Tag: Old Age

Happy Holidays

A few years ago, someone referred me to the opinion pieces of Richard Groves.  His column for Christmas (found here or here) is entitled “In the Beginning, There Were Stories.”  Christmas is surely the time for stories – some of our finest literature is in the form of Christmas stories.  One thinks of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales or Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory.  There is, of course, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and my favorite – Little Women, where we begin with Jo moaning that “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”  As I age, stories are the Christmas presents that I most want – to remember them, to create them.

I love Christmas movies too, but over the last couple of weeks we have had some really bad luck with recent Christmas movies.  Last night, however, we watched “Christmas in Connecticut” from 1945 and enjoyed it thoroughly.  It was silly, sentimental, and predictable – just like Christmas should be.  I also recommend “The Bishop’s Wife.”

I have posted holiday blogs and stories over the years.  Three years ago, I posted “Holidays, Holy Days, and Old Saint Nick.”  For the new year, you might try “Baby New Year and Old Father Time,” or “New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age.”  If you are in the mood for fictional stories (or perhaps quasi-fictional), you might look at “Epiphany,” “Cookie Crumbs,” or “Boxing Day.”  “A Tale of Two Grannies” is not, strictly speaking, a Christmas story, but it is in the mood of the season.

However, if you want the best of all holiday treats in this hectic and over-commercialized season, read Robert Frost’s little poem, “Christmas Trees.”

I wish all the best to my readers this holiday season.  It is our first Christmas back up north, and with the temperature in single digits and a slight snow covering, it looks like it will be a white Christmas for us.  Here’s to a meaningful holiday season and a peaceful and healthy new year – “may your days be merry and bright.”  Thanks for sharing this space with me for another year.

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.

The Threat of Singularity and the Promise of Perennial Philosophy

As I have aged. the pace of technology has surely surpassed my interest in “keeping up.”  I have been intrigued, however, by the notion of the singularity, which is defined in many ways, but often as “a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.” Technology already feels “uncontrollable.”  It forces me to deal with chatbots and answer yes/no questions.  It fights to supplant me.   Even as I write this. Microsoft is pestering me to let its AI “Copilot” help me; it wants to co-opt my place at the keyboard, convinced (and trying to convince me) that it can do whatever it is better than I can.  What AI fails to recognize that it is the doing that matters, not a uniformly “perfect” product.

As I was thinking about this, I was strangely reminded of Aldous Huxley and his “perennial philosophy,” which represents a different kind of quest for doing things in the best way, for improving ourselves, or – more specifically – for living life well.  Seekers for the perennial philosophy pursued ageless universal truths, laws, dharmas, which might enable mankind, individually and communally, to reach their utmost potential.  There was no place in this philosophy for technology or even much science.  It had more to do with getting to know the nature of the kind of beasts we are, the kind of world we live in, and how the two interrelate.  “Know thyself,” said Socrates. 

Huxley’s book was a bestseller in 1945, as shocked and tired people were emerging from the nightmare of WWII.  Reviews were good, with the New York Times noting: “Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.”  Perhaps, after Hiroshima and the gas chambers, no one was looking to technology to solve our problems.  In the last 70 years things have changed; we have become beguiled by technology.  As Wordsworth predicted, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, / Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  Indeed.  Our hearts, our minds, and maybe our souls.  We are apparently far more interested in knowing what machines can do for us than knowing ourselves.  Why? It’s easier.

The machines enticed us, seduced us, slowly. Old folks are very much aware of this. When I was a child, technology (in the guise of Western Auto) gave us a big TV with a tiny screen and one to three channels.  It stood in the heart of the house, and we watched it together.  Step by step, it led us to the internet and streaming, and now watching anything is seldom a communal experience.  In my youth, technology gave us one telephone in the center of the house, so that communications were communal (hard on teen-age girls). Now cell phones are stopping any sort of real face-to-face communication.  The internet has made information easier to find, but harder to verify; common wisdom is no longer looked for or found. No wonder they call it the singularity; in wisdom, as in most things these days, we are “bowling alone.”

I think that Huxley’s perennial philosophy is probably the opposite of singularity; it assumes that the answers lie in the truths of the past and not the unknowns of the future, that we can both formulate the questions and find the answers without mechanical help.  The singularity assumes that machines will find the answers, machines which will soon be smarter than us, and that is a scary thought – unless you think that we will always be in control.  Have we ever been in control?  Did we consciously end up with children in their bedrooms sending pictures to strangers and old folks entranced by online “friends” who are trying to scam them?

