Old age sucks. But some people say it nicer. The poet Dylan Thomas, for example, says it real nice:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I am doing my bit. I am raging.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is best known for her books “The Old Way: A Story of the First People” (the San tribe in Africa) and “The Hidden Life of Dogs,” says it real nice, too. In “Growing Old: Notes on Aging with Something Like Grace,” she tackles a different kind of tribe: the tribe of old people.
I flatter myself by thinking that Thomas agrees with me about old age. She is honest, even funny, and tells the truth. “Old age is OK — if you can put up with the problems.”
Amen.
Thomas’s mission is to explain old age from the perspective of someone who is 87, not someone who is 40. Younger people who write books about old people just don’t “get it.”
I appreciate this point on a personal level, my own and my mother’s. My mother lived alone after my father died, and I remember feeling turned off by her bad housekeeping, bizarre eating habits, endless rituals, refusal to wear hearing aids, bad taste in TV shows, piles of unwearable shoes, lack of modesty in the bathroom, fear of people’s disapproval. From my brother’s and my perspective, she seemed kinda nuts.
Actually, she was just old, possibly with dementia. She had some magical thinking, which included the persistent idea that neighbors were trying to drive her crazy by talking dirty to her through the water pipes. She was so convinced of this that a social worker stopped by at night to check it out. No voices.
Now that I’m in the 80s myself, I see how little I understood my mother’s last years. And I regret this. There is no way to make amends, and probably there is no way to change the usual perception of “nuttiness” in old people. We only understand life from where we sit – in our youth, middle age, old age, poor or rich, sick or healthy. The human condition is viewing the universe from our own selves, each person looking at a different universe.
Thomas points out that old age and death are the price we pay for life itself. Stones do not die – but we would not exchange our lives for the “life” of a stone. “The aging process is an essential part of the human story, and it’s not for the faint-hearted . . . a venture to the unknown.”
A venture is a risky or daring journey. Old age is indeed risky. We don’t know whether we will confront cancer, heart disease, blindness, loneliness, dementia. The journey is fraught with danger without even a hope of meeting a new lover or bearing a sweet child. We simply lose things: health, hearing, sight, mates, jobs, housing, memory.
No wonder medical forms ask us, “Have you been depressed?” Of course we’ve been depressed! Anyone facing this kind of journey would be crazy if he wasn’t depressed. But always mark NO. Part of being old is knowing when to lie. The alternative is being referred to a 30-year-old psychologist who will tell us how to look on the bright side and live for today.
Yeah, right. For tomorrow we die.
