Category: Death and Old Age

Very Old People, Vollendungsromans,  and Lore Segal

When I was young, I devoured “coming of age” novels.  These works are often classified as Bildungsromans – bildung meaning “education” and romans, “novel.”  Think of Catcher in the Rye, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or Little Women – you surely had your own favorites.  I clung to such books because I was looking for a chart for navigating my changing world.  Now, I suppose, YA (Young Adult) novels fill this niche – although I would guess there might be a good reason to read an adult-level book if an adult is what you are trying to become (grumbles the old lady).

As I approach old age or move from a “greener” old age to a drier, more fragile, old age, I look for books about the coming of an even older age.  There is also a term for books about the “winding down” of life: Vollendungsroman.  And, while it is important to me that such books be written by someone who has experienced the last vestiges of life, there are not a whole lot of people who are still writing at the outer limits, into their 90s or beyond.  I have written about some of them here, but we just lost a master in this regard, and it is Lore Segal whom I want to talk about today.

Last October, there was an article entitled “A Master Storyteller at the End of Her Story” in the NYTimes Sunday magazine about Lore Segal’s last days.  It was published in the same month that she died at age 96 and noted that she wrote (sometimes dictating) until the very end. In the article was this notation from an author-friend of Segal’s:

“With writers who survive into their old age my sense is that sometimes the spirit is willing, but the ability to get it onto the page starts to wane,” says the critic and author James Marcus, a close friend of Lore’s. “It’s just not true for Lore.”

He goes on to say that he was struck by her late writings’ “unsparing depiction of a period of life – namely the end – that is typically rendered with a gauzy wistfulness, if it’s ever rendered at all.”   Segal herself says this:

The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words.  And being old is being old.  Dying is dying.  You must not be scared to say it.

No euphemisms for this old lady.  She wrote a series of stories about a group of old ladies who have met periodically for lunch over the decades.  Many of the stories were collected in Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories, but the last one was published in the New Yorker just as Segal died; it was a series of vignettes about her ladies and was entitled “Stories About Us.”

When I was newly married, I talked to other young women about keeping house (how often do you wash your sheets?), furnishings, saving up to buy a house.  When I was a young mother, I queried my friends about how to get babies to sleep through the night.  As a working woman, I had lunch with my friends and talked about our bosses, chances for promotion, what to wear to the office, and whether to divorce our husbands.  Later, when we were all middle-aged, we talked about retirement – where, when, how much did we need?  Newly retired people talk about travel, classes, investments, hobbies.  Slightly older people seem to discuss physical therapists, dental work, cruises, and fears for our grandchildren.  All of this is familiar I am sure – but what do really old people talk about?  Lore Segal gives this to us. Her ladies are done with trivial topics.  Together, they are looking into the face of the death, and it is refreshing.

Segal’s ladies have rules.  They take a full twenty minutes (and no more) to chronicle their latest ailments; they keep up with each other’s families, but also with a limit.  They strategize with each other about how to stay in their own apartments (despite the machinations of their desperate families). They think out loud about the end of life.  How will it happen?  Who will go next?  They have conversations that they could not have with their children or grandchildren.  “Our children would not believe how calmly we look around the table wondering which one of us will be next,” says one of the ladies.  They are proud of being “commonsensical.”

They talk about all the things they have resolved never to do again – travel, see movies in the theater, driving – and then they talk about reneging on their resolutions.  They bond against their common enemies – who are often their own children.  They support each other, while realizing that holding on forever is a losing cause.  And they are brave.  Oedipus at Colonus walks into the sacred grove to meet his fate; these ladies face the ambulances and nursing homes with the same grace. (By the way, Oedipus at Colonus was written when Sophocles was over 90.)

Many of the ladies in the stories are Holocaust survivors; Lore Segal was one.  She came to England on the Kindertransport, and later to New York with her mother.  In the end, these ladies come back to that early experience of knowing death was just outside the door.  “There are no happy endings,” one of the characters reminds us.  They reminisce that they have spent their busy, intellectual lives asking “why?” and “what is it all about?”  with few answers.  And still the end comes knocking at the door.  Reading Segal reminds us that this is the human condition.  And the attitude toward the human condition should be sharing, acceptance, and the noticing of how the “fuchsia blooms” on our way out.  Lore Segal’s stories are highly recommended.

How Do You “Mask Despair”? How Do You Handle a “November of the Soul”?