Literature has long worried over the ascendency of technology.  RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was written by Karel Capek in 1920.  The play warned us not to turn our back on a robot.  Arthur Clark wrote the novel and screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, based on stories he started in 1948.  HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) was definitely the enemy by the end.  Technology was much cruder in those days, but people were already concerned. As creatures being slowly ingested by technology, we seem to be less worried now than we were then.  It would seem that HAL has made us fat and happy.  And what is the alternative?  A recent bill putting limits on AI development in California was vetoed by the governor after Silicon Valley got incensed.  There is no hope for such legislation on the federal level. 

The perennial philosophy was defined by Aldous Huxley and others as “a school of thought in philosophy and spirituality which posits that the recurrence of common themes across world religions illuminates universal truths about the nature of reality, humanity, ethics, and consciousness.”  In other words, a search for a commonality in proven human thought, faith, and ethics which could give us clues on the way to live better individually or communally.  But no one thought we could outsource that search, or google it, or that the answer would be a complex algorithm.

Computers are yes/no machines.  In the words of E. F. Schumacher, the real questions of life are divergent rather than convergent problems. Designing a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and eventually arrive at an answer. AI could do this. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e., transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment) is a divergent problem.  Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions.  Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.” Schumacher reminds us that, again, it is the doing that matters: “Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves.” 

I appreciate the good that technology has done for us – many of us, including myself, would not still be here without advances in medicine, education, transportation.  But let’s not give away our hearts (“a sordid boon”) – or our lives.  Science may have given us increased longevity, but, as Mary Oliver asks, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  Show me the answer to that question in an algorithm.

Bare Ruin’d Choirs – Seasons and Similes of Old Age

I have been intending to write a blog about the notion of “singularity,” but my readings on the subject seem to go on and on, so I thought I would just look around me and write about the season and the seasons of life.

This is my first autumn back in New England after almost a decade.  We moved from western North Carolina two months ago (just in time, I guess).  Autumn was longer but less colorful North Carolina; there were the brilliant yellows but not the mellow golds and reds.  Fall has always been my favorite season, and I am looking forward to the colors, the smells, and the urgency of buttoning up the house (nesting) before winter arrives.

If autumn is my favorite season, October has always been my favorite month.  For years (until the printing wore off), I used a coffee cup inscribed with Thoreau’s quote about October. Here it is, to remind us to imbibe some of the magic Henry found in October:

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

Back to our earliest records, poets used the seasons of the year as similes for the seasons of life.  We still do it all the time, talking about a “December bride” or someone being “in the autumn of his years.”  These are apt similes, much like that of the Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  We grow and blossom, reap the karma of our earlier life, and close in ourselves with the narrowing of the light at the end of the year.  One significant difference, of course, is that our lives are linear, while nature recycles upon itself. (Or, as Dante contends, the life span is a parabola! See further discussion of that possibility here.) Perhaps the problem is how we look at it; if we could accept that we are part of nature perhaps we would see it differently.

Cicero, in his “On Old Age,” uses many images of old age that relate senescence to the cycles of nature.  Thus we have age as the “tranquil evening” of the life’s day, as the “autumn” or “winter” of the life’s year, as the ripening, maturing, even withering fruit of the tree of life:

There had to be a time of withering, of readiness to fall, like the ripeness that comes to the fruits of the trees and of the earth.  But a wise man will face this prospect with resignation, for resistance against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.

Clearly, the giants of Silicon Vally do not agree that “resistance against nature” is pointless, but more on them in my next blog.

Shakespeare starts his masterful Sonnet 73 about old age with these lines:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Latter day poets use the images of the seasons all the time to connote the ages of man; when Philip Larkin wrote his comic masterpiece about growing older, he titled it “The Winter Palace,” and ended with the image of a last December snowstorm:

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

For more examples, revisit Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves,” or Rilke’s “Autumn.” To find more correlations between the seasons and the stages of life, just look at my (incomplete) list of poems about old age.  And please send me any of your favorite poems to add to the list. Or write one.

But, back to me and to the month of October.  I used to think I was in the October of life, but that is foolish at this point.  If I were a maple tree, my leaves would have long since been raked up and hauled away.  I am more “bare ruin’d choirs” than the rich golds and yellows of this lustrous October.  I am surely in November, and probably most of the way to Thanksgiving.  The “later twilight” of life.  Robert Frost said that sorrow was his “November Guest,” but yet appreciated the season:

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow…

Yet, I can still enjoy the present October while looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of past Octobers, Septembers, Mays.  And forward to the dark and quiet evenings of December.

