Last Act in the Footlights

This week, I encountered two very (very!) different blogs about retirement and aging. First, a friend sent me an “Opinionator” blog from the New York Times with the inspiring title, “For Healthy Aging, a Late Act in the Footlights.” Later in the week, I heard a Fresh Air segment on NPR in which Terri Gross was interviewing the author of a blog called “The Voice of Aging Boomers.” A starker contrast is hard to imagine.

First, the “Late Act in the Footlights.” This blog points to the challenge that many of us faced as we approached retirement without the resources to support the exotic adventures we imagined as we dreamed of retirement. As the column frames it, “Absent money and a sense of possibilities, retirement can become more time to fill with television.” This is the theme of countless columns and blogs and articles on retirement: how to make your retirement (and/or aging in general) a rich and satisfying experience. That’s harder when you come to it with limited financial resources. But, as this article and many others (including this blog) have argued, it really is possible to find great joy in aging. 

This particular piece offers a range of novel ideas to fill the void of all that extra time that retirement dumps in our laps. Artists' colony, senior Olympics, collective film production, or community theater anyone? Most of the ideas mentioned here are the brainchildren of a program called EngAGE, which is located in LA. But there's no reason these ideas couldn't be exported to any place where someone has the time and energy to clone them (and maybe some capital to support the effort, I suppose). Check them out ... maybe you're the person to bring them to your town!

So far, so good … aging can indeed be full and rich and expansive (even in LA)!

And then I heard the Fresh Air interview, and another door on aging opened. “The Voice of Aging Boomers” is written by a man who has early-onset Alzheimer’s. His condition put him in an assisted living facility at the age of 52—far younger than most of the residents there, and younger than most of us at retirement. But retired he was, and living in assisted living with fully intact cognitive ability, no peers of his own age (or even his own generation), and many years ahead. Since he’s there, he has decided to use his aging years well. He has taken on a role as the “voice” of people living in what he describes as a setting filled with disability, dementia, despair, and death. Many people living in this circumstance are unable to speak—or speak clearly—for themselves, he argues. Many others are dismissed as simply old people who are somewhat demented or depressed or just lonely. But in fact, they are desperately in need of more genuine caring, honest attention, and thoughtful understanding and less patronizing, idealizing, de-individualizing, and dismissive treatment. So he has become the “voice of ambient despair.”

This is the other side of aging. For many of us, some part of our last years will be spent beyond the reach of artists colonies and community theater. Beyond, even, Sudoku and crosswords. The stark reality is that no matter how many almonds and blueberries we eat, no matter how many miles we walk or how many weights we lift, no matter how little we weigh, smoke, or drink and how much we exercise, sleep, or pray, we will all die. Relatively few of us will slip painlessly and quietly away in our sleep. Most won’t, as the currently popular slogan urges, “… skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, champagne in the other … screaming, ‘WOO HOO what a ride!’” Many of us will spend the last weeks, months, or even years of our lives not in theater or painting classes but in extended ill health. I know it’s a downer, but there it is.

So, I ask myself, how do we balance these two realities: Aging can be rich and expansive … and … Aging inevitably ends. Or, perhaps more accurately, how do we balance our reaction to these two realities? How do we both fully live now and fully accept that we will die? How can one mind and heart possibly contain both our wish to relish the time we have and the knowledge that one day—one finite day, a day with a date and weather, a day that’s someone’s birthday, someone’s wedding day—it will all simply stop?

Better minds than mine have contemplated this question since humans had minds for contemplating. In fact, some folks argue that this is what distinguishes humans from all other species: we have the ability to know we will die. For better (we can “get our affairs in order”) and for worse (we have to live with this realization, however we may try to ignore or deny it). Some folks have argued that this is one purpose served by a belief in an afterlife: we don’t have to accept that our life will stop if we are certain that it continues beyond the grave.

Whatever your position on these arguments, my personal experience is this: I am occasionally stunned by the reality that the years ahead keep getting fewer (and they're passing faster!), and I'm eager to live as fully as I can manage today. Ask me about this again if/when I find myself in assisted living, staring at a world that seems full of disability, dementia, despair, and death. I may find that eagerness less compelling. 

Until then, pass the chocolate and the (alcohol-free) champagne!