aging tagged posts

You reach a point in life—I’m not sure when it began but I know it has—that your people—friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, teammates— who have died begin to rival in number, and feel as present to you, as those who are still living. This represents some kind of turning point no one ever alluded to in my formative years, when they suggested all the exciting things awaiting me in my maturity.

No one ever took me aside back then in a candid moment and intoned, “All they’re saying is true, but at a certain point, you will also begin to suffer loss upon loss, and it will last until the very day you, too, will perish from this earth.”

Much as we suspect that might not be the most helpful and inspiring bit of wisdom for an elder to pass along to a youth in bloom, I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be at least as helpful as the traditional exhortations along the lines of, “You can be anything you w...

If I believed in an afterlife, I would state without hesitation that I’m gonna miss this planet when I’m gone and heading off somewhere else. This feeling grows all the more acute with age, given that with the passage of time and the abundance of good fortune I have enjoyed through a now long-in-the-tooth 70 years, life truly does get more precious and appreciated every day.

Reveled in, actually.

This could all change on a dime, of course, if my luck were to turn and I was struck by severe illness or debilitation. When life becomes merely bearable for the duration or unbearably wracked with suffering, then a final closing of the lids and fadeout loom as a most welcome attraction.

But after a birthday weekend of multiple events that included hosting a large gathering of folks for whom it represented the first substantial social occasion following the pandemic, it looks like this day will not be a fadeou...

Watching Robert Mueller’s halting, tentative, sometimes fumbling responses to being grilled for hours by highly charged (and much younger) congressmembers today, I was struck anew with my increasing conviction that past, say, age 70, people should no longer try to become leaders of their country.

Call me ageist if you will, but my reasoning is not that I don’t think elderly people have much to offer the world (so long as they keep their wits about them). It’s just that ideally, they move into a senior advisory role, a steadying hand, a source of wisdom and historical perspective in the ear of younger, more energetic leaders who benefit greatly from their senior confidantes.

Mueller, just short of 75, looked and sounded somewhat lost a good deal of the time yesterday over a grueling 6-hour stretch as he faced two different committees, half of their members hostile and yelling at him from the get-go, ...

The problem isn’t so much that in the end, we die. It’s in all the time leading up to the end. Not death, but severe decline is what puts fear in our hearts. A long debilitating illness or just aging that cuts us off progressively (regressively, come to think of it) from all that we love.

We all peak physically at some 30 years of age, but robustness and increased life satisfaction can persist for decades longer as we go about building our lives, hopefully coming to accept our aging and its limitations with equanimity and often, good doses of humor.

But the decline does march on, as inexorable as fall following summer.

At a certain point, we stop running, then hiking, then walking without assistance, then walking altogether.

We stop driving long distances, then at night, then at all.

No more foreign travel, then it’s no to flying anywhere, then no more leaving our town, our house, and finally our room ...

Books on aging are all the rage at Amazon. As well they should be, because there are so damn many of us aging Boomers, and we tend to have money to buy the books that tell us how to “age well” and keep our playfulness and maintain our memories and our balance and our joints and our portfolios and our erections and moistness and thirst for life, life, and more life. And still we die.

Can’t someone do something about that?

(Actually, they’re trying—figuring out the exact mechanisms of cell death occupies many learned scientists at our august aging institutes, and when that code is finally cracked and reversed, we can all say hello to the ethical, economic and environmental dilemmas of eternal life. Count me among those glad to bypass the option…)

I was in line at the Whole Foods meat counter recently, standing between two late 20s men and a matronly black woman...