We all think we know quite a bit about getting old, and about those in the middle of that adventure.  (I said “adventure” Brian!)  I don’t think we know a god-damned thing about this.  Or, rather, there is an elite out there who have the great privilege of an inside track to what the old know and experience, and this “information” is beginning to trickle down to the poor beasts of burden we all are.  We’ll be hearing more and more about this as time goes on, because, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run we’ll all be dead, but first there’s the short term, and than the middle term, before that other thing that makes no sense at all. 

It may well be that old people manage to totally forget that they are supposed to be confronting death.  That sounds to me like something a middle-aged man or woman might say, off-handedly, scarcely aware of the fact that it’s her problem and not necessarily out there at some future stage.

Here’s a 93 year-old woman, sitting in a chair a few weeks after her husband of 73 years has passed.  The geriatric psychologist or nurse or hired hand walks up, with all manner of compuction and empathy (oozing empathy), and whispers gently about sharing the pain of such a loss, and takes the woman’s hand in hers or his, and adds: it’ll take time, but time heals all.  But tell me ma’am, how does it feel, in your own words?

Response: “It feels like I’m in heaven!”  The woman was simply not graced with a wonderful spouse, but someone a little bit too lackluster for her tastes, and someone whose rut had begun long ago looking like a prison gate, and at his death, she felt liberated and ready to begin an entirely new life.  The ward assistant or doctor or hired hand had once again fallen into what William James called the psychologist’s fallacy, which is to assume incorrectly that you know what the other person is experiencing.  What the psychologist, at least in most brands of psychology uninformed by the wisdom of Diotima in Plato’s Banquet, ignores is that love and aspiration are like endlessly blossoming flowers that are on call 7/24 to reach hundreds of different forms of expression.

Here is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on this mystery:

“For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

An adult sleeps at night.  But an old person’s sky at night is filled with stars, and among them there are patterns and indications that insist on being followed out.  I’m convinced of this.  I’m only 60, so it’s not that I’m preaching for my own parish.  I’m just rooting for a return to family matters as quickly as possible. 

(this post is based by a 1 March NYT article by Doctor Marc E. Agronin entitled “Old Age, from Youth’s Narrow Prism.”