even triumph, but also failure, error, regret, sadness, even tragedy. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates at his trial on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens. We should not die without having examined the life we are leaving. We should not die without having tried to understand our own narrative. This is the grand existential task of old age.
For the old, physical and mental decline is inevitable and irreversible. This process of decline can be all-consuming and frightening.ALAIN JOCARD/AFP/Getty Images
For the old, physical and mental decline is inevitable and irreversible. When you’re young, the mind is master of the body. As you age, your relationship with your body changes. The body becomes the master. It demands more and more attention. As the body deteriorates, the mind itself may weaken. This process of decline can be all-consuming, frightening, painful, and in some cases almost impossible to manage. You spend your time seeing medical specialists – rheumatologists, cardiologists, respirologists, ophthalmologists, urologists, neurologists, prosthodontists, otolaryngologists – and waiting in hospital emergency rooms. The descent into decrepitude draws deeply on your personal resources. Aging interferes with your ability to do what you want to do and the things you must do.
The worst incident of old age is the death of people you love. This is the hardest part. My best friend of more than 60 years died last year. Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote in Sonnets from the Portuguese, “Behold and see/ What a great heap of grief lay hid in me...” In his book Bereavement, the English psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote, “The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love.” Some will tell you that grief is the price of love, but they are wrong. As many have said, grief is the continuation of love.
I look at photographs of my friend and I together, some going back to the 1960s. Old photographs have great power. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, the French literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes wrote, “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”
When an old friend dies, part of your history, the part you shared with him, dims and eventually dies as well. But not completely. Memory offers succour. Henry Bolingbroke in Shakespeare’s Richard II: “I count myself in nothing else so happy/ As in a soul remembering my good friends.”
As you age and lose friends, old photographs have great power.GETTY IMAGES
In the heavy kit bag of old age is the prosaic and unavoidable problem of money. Like everyone else, old people cannot know with certainty how much money they have today or predict future income with reliability. (Current worth and future income depend on unpredictable markets and other external factors.) An old person does not know how long he will live. He doesn’t have time to recover from exogenous financial shocks. He has almost no way to increase his income (an octogenarian barista?) or reduce his obligations, which are likely increasing year-by-year. How long must the money last? And, our needs, as we age, vary and are unpredictable. What will be the trajectory of physical and mental decline? Who will help us when we need it?
When I talk to my family and friends about these things, and express my gnawing doubts and persistent fears, their reaction is often unsympathetic. They say, impatiently, can’t you be more cheerful? Why the gloom and doom, mister? Look on the bright side. Count your blessings. You’re a lucky guy! Sometimes, their response reminds me of the rebarbative prose found in supermarket greeting card aisles (You’re not getting older, you’re getting better!) Sometimes friends take my wife to one side and ask, “Is Philip okay? Is he depressed?” She tells them I am not depressed. She is right.
There are two ways of thinking about old age. The bad way is to pretend that the inevitable accompanying indignities and vicissitudes are not all that important and try to ignore them. Why discuss these things? There is nothing to be done. The good way is the opposite, to engage with old age and fully acknowledge and confront its unpleasant implications. I don’t think trying to see things realistically is a sign of depression – quite the opposite. The clear-eyed confronting of problems is always a good idea. Then you have a better chance of dealing with them, as best you can. Clarity and honesty are virtues in themselves, to be pursued. The truth will set you free.
In old age you can engage yourself in reading novelists you haven't read, listening to new music or even taking a moment to ponder the nuances of John Constable’s painting, The Hay Wain.
What does the future offer the elderly? You may have lost much but there is much that remains. You may have lost people you loved, but people you love are still alive – friends, children, grandchildren. You can no longer go jogging at dawn, or play three sets of tennis, but you can walk through the park on a spring day and listen to susurration in the trees and streams. And as you walk through the park, you may see a Red-tailed Hawk, a Saw-whet Owl, or a Great Egret. You rejoice in the dazzling complexity, tenacity and beauty of nature.
You discover new writers who delight – Javier Marías, António Lobo Antunes, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. You listen to the Fantasia in F minor by Franz Schubert, and to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing Girl from the North Country. “If you’re travelin’ in the north country fair/ Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline/ Remember me to one who lives there...” You finally master Für Elise and Georgia on My Mind on the piano, something you’ve been trying to do for a long time (at last, says your patient piano teacher). You ponder Constable’s painting The Hay Wain. You become contemplative and mull over problems that you never considered before. Why is there something rather than nothing?
The life force – the will to live, love, create, and endure – burns strong in those who are old. Life wants to thrive.