第 11 章
Finding Meaning in Life's Final Chapter
The year my mother turned eighty-one, she had a confrontation with a Homeland Security officer at the airport. When instructed to remove her shoes, she smiled and replied, "No, I don't." The officer insisted it was required, with no exceptions. "But I'm old," my mother argued. Learning she needed to be seventy-five or older to keep shoes on, she matter-of-factly stated her age. The officer stared, muttered "That's incredible," and waved her through.
This officer, like many, assumed old age inevitably meant infirmity. He didn't check her ID, likely because society sees aging as so undesirable that no one would claim to be older than they are. Unlike young adults who must prove their age to buy alcohol, older people are rarely "carded."
Health, appearance, and function vary more in later years than any other life period. The "successful aging" movement celebrates resilience and accomplishments in old age - a message both helpful and sometimes counterproductive.
The concept of successful aging has ancient roots, from the Fall in Eden (where difficult old age was seen as consequence of moral failure) to Aristotle's concept of "eugeria" (a good old age). In 1997, the landmark MacArthur Foundation study identified three key ingredients for quality life in old age: maintained low disease risk, high community engagement, and high physical and cognitive function.
The problem arises when we imply that being old inherently means being inactive, disengaged, or unattractive - requiring qualifiers like "successful" or "exceptional" to describe vibrant elders.
My octogenarian mother exemplifies an "exceptional senior" - exercising daily, volunteering at a museum, taking university classes, and maintaining an active social life. She achieved this through inclination, effort, and good luck. She ate healthfully before it was fashionable and took up exercise at sixty when she noticed physical decline. Most impressively, she adapts to changes - spreading dinner party preparations across a week when she slowed down, and practicing using alternative transportation before giving up driving.
But willpower and wise decisions aren't the whole story. Like Queen Elizabeth (another "exceptional senior"), my mother benefits from privilege: whiteness, citizenship in a developed country, relative wealth, education, being female (women live longer), possible genetic advantages, and avoiding random misfortunes like accidents or serious illness.
Different fields define successful aging differently: health professionals focus on disease absence and function maintenance; psychologists emphasize life satisfaction and resilience; older adults themselves prioritize independence, spirituality, meaningful relationships, and societal contributions.
While personal choices matter, much of aging results from genetics, social circumstances, and public policies. Those labeled "exceptional seniors" often resemble those privileged throughout life. We must beware implications that disability equals lives not worth living or that aging is inherently negative - neither necessarily precludes happiness, as exemplified by 103-year-old Holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer who continued playing piano beautifully despite profound losses.
In her essay "On Sixty-Five," Emily Fox Gordon described feeling her age while hastening to add she wasn't infirm: "I'm as vigorous as I ever was, and reasonably healthy." She noted cognitive changes too: "Mentally I'm quite intact, though my memory, always bad, grows worse." This reveals the disconnect between old age's reality and our beliefs about it.
Both Diana Athill and Doris Grumbach reached one hundred years old, publishing books in their nineties and essays in their hundredth year - proving that seventy isn't necessarily "an unmitigated disaster." At eighty, Penelope Lively described becoming "almost a new person" whose spirit remained eager while the body "unfortunately calls the shots." Doris Lessing noted the disconnect between body and self: "The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all."
May Sarton wrote at eighty-two about the "difficult transition" into "real old age," struggling with both small frustrations like buttoning shirts and larger aspirations like writing poems. Diana Athill at ninety lamented "dwindling energy" - a universal experience shared by the pregnant, injured, or overworked. Though elderhood brings closer proximity to illness and death, the tragedy, as geriatrician Robert Butler noted, is not aging itself but how we've made it "unnecessarily and at times excruciatingly painful, humiliating, debilitating, and isolating."
Our society's shame about aging manifests in widespread hair dye and cosmetic interventions. The author imagines a world where we accept natural aging, where gray-haired people are seen doing all they already do, where elders are valued "both for who you were and for who you are, a person completing the full arc of a human life."