As my regular readers know, I have been mulling over Moby-Dick after a recent re-reading.  (Re-reading is highly recommended; see my blog here.)  In the very beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tells us that when he is starting to despair, when he feels the “November of the soul,” he goes to sea.  Ishmael thinks that this is a universal solution, and the reason that all over “Manhattoes” (Manhattan) people in despair migrate to the shore, to the docks, and gaze upon the ocean: “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”  The ocean does help me when I am in the doldrums.   Perhaps it is the immensity and power of the ocean in relation to the paltriness of one human life.  I recently had a welcome dose of the sea, but it is not readily available to us all and is only a temporary antidote.

Thoreau reminds us that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” so we know we are not alone.  There are others, many others, in the clutches of despair.  Old age may or may not be more liable to this condition, but it definitely provides less distraction from our own minds.  In our younger days, when we had jobs, children, obligations and a hectic schedule all around, there was still despair, but perhaps little time to consider it.  Now, it descends during quiet late afternoons and the wee hours of the morning.  And, lately, every time we turn on the news.

The ocean helps, but so does nature in all its forms.  Wendell Berry finds relief (not alleviation) from despair in wild things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

Berry finds “grace,” but only “for a time.”

There are other ways, additional ways, that we handle despair.  Niall Williams’ latest novel, Time of the Child, is about an older doctor who has lost his wife and also lost his faith.  Yet Doctor Troy attends mass, in an effort to ward off despair and order his life with the comfort of a schedule, a routine:

The doctor attended Mass, but without devotion.  After his wife Regina was taken by a cancer he hadn’t seen coming, he had lost the relic of faith he once had.  To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more or less than how to get through another day.

Oh, the things that we do to “mask despair”!  Is this perhaps the reason that we old people cling to habits, our houses, our ways of life? Rituals, habits, and repetitions paper over despair.  In a world and a body that are failing us, they are something that is ours – built up over a lifetime.

In an earlier book, This is Happiness, Williams talks about how an old woman has braced herself against despair:

As a shield against despair, she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived.

Again, we know pessimistic people like this, we know times when we are like this ourselves (practically every day in the political realm, I am finding).  Not a pleasant way to live though, but, for some, expecting the worst is often a partial armor against despair.   

 So, what do we do with this despair in relation to our fellow elders: should we share it to make others know that they are not alone?  I remember, as a young woman, the first time I read Virgina Woolf’s admission that life “is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength.”  Someone was finally admitting to me what I thought was obvious, but I had never heard anyone articulate.   Mary Oliver says, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”  Yes.  The alternative is to buck up and, in our bravado, give others the hope that despair can be overcome.   Later in Walden, Thoreau exhorts us: “We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.”  I think I’m with the ladies on this one.

And there is another reason that we should share.  Our fears and worries, spoken out loud, are seldom as scary as when whispered silently through our minds.  When we expose our fears to the light, they do not disappear, but they often seem to shrink – or, at least, stop growing.  Also, remedies can be shared, as noted above.  Go to the sea, go to the woods, find comfort in ritual or habit.  And discovering that others have survived despair is the best encouragement we can find.

For anyone who came to this page by googling “despair,” and is in its clutches, please remember that you can talk to someone by texting or calling 988 for the suicide hotline.  Despair is a fact of life for all of us at times, but if there is no relief, please get some help.  You are not alone.

When I was young, I often used fantasy to counter despair.  I find it doesn’t work so well in old age.  I wrote a story in order to think about that: “Amnesia at the Airport.”  Try it.  Better yet, write your own story.  And share it.

The Afterlife and Psychic Hygiene

Old folks have a reputation for worrying, for longing for the good old days, for catastrophic thinking.  I don’t think I am an overly negative person (my kids might disagree), but these are surely times to try an old lady’s optimism.  I know the stereotype is that elders are backward-looking, but I don’t want to return to the days before vaccines and the Civil Rights Act.  I am, however, searching for something positive to look forward to.

For years, parents could look forward to a better life for our children; upward mobility is not so easy anymore, for economic, environment, and political reasons.  At the founding of the UN, there were hopes for world peace.  We could find comfort that we would leave the world and our loved ones in better shape than we found them.  But no more.   So how can we alleviate our worries, calm our psyches, have the courage to soon leave life behind?

In “The Stages of Life” (recommended), Carl Jung acknowledged that old people needed something good to anticipate, and he suggested that the notion of the “afterlife” could have therapeutic value for us elders, particularly as it could take away some of the fear we face as we begin “transitioning” to death:

I therefore consider that all religions with a supramundane goal are eminently reasonable from the point of view of psychic hygiene.  When I live in a house which I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if on the contrary I feel myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way.  From the standpoint of psychotherapy, it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition, as part of a life process whose extent and duration are beyond our knowledge.

