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Much has changed in the intervening decades. Then, most forty-year-old women had devoted themselves to being wife and mother, only to awaken to the realization that they no longer knew who they were beyond the confines of those roles. Now, the same women have most likely been in the labor force for years and, as a result, have some broader, less elusive sense of self. Now, instead of bearing her first child at nineteen or twenty, a woman is likely to be twenty-six, and for a significant subsection of the population, much older, maybe even forty.
In mid-twentieth century, when American life expectancy hovered around sixty-five, questions about the “rest of life” presumed something like twenty more years, and it was mainly women who asked the question. Men knew what the rest of their lives would bring. If they were lucky enough to live that long, they’d work until retirement, then die shortly thereafter. Now, depending on race and class, a man who reaches the age of sixty-five might expect to live into his early eighties, a woman even later.
In fact, people over eighty-five represent the fastest growing segment of our population. As we live longer, healthier lives, the question, “Now what?” comes later, for some at sixty, for others not until seventy or more. No matter how delayed, the question will arise with the same inevitability that death itself arrives on our doorstep. Only it isn’t just women who ask the question, it is men as well—men whose sense of identity is threatened as they contemplate years without connection to those institutions and activities that structured their daily lives and gave it meaning.
It makes no difference what our station is, whether high or low, we will all stand at the abyss as, just by living so long, we are forced to look into a future we cannot know and confront the combination of hope and fear that accompanies that reality. “I wouldn’t know what else to do,” said Mike Wallace, the renowned television journalist, when, at eighty-eight, he was asked when he might leave the show at which he’d worked since 1968. When, a short time later, he suddenly announced his retirement without explanation, his former producer, Don Hewitt, speaking partly from his own experience, explained, “You get to a certain age . . . and you’re not as gung-ho as you thought you were going to be. But you hang onto who you were [emphasis added] because you don’t know any better.” To who you were, not what you do because, as is so often the case, what you do becomes who you are.
This is uncharted territory, a stage of life not seen before in human history. Where before twenty-five years on the job bought a gold watch, a retirement party, and not much time left to enjoy it, now you’re wondering what you’ll do, who you’ll be for the next twenty or thirty years. Like the Energizer bunny that just keeps going and going, this single demographic fact ricochets around the society, undergirding the most important social and cultural changes of our time and revolutionizing the private sphere as well as the public one.
Throughout history the very concepts of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, and the cultural norms that accompany these stages of life, have been shaped, at least in part, by the length of the life span. When, in the seventeenth century, forty was advanced old age, there was little thought to the special needs of childhood, and the idea of adolescence didn’t exist.
In our own time, we have seen extraordinary changes in the meaning of each of these life stages. Children, once valued as necessary contributors to the family economy, now are the cosseted, protected objects for what Diane Ehrensaft, in Spoiling Childhood, calls “expectable parental narcissism,” a phenomenon that has become “expectable” only in the last few decades. True, the worst excesses of these child-rearing patterns are seen among upper-middle-class families. But working-class parents, too, are more involved in their children’s lives—more protective, more concerned about what they see, hear, and do, about their safety, their culture, their values, their future—than ever before.
Adolescence, once defined as a haven for children between thirteen and eighteen, continues to expand into the twenties and beyond. As the new economy has mandated more advanced training and skills, college now serves the function that high school once did. Consequently, about one-quarter of our young people have at least some college education, which means that someone is paying the bill, whether through grants, loans, or parental beneficence. And that, in turn, means that post-teeners, who would have been working and self-supporting before, remain in a dependent, adolescent state for many more years.
As the boundaries of adolescence advance, the definition of adulthood changes as well. Until recently, marriage was the entry point into adulthood, a milestone people sought. That’s no longer so. When people are living to eighty and beyond, the definition of adulthood becomes fluid, and choices that were unavailable, even unthinkable, before suddenly come into view. There’s no longer any social necessity to marry off people by their teens to ensure that they’ll live long enough to launch the next generation. Nor is there any psychological imperative to rush into marriage when the years stretch so far ahead and when, at the same time, the privileges of adulthood that once went with marriage alone are now readily available to singles as well.
I don’t mean that people consciously think these things. Rather, it’s axiomatic that cultures change in response to changing social conditions. The demographic reality of an era is inevitably reflected in the development—often without a conscious plan—of new social norms and roles. As the content of socialization changes in the external world, the psychology of our internal world shifts as well. Suddenly, new and unseen possibilities about work, family, identity become visible and acceptable. If you can’t get a decent job at a living wage, why not retain your identification with the youth culture as long as you can? If working for the rest of your life means doing the same thing for sixty years, maybe beginning later is a better idea anyway. If you’re going to live to eighty, what’s the rush about growing up, getting married, having children?
AS THE LEADING EDGE of the baby boomers—that huge cohort that has shaped everything it touched as it has swept through society—turns sixty this year, concerns about our increasingly aging population have come center stage. Predictions vary depending on the mind-set of the predictor, on whether she or he sees the glass as half-full or half-empty.
The pessimists see disaster as they warn of the crises that lie in wait: the financial burdens on the social system will prove unsupportable. Medicare and Social Security will go broke. The economy will falter as the nonproductive old outnumber the productive young. The burden on families will be intolerable as sixty-five-year-olds find themselves the caregivers for their eighty-five-year-old parents.
Those who see a half-full glass tell us the worries are overblown. Sure, they say, the social institutions designed to ease the old age of earlier generations, whether health care, housing, or Social Security, are not adequate to deal with the huge aging population that looms ahead. But with the political will and sensible planning, the old programs will morph into new ones that will meet the realities of our continually expanding life span.
True, the optimists say, many sixty-five-year-olds are burdened with the care of their eighty-something-year-old parents, but 60 percent of people over eighty continue to live independently. Yes, between 1990 and 2050 the ratio of those over sixty-five to what we now call “the working-age population” will nearly double. But the working-age population is already being redefined upward, as witness the legislation outlawing age discrimination and the disappearance of mandatory age-based retirement in government and industry. With the promise of an aging population that is heartier, healthier, and better educated than ever before, it’s reasonable to assume that increasing numbers will remain in the work force.
Maybe, maybe not, the pessimist might reply. Ask the 40 percent who are taking care of their aged parents, and you’ll hear another tune. Indeed, even those whose parents live independently find themselves preoccupied with their welfare, calling more often, worrying about a future they know is coming. What’s more, the idea of being on the job until eighty and beyond may appeal to a Supreme Court justice or a world-famous television journalist, but is that what the average person, whose job is neither so important nor so glamorous, wants to do with these newfound years?
The answer is complicated. It’s true that many of those who remain in the work force beyond what was once the accepted retirement age do so out of choice. These generally are the professionals, men and women who find satisfaction in their work and whose identity is tied to it. Many more, however, stay in the work force or return to it after retirement out of need, sometimes economic, sometimes psychological, often a combination of both.
The economic side is straightforward: most pensions, when they exist, aren’t adequate to support their needs; most people don’t have enough savings to pick up the slack. Psychologically, it’s more complicated. During their working