This Old House

In trying to find a house in the right location in a tight market, my husband and I ended up buying an old house – one that is close in age to ourselves, a 1950’s house with a lot of character and a lot of problems.  It was not the wisest of decisions, but we have always made our housing decisions with our heart and not our brains, and, in the past, we have been able to make things work.  This time, however, we are old and tired, and I am not so sure.  The house has charm, but it is the charm of an old flirt in a wheelchair.

This is not the oldest house we have owned; that prize goes to a beauty we bought in 1999, which had been given to the couple we bought it from as a wedding present from her father.  It was immaculately kept up – not modernized, just kept up.  It had the original cherry kitchen cabinets with a built-in flour sifter.  That house was like people who take care of themselves their whole lives, and do not succumb to either bad habits or cosmetic surgery.  The old house we are in now was not kept up, and all too often, modern “updates” were grafted onto deeper problems.  It has gracious bones but needs both detox and some reconstructive surgery.

Obsolete appliances and rotting wood have got me thinking about the analogies between old houses and old people – a very popular analogy.  I recently ran into this by Frederick Buechner (from Whistling in the Dark):

Old age is not, as the saying goes, for sissies.  There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it’s like living in a house that’s in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn’t work right anymore.  There are bats in the attic.  Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there’s a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather.  The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on.

Buechner’s analogy, of course, reminded me of the old revival song, “This Old House,” by Stuart Hamblen, written about the time that my house was built:

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer, ain’t a-gonna need this house no more.

Ain’t got time to fix the shingles, ain’t got time to fix the floor.

Ain’t got time to oil the hinges or to mend the window pane,

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer I’m getting ready to meet the saints.

Rosemary Clooney had the first hit with the song, but everyone from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson has recorded it.  It was supposedly inspired when Hamblen, while out on a hunting expedition with John Wayne (who else would you go hunting with in the Sierras?), came across a broken-down house where an old dog was guarding his dead master.  Believe that if you want.  The song has a catchy tune and great rhythm, but I think the song mostly resonates because it tells a great truth.  Hamblen reminds us that as the body deteriorates, we are getting closer and closer to not needing it anymore, and that is just how life is – so we might as well sing about it.

I need my body now, however, and partly I need it to make this house livable.  I need it to build a new life one more time.  But I also need to stop hearing my husband moan as he unearths (literally) some new problem.  (Though he denies it, the man is a saint.)

So, we try to cope with this old house in our old age.  Probably a mistake.  Surely feels like a mistake many days.  But maybe the process has some redeeming lessons about accepting what old is.  You can paint it, prop it up, make it over, but it is still an old house.  In the end, one can only enjoy its charms, but that is only possible if you can contain the angst and come to a kind of peace about aging, senescence.  In the Prologue to his Rule, the great St. Benedict tells us that if we grow old it is by way of a truce with God, so that we may have time to “amend our misdeeds” and “to safeguard love.” (See my earlier post, “The Truce of Saint Benedict and Rules of the Road.”) A truce, not a war.  We will fix the house the house as we are able and as we try to “safeguard love.”  We will try to remember that we are fortunate – to grow old, to have a roof, to be busy with meaningful chores.  And we came here to be near family, and there are no regrets in that regard.  As I look at our teenage grandchildren, I wonder how they see us.  And then I think of this old house again.  I hope they think that we have some charm.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Old Marriages/Grow Old Along with Me

I have written about long marriages, old marriages, before (see my blog on romance in old age, “Old Folks and True Love“), but I recently ran across this quote worth sharing from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.  They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.  For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Is love more solid the closer it comes to death?  Shakespeare addresses age in Sonnet 73, beginning with a trope comparing age with the coming of autumn and winter:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The bard finishes with a couplet addressed to his lover:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare is assumed to be writing about a relationship between a young person and an old one; I would say that his sentiments are even more true when both participants are old.

And it is not just each other that we old folks love; the marriage itself becomes a valued object.  The marriage contains history (good and bad), a moral code (carefully crafted over the years), and a full set of rituals and traditions.  It even has a liturgy.  My husband, for example, ends every meal by sighing and saying it was “the best meal he ever ate,” (even when he was the cook).  I can be relied on for the morning weather report promptly upon sitting down for breakfast.  And so it goes – you long-married folks doubtless perform your own liturgies on a regular basis.

When we were wed over three decades ago, dear friends gave us a sun dial which has traveled with my husband and me to four different states.  “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be” is inscribed on the top of it.  It is a line from Browning.  We thought we were already “old” when we got married in our forties, and here we are in our seventies.  For us, Browning’s prophecy proved true – the latter years have only gotten better.  Part of it is that the family/stepfamily responsibilities have diminished, but mostly it is that we started with some trust, and worked hard to remain trustworthy to each other in every way.

John Lennon loved the quote from Robert Browning.  In the last year of his life, he used it as a basis for a song.  At the same time Yoko Ono wrote a companion piece based on Elizabeth Browning’s “How Do I Love You, Let Me Count the Ways.”  Before either song could be released, John was gone. John and Yoko were not allowed the chance to see how and if their love matured.  John thought about it in his song, however:

Grow old along with me

Two branches of one tree

Face the setting Sun

When the day is done.

Divorce was common in our generation; there are few of my childhood friends who are still with their first spouse.  And baby boomers are still getting divorced at a high rate. While divorce rates have declined ever so slightly over the past two decades, one cohort has been bucking the trend: baby boomers. “Research shows that boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—are divorcing more than any other generation.”  This is from a generation whose parents – no matter how much they bickered and sulked – rarely got divorced.  In some ways, I envy those of my cohort who were able to stay with their “original spouses.”  But by the time I made the choice for the long haul the second time, I apparently knew what I was doing.  May it be so for you.

I have written many short stories about old marriages.  You might look at “The More Loving One” or “Slip Slidin’ Away” for a couple of examples.

In Praise of Failure

I am thinking about failure these days.  This is partly because I have had a few lately, but mostly because I just finished Costica Bradatan’s very interesting new book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.  Bradatan sees failure as necessary because it grounds us in reality and brings us humility.  He cites Iris Murdoch’s definition of humility as “selfless respect for reality.”  (Murdoch thinks that humility is “the most difficult and central of all virtues.”)

Bradatan says failure begets humility in three phases:

  1. Humility involves acceptance of our cosmic insignificance.
  2. It puts us on firm ground, since we have been “brought down to earth.”
  3. Having lowered our anchor into the world, and regained our existential balance, we can move on to other, bigger things.

Bradatan also notes that “Humility is the opposite of humiliation – that’s the chief lesson…There is nothing demeaning or inglorious about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening.”

I certainly am interested in “regaining my existential balance,” so this got my attention.  I was also interested in the way that we often reference old age as some kind of failure.  We talk about old folks failing to thrive, having failing eyesight, experiencing organ failure.  Much about old age unfolds with small failures, a dripping faucet of losses.  I used to be able to reach that shelf, didn’t I?  Remember that word?  Walk up that hill without pausing for breath?  Bradatan does not reference old age often in his work, but he is reassuring that failure grounds us and serves us in ways that success never can.

Failure is defined in the dictionary as “unsuccessful at reaching one’s goal.” Is staying young, staying alive, a goal?  It certainly is not within our complete control. We are mortal, and we will age, whether we like it or not.   We may have some control over the rate of decline, but not over the inevitability of it – Silicon Valley notwithstanding.

And how do we handle this sense of failing?  We are bombarded with contradictory messages.  Some say we should try harder, accept new challenges, revolutionize our diets.  Others posit that we should practice a reasonable level of acceptance. David Chernikoff in his Life, Part 2, shares this wonderful quote, a prose-poem really, from Solzhenitsyn:

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own. . .. There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past—just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane. . .. Growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.

Uphill, downhill.  Success, failure. Do these words have any meaning in relation to human existence?  Life is a parabola according to Dante; we go up, we go down.  Almost a millennium after Dante, Joni Mitchell said life is a “game,” not a tragedy, and as the “painted ponies go up and down”:

We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

I think there can be joy in the motion, whichever side of the circle or parabola you are on. Yes, we must “accept” the end of a season, of our youth.  We either have to change our view of failure in relation to age, or start to use another word.  “Growing old serenely,” says Solzhenitsyn, “is not a downhill path but an ascent.”

And, if we are willing, we may find happiness in the falling, the failing, the downhill path. I have listened to many dharma talks about withholding judgment on all changes, including age. Rather than judge, we are to watch, realize.  Serenely.  A good word.  Like equanimity.

One last note: my last two blogs have started with the term “in praise of” – ordinary times, failure.  One cannot neglect mentioning Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly – the most memorable of such encomiums. In it, Erasmus’s discussion of old age almost always puts it into the context of the life cycle.  Lack of decorum in relation to one’s place in the life cycle is a constant source of humor for Folly.  Folly holds up the futile attempts of the elderly to be what they are not: “They cling to life so fiercely, and try so hard to ‘seem young,’ that one old codger will dye his last gray hairs, while another will stick a wig on his pate, and still another will fill his gums with false teeth, borrowed perhaps from a pig’s jaw.”  Erasmus, too, is cautioning a level of acceptance and equanimity.

For more on Dante’s view of life as a parabola, you might look at my blogs, “Dante’s Parabola” or “A Diminished Thing.”