Death as placebo, you say.  Maybe.

It is interesting to note that in the medieval period in Europe there was a general belief that life was getting worse, that mankind was declining from a golden age (Eden?) through silver and brass to iron.   Even earlier, Ovid gave a clear delineation of the ages in the Metamorphoses, from the Golden Age, which “still retained some seed of the celestial force,” through the Age of Silver, when constant springtime was compromised with the addition of the other seasons, to the Age of Bronze, and finally the corrupt Iron Age, when humanity let loose to “Violence and the damned desire of having.”  After this cycle of decline, the population is destroyed in a flood and new men are created out of the earth, and presumably the cycle starts again.  I don’t really know where we are in the current cycle, but “violence and the damned desire of having” sound familiar.  Any rewards or punishments were to be found in another life, in a very real heaven or a very scary hell.  The assumption of “progress” only became common after the Enlightenment.

Americans tend to believe (or say they believe) in an afterlife of some sort (reincarnation counts).  According to a Pew study in 2021, about 73% of Americans believe in heaven but only 62% believe in hell.  There’s optimism for you. More people over 50 believe in heaven and hell than younger people (no surprise there) and more Republicans believe than Democrats.  Maybe that’s why they are not so afraid of an earthly future of global warming and increasing warfare – as they say, “there will be pie in the sky when you die.”

But back to Jung and the idea that believing in an afterlife is an act of psychic hygiene.  Can we make ourselves do it?  As John Lennon inferred, we are past that.   “Imagine there’s no heaven/It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us, only sky.”  Not believing in heaven is “easy;” believing has become very difficult – a little like trying to believe in Santa Claus again.  And yet I understand where Jung is coming from.  In his memoir (recommended) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung has a chapter entitled “Life After Death,” in which he recalls glimpses of eternity that he got as a child and again cautions against ridiculing the therapeutic comfort that believers receive:

Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence.  They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries. One has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal.  What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

This led me to think about Herman Melville.  In a little-read book Melville titled The Confidence Man (written by the master just after Moby-Dick), one of the characters cautions against forcing old people up against the truth:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you.  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

And that is what facing the truths of our world reminds me of – “a supper too hearty.”  Is a belief in an afterlife an answer?  Simone de Beauvoir suggested in The Coming of Age that we all needed a project in old age, we must continue the good fight. Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.  In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.”  Yes.  But.  She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) that it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.”  And where does that leave us?

In this, as in most things, I land in Spinoza’s camp. Spinoza said that we were thinking about eternity in the wrong way; he says that we think of eternity as a matter of time rather than a matter of the moment, of awareness:

If we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse it with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory, which they believe remains after death. (Ethics V)

Reminding myself of my own mortality (try the Buddhist Five Recollections daily), helps me do this.  William Blake puts it more poetically:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

For an example of a very old lady’s momentary heaven, you might try my short story, “Like Heaven.”  For a blog on another aspect of this subject, try, “Retirement, Death, and the Land of Cockaigne.”  And try to put into words what it is you do believe.

An Old Lady Thinks About Population Statistics

One of the “constructive hobbies” that I have taken up in old age is reviving my French.  I have never (despite years of instruction in high school and college) been able to speak it, but I once learned to read it well enough to pass a language requirement for a graduate degree. However, I had long forgotten even the basics, and it has taken Duolingo a couple of years to get me to the point of trying to read/translate texts which interest me.  I started with Candide (a little too challenging), and have stepped back to The Little Prince (just my level).  Reading/translating the text slowly has given me a new appreciation of an old book – but more on that in another blog.

I get distracted easily (you might have noticed), and when the aviator is describing the Earth to the little prince, he says that there are about 2 billion grande personnes (adults) on the planet.  That got me looking up population statistics.  Now, The Little Prince was written in 1943, and there were no good demographic numbers during WWII, but the UN started keeping records after the war, and in 1951, the year I was born, the world population was estimated at 2.5 billion (presumably including children).  In 2024, the same organization estimated the population at 8.1 billion – an increase of 224% in my lifetime.  Compare this with the world population estimates for the nineteenth century, when over 100 years the population only increased by 60%.

The increase in the USA has not been quite that dramatic.  In 1951, there were about 150 million people in the United States; in 2024 the population was hitting 342 million – an increase of 128%.  There seem to be more people everywhere, though the increases are not evenly distributed.  Florida, for example, grew by almost 700% in my lifetime.  Massachusetts, where I currently reside, has only grown about 52% over the same duration.  In our rich country, populations have migrated to warmer climates, shorelines, desirable suburbs.  We all know this.  When I was growing up, my family had a summer place on a large island in Rhode Island.  It was almost a shack – no insulation, no telephone, plywood flooring.  The island was dotted with summer people like us and local fishermen (who lived in stouter dwellings).  Most of the island was shrubs (bayberry and blueberry) and small freshwater ponds.  Now there is not a vacant lot, shacks have been replaced by McMansions, and the freshwater ponds and their diverse habitats have been overrun by invasive species fed by the runoff from lawn treatments.  It is crowded, and it is so very different than it was.  You all know places like this.  It breaks my heart.

Almost nowhere is exempt.  Roads are crowded, tourist destinations are often unbearably swarming, and resources of all kinds are challenged.  Old people feel this particularly, as they can remember when it was otherwise.  Childhood must be very different when there are no wild places to explore.  Along with the increase in population of course, we have also seen an increase in the resources required to fuel a rising standard of living.  And poor Mother Earth is moaning under the weight of so many people. (Disclosure here – my own family is contributing to this problem; we have three children and eight grandchildren.  We are more than replacing ourselves.)

And yet, we have a cohort of people moving into Washington who think that a decrease in the rate of population growth is a problem.  One of them recently tweeted, “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”  This sidesteps the probability that population increases are a major reason for global warming, and also the facts of science, which contradict the hypothesis of “population collapse.”  But these are people who never let science get in the way of fearmongering.

The fact that life expectancy has increased by about 11 years since I was born has contributed not only to the population increases, but also to major changes to age distributions, which create problems in themselves.  Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that burdening our society, our planet, with an ever-increasing population would have beneficial results.  And if we really want more people in this country, why don’t we let in more immigrants?

Left alone, Nature takes care of overpopulation.  On that island in RI – severed from the mainland except for one small bridge – the rabbit population sometimes grew tremendously fast.  Rabbits everywhere.  Then the foxes would arrive, and the next year we would have no rabbits.  Soon the foxes – without prey – would presumably trot over the bridge and go elsewhere.  Within a year or two, the rabbits would return, and the cycle would continue.  It is not at all clear that Nature will take care of the human overpopulation problem, however.  Or that she will not be thwarted if she tries.

To many of the old, myself included, the world seems too full of people and yet devoid of any real human beings to interact with.  Try calling your doctor’s office.  Real trees have been replaced by phone trees; real people have been replaced by AI.  Housing is scarce and therefore expensive; driving has become onerous – don’t attempt to navigate the highways on either coast of Florida in the winter.  I am not a scientist, but it does not seem to me that we should be worried about increasing our population; I think we should be worrying about the quality of life (not lifestyle) of the people we already have.

Most of my statistics either came from the US census or the UN.  A very good site that compiles these statistics and is considered to be accurate is Worldometer.com.  I apologize for any inaccuracies and will gladly accept any corrections!

Build Your Own World, Create Your Own Day, Construct Your Own Life

When I was young, I thought I would have figured things out by the time I was old.  (Old then being about 50.)  Yet I seem to be fighting many of the same battles with myself that I have been fighting for seven decades.  I know I don’t need another book to tell me how to fulfill my purpose, stop procrastinating, live according to my values and priorities.  I have read a slew of those books and know what it is that I am supposed to do.  That is not the problem.  Actually doing what I know is the best thing is the problem.

Moving closer to my teenage grandchildren and hearing them interact with their parents has been somewhat enlightening in this regard.  The conversation goes like this.  Parent: “Do you think eating all that candy (or staying up late playing video games or spending your allowance on silly things) is a good choice?”  Child: “I know, I know – but I really wanted…” You get the picture.  Many days this same conversation is going on in my head, but both characters are… me.  I know what the good choices are, but as Saint Paul laments in Romans 7:19, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.  Or as Ado Annie says in Oklahoma, “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

I have won the battle in some cases.  I keep a serious journal and have an exercise routine of sorts.  I take my vitamins and see my dentists and doctors as required.  I make my bed and remember birthdays and get a blog posted a couple of times a month, yet my life is overshadowed by the things I want to do and do not do.

Friends have told me just to climb out from under the guilt.  Retired people don’t really need to do anything, do they?  And yet this is not an answer for me.  I want to end every waking day by being satisfied by what I have accomplished, but I also am looking more closely (than I would like) at the end of my life.  The big deadline looms.

Three pieces of advice have helped me lately, and I am glad to pass them along.  Two are quotes from the Transcendentalists, first from Emerson in “Nature:” “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”  Birds single-mindedly build their nests; we should do the same.  In old age, our nests are for nurturing ourselves and not our babies, they are for cradling us to the end.  No better reason for building your own world.

If Emerson seems to call for too much, Thoreau parses it into to smaller chunks for us to consider.  In Walden, he tries to whittle his life down to the marrow; he trims his expectations to the day in front of him.  “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  Make this day a good one – and our days will add up to a life, a world.   Thoreau’s gentle exhortation has gotten me through some rough patches.

Lastly, I have been reading a wonderful novel, This is Happiness, by Niall Williams.  The book was recommended in a recent NYTimes piece by Ann Patchett and is narrated by a very old man who is recalling the coming of electricity to his Irish village.  Read it to find out if the residents are happier before or after technology catches up with them!  In any case, the seventy-eight-year-old man reflects on this very subject:

Not that you ever quite know what that is [the better version of ourselves], still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you.  I write this now. Having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard.  With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour.

And what are the fruits of this fruitless endeavour?  Perhaps that we affected the quality of our days with Thoreau and built our own (yet imperfect) world with Emerson.  I am happy to make an old lady’s accommodation with these truths.

What Abides (Into Old Age)?

What makes the 73-year-old me that I see in the mirror, that I identify as “me,” the same as the four-year-old in the picture on my desk?  No one would recognize me in the four-year-old.  Even I have trouble identifying what remains of her.  As we age, “what abides?” is a question worth pondering.  People try to answer it in different ways – some look up old friends, some write memoirs.  We all dread the loss of what we think of as our “selves;” I watched my mother turn into a different person in her late eighties, and yet she retained many early memories.  In fact, she seemed to live in her earliest memories.  What of her self was lost, and what remained?

These questions made me think of that old word: abide.  In old age, what abides?  What stays and makes us us until the very end?  Or is the concept of a constant being just fallacious?  In “Ulysses,” Tennyson posits that “much abides” in old age – that while the body fades and weakens, the will is strong:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” when he was a young man; I would posit that the admonition “not to yield” would not be the advice of an old man.

On the other hand, Thomas Hardy was around sixty when he addressed “abiding” into old age in “I Look Into My Glass:”

But Time, to make me grieve.
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

While Tennyson wants to concentrate on the value of what abides, Hardy finds it a form of torture, as his spirit wants to do what his body cannot do.  And then there is Robert Graves and his poem about looking in the mirror, written when he was about 72:

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.

For Graves, what abides is “presumption.”  And more specifically, “a boy’s presumption.”

In its intransitive form (as used by Tennyson and Hardy above), abide means “to remain stable or fixed in a state;” this is the same as the meaning it takes in the great hymn, “Abide with Me.”  The tale is that the author of the hymn wrote it at the deathbed of a friend, a friend who asked him to abide with him until the end.  The Biblical reference is Luke 24:29. The disciples (after they had met the risen Christ) plead with Jesus: “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.”  This is from the lovely King James Version; I would note that some later versions use the word stay rather than abide.   I prefer abide, which is related to the word “abode.”

This is an old problem.  The ancient Greeks pondered the problem of the Ship of Theseus.  As told by Plutarch in the first century, Theseus’s original ship was used for a ceremony commemorating his defeat of the Minotaur; over the centuries, almost every part of the ship had to be replaced, as it rotted and rusted.  A thousand years later, was it still really the Ship of Theseus?  Sixty-nine years later am I still my four-year-old self?

So, the question still is: What abides?  What abides when we walk with a limp, when we can’t remember the librarian’s name or where we put the library book?  What abides that can reassure us of who we are?  Tennyson would leave us with the impetuosity of youth; Hardy would have us the prisoner of passions we can’t act on; Graves chides us for presumption.  I firmly believe that something of value abides, and I spend a bit of time trying to winnow out the chaff to find it.

Retirement, Death, and The Land of Cockaigne

Younger people dream of retirement – of that rosy day when they have reached the right age for social security or pension payments.  Or banked enough money in retirement accounts to cover their living expenses for the rest of their days.  Middle-agers discuss retirement with others in the office; they fantasize about where they will live and where they will travel; they try to imagine not having to wake up to an alarm every morning or having to turn out the light earlier than they would like.  I had such fantasies, but that was many, many years ago.  Now, I can’t imagine how I ever worked nine- or ten-hour days, put up with the constant aggravation of an office, or made a commute in rush hour traffic.  I don’t miss it, never missed it much.

Here is what I sometimes miss though – the hope for an event which is going to make life easier.  I sabotaged this wish lately by moving to be closer to family and taking on the logistics of a move (will I ever be able to get through the red tape at the DMV or find a primary care doctor?).  In the middle of the move, one of the family members that I was moving to be close to unexpectedly passed away.  He died while the movers were emptying my house in North Carolina, and his funeral was the day the movers arrived with our stuff in New England. 

And then there are the minor losses – routines, habits, a sense of where things are.  Finding further problems with an already imperfect new/old house.  Major and minor problems and aggravations are constant.   Locating a cooking utensil is suddenly a big deal.  Bills have to be carefully monitored during the address change so that payments are not missed.  New telephone numbers and wireless passwords must be noted and memorized.  The view out the windows has changed.  Being close to family means being physically and blessedly closer to their lives – which unfortunately also include their problems.

So, if we can no longer look forward to retirement, what does the elderly one look forward to?  Assisted living, the nursing home?  We decided when we moved that we were not ready for communal living of any kind, and – while it may be necessary someday – it is far from our ideal.  It is not something to hope for.

In medieval Europe, there was the peasant concept of Cockaigne, or pais de cocaigne, which translates to “the land of plenty.”  It was pictured as a kind of heaven with enough to eat, time to rest, the abolition of work, and – of course – free sex.  It was something for poor men and women to dream about, a heaven more to their taste than the Christian one.  As I was going through the trials of the last few weeks, I wondered what my equivalent was.  If I believe in any kind of afterlife, it surely is not the “pie in the sky when you die” sort.  And, yet, I found in the midst of seemingly irresolvable problems, that I was reminding myself over and over again, that I would soon find myself (or more accurately others would find me) dead and all my worries would go with me to the crematorium.  So, is this what old people look forward to – leaving their problems and their bodies (which often are one source of their problems) behind them?  Interesting thought.

Death as something to look forward to?  An alien concept in our culture but not without its believers.  The wonderful poet Stevie Smith wrote “I have a friend/At the end/Of the world.  /His name is a breath/Of fresh air.”  His name, of course, is death.  The poem is “Black March.”

I do not wish myself dead.  I just wish to get settled in and live a more routine existence.  But Jorge Borges found some comfort in imagining his own death – he even wrote a story about it, “August 25, 1983“, in which Borges conjures up an older version of himself on his deathbed.  I once made an exercise of doing the same for myself (see my blog entry “Fantasies to Reject in Old Age” from last May).  It was informative and scary.

I will get used to my new location.  I will unpack my ladle and find a dermatologist and get a new driver’s license.  But none of that happens quickly and all of it is harder than it used to be.  But there is really no alternative, no Cockaigne, without going through it.  I try to tell myself that it is useful to challenge myself in my old age, but it is not easy.  It is worse than I thought it would be; I hope that, when I come to it, I will be able to say the opposite about death.  At least that transition will not require a trip to the DMV.

The Nearings, the Yaloms, and Two Great Poets – When Death Comes to Good Marriages

Over the past month or so, I have read three memoirs about long, happy marriages which were visited by the death of one of the partners.  Close couples often joke about hoping that they will both expire at the same moment, but the partners know that this will not happen; one of them will watch and one will die.  How to cope? 

These narratives of death’s visitation are similar in format, while different in tone. All three books alternate the descriptions of the last days of the marriage with memories from earlier times, with tales of falling in love and creating a life.  The rituals of each marriage are carefully documented – rituals which mean so much and are so important and, at the same time, are so hard to cling to when illness and tragedy intercedes.

In A Matter of Death and Life, Irvin Yalom (The Schopenhauer Cure, When Nietzsche Wept) and Marilyn Yalom alternate chapters as they tell of the end of her cancer treatment, and her death surrounded by family and friends.  It is the relationships that are important to the Yaloms.  During her last days, Marilyn stopped treatment and chose death (and it seems like a good choice) – and while she can accept death, she has more trouble about leaving her loved ones:

Still, if I am not afraid of death itself, I feel the continued sadness of departing from my loved ones.  For all the philosophical treatises and for all the assurances of the medical profession, there is no cure for the simple fact that we must leave each other. 

It is these loved ones and their memories that Irvin thinks will be the “afterlife” of himself and Marilynne, but he knows that this too is ephemeral:

I know that I will exist in ethereal form in the minds of those who have known me or read my work but, in a generation or two, anyone who has ever known the flesh-and-blood me will have vanished.

Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon are also separated by cancer.  Donald had just recovered from his own grappling with this disease when his much younger wife is diagnosed with leukemia. For years, the couple assumed Donald would predecease Jane and planned accordingly, but such are the plans of men and women.   The couple follow up on every possible chance of recovery, including spending some miserable months in Seatle for a bone marrow transplant.  Nothing works.  The most moving moment in the book is when Donald and Jane finally are convinced that they must “give up” and accept.  There is a strange joyfulness as they throw out all the noxious medicines and look for a brief respite from treatment before the end comes.  They have only eleven days left.

But like Marilyn Yalom, it is the loss of relationships, of contact with loved ones, that bothers Jane.  “Dying is nothing, but…the separation!” she howls.  Jane and Donald prepare poems for her posthumous volume, compose her obituary, pick a Psalm for her funeral.  Unlike in the Yaloms’ book, there is some notion of a religious afterlife, at least on Jane’s part. 

The Nearings had a different kind of ending.  Scott Nearing is 100 years old and frail, but he decides that he has had enough and stops eating.  In Loving and Leaving the Good Life Helen Nearing, writes:

He would take no pills, no drugs, and hoped to avoid doctors.  He became less and less concerned with continuing to inhabit a weakening body.  When he could no longer carry his part of the load and take care of himself, he was ready to go on.  I was at one with him in this.  The way one dies, it seemed to me, should reflect the way one had lived, and I was glad to help him do it gracefully.

Scott dies peacefully by his wife’s side.  If you have read their earlier book (Living the Good Life – a hippie Bible) about how they consciously set out to live a good and meaningful life in Vermont, you will recognize the intention to do things consciously, and, as Helen puts it, gracefully.

These memoirs clearly served a therapeutic service for the writers.  The act of tracing the roots of the relationship is preparatory to trying to acknowledge what the last separation means.  Reading these books – all highly recommended – should be done long before we are in the position of facing such realities.  Planning for the unknown is impossible, but contemplating the possibilities can be a worthwhile exercise.

These were all good marriages, but we are reminded that even good marriages come to an end.  Irvin Yalom concludes his memoir thus:

I shall end our book with the unforgettable opening words of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”  That image both staggers and calms.  I lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and take comfort.

Good marriages intensify that “brief crack of light,” and while we cannot stop mortality, we can appreciate every good day we are granted.  There are other lessons in these books, but this is the wisdom that remains.

 

 

 

 

Fantasies to Reject in Old Age (or Sooner)

Youth is a time for fantasy, but it occurs to me that we may never outgrow some illusions.  The nature of our fantasies changes as we age (Santa Claus and Prince Charming may have been discarded), but our need for such magical thinking apparently does not.  I have been reading Swamplands of the Soul, by the Jungian James Hollis, which is a far more uplifting book than you might expect from the title.  Hollis and others whom I will discuss think that elderly fantasies are not entirely harmless.  And if you think you don’t have any such illusions, please read on.

Hollis is particularly interesting on the subject of aging and fantasy. He says that there are at least a couple of fantasies that we all need to reject as we grow old:

The two greatest fantasies we are obliged to relinquish in the second half of life are that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some “Magical Other” who will rescue us from existential isolation.

My body has been working hard to convince me that it won’t last forever; so, I think I have probably come close to accepting my mortality (ask me on my deathbed).   But the “rescue” fantasy is harder – and it includes, according to Hollis, “Taking responsibility for choices, to cease blaming others or expecting rescue from them, …and to accept the pain of loneliness.”   I do have trouble with the blame thing – partly because my family of origin loved the blame game and partly because it is indeed an easy way of avoiding responsibility.  I have spent countless hours with therapists, siblings, and friends detailing the sins of the childhood that made me what I am.  But that’s over.  The older I get, the surer I am that those recalled injustices just don’t matter anymore.

As for the “Magical Other,” I think I have finally learned that no one can rescue me from myself.  I also realized over time that it was not simply a knight in shining armor I was looking for to redeem me. I often fell prey to the false belief that more money, another house, a new situation, a grand trip could do the job – never seeing that any remediation for “existential isolation” comes from acceptance within.

Much “magical thinking” is the product of conceiving our life as a story.  As James Carse says in his wonderful Infinite Games, “Because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also [think] we know what the narrative is…. [But] true story tellers do not know their own story.”

And of course, if we have a story, we want a happy ending.  This is another fantasy to reject in old age (related to Hollis’s second one).  My husband and I have recently lost the last of our parents, and it is clear that life’s end may be many things, but it is seldom happy and often it is quite the opposite.  The old have happy moments, happy memories – but to tell ourselves that everything will come out right in the end (think Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is indulging in a fantasy.   Many of us delay making necessary changes to our lives because we picture a quiet deathbed scene in our own bed, with loving (and not burnt out from taking care of us) friends and relatives holding our hands and playing our favorite music.  May it be so for you, but I hope I know enough not to count on it.  But accepting this does not mean despair.  Joko Beck posited that it could mean something else entirely:

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way the want it to.  Then they can see the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below – you may know the story] – because that is all there is, this very moment. (Everyday Zen)

It is easy for me to say that I accept Hollis’s imperatives to accept mortality and to reject optimistic fantasies and magical thinking.  It is not easy to do, and recidivism occurs frequently.  Young children often cannot tell fantasy from reality; dreams seem real, Santa’s reindeer can fly, and there really are monsters under the bed.  We are older, but are we wiser?  We justify telling lies to children to protect them, to make the world seem less threatening.  An argument might be made that elders need the same protections.  I will, however, keep trying to “put away childish things.”

Jorge Borges wrote a story, “August 25, 1983,” in which he imagines his own death.  Using his format, I did something similar and found it an interesting exercise.  I highly recommend both the story and the exercise.  What do you think you will have to say at the end of your life?  What was important, transformational, disappointing?  Look at it as practice in dealing with reality.

I would also recommend a wonderful book by Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.”  It inspired my story, “Encore.”

A Last Transitioning

I just returned from visiting a ninety-eight-year-old relative who, although she is weak and has been under hospice care for many months, has never spoken of her own death in my presence. She has never acknowledged her mortality in any way.  However, since the last time we were with her, she has learned a new word for what she feels she is going through: transitioning.  She affirmed quite emphatically that she was in the process of transitioning, that she would be transitioning soon.  There was never any discussion of what she would be transitioning to, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I guess transitioning seems less terminal, more transitive.  For whatever reason, it is a concept, a term, that she is comfortable with.

This terminology, however, made for some humorous conversations. I heard her, for instance, leave a phone message for a financial manager telling him that she wanted to talk to him because she would be “transitioning” soon.  In this day, when “transitioning” is usually used in a different context, it might make people who don’t know her well wonder if she is having a deathbed gender conversion.  But I don’t mean to make light of it; I am grateful that she has found a word to describe her experience, a word that she can be comfortable with.  And the end of life is surely an ongoing transition which must be borne, appreciated, accommodated.

Our culture has many euphemisms for death; Wikipedia can give you more than fifty.  Many have religious connotations: “going to heaven;” some are earthy: “kick the bucket;” some are transactional: “checking out.”  But we are loath to look at death directly.  Irvin Yalom, my favorite psychiatrist/author, wrote a book entitled Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.  The title comes from a quote from La Rochefoucauld: “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”   Yes, and despite the optimistic title of Yalom’s book and the advice he provides, facing our mortality never seems to get much easier.

Literature gives us many images of death, with deathbed scenes ranging from the horror of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich to the sweet demise of Dicken’s Little Nell.  But, today, I am more interested in poetry, and no one can confront the truth like Philip Larkin.  He wrote an aubade, a poem about early morning hours in bed, in which he talks about lying in the dark facing “the dread of dying, and being dead,” thoughts which “hold and horrify.”  Aubades are usually romantic poems, about lovers having to leave each other at sunrise after a blissful night.  Larkin fixates only on his fear of having to, inevitably, leave life.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

I have known people who claimed they had no fear of death; I never believed them.  I know other people who say they are afraid of the process of dying, but not death itself.  I can almost believe them.  Clearly my skepticism is deeply colored by my own fear of annihilation.

There are other views of death in poetry.  Stevie Smith calls death “Black March” in her poem of that title; she thinks of death as an “old friend,” “a breath of fresh air,” “a change.”  She looks forward to thinking of a visit from her old friend; she seemingly cannot face life without knowing he is somewhere, cloaked in grey chiffon, waiting for her.  “I have a friend/ At the end of the world. / His name is a breath/ Of fresh air.”

And then there is Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent most of his life struggling gallantly with tuberculosis, but has no intention of resisting death when it comes:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

I may never have Stevenson’s openness to death, but I sincerely hope to have Stevie Smith’s confidence that, at some point in my life, death will be a friend.  And I will lose my fear about a final transition.

If you want to contemplate death through some of my fiction, you might try “And Now, A Word from Dead Barry,” or “Tale of Two Grannies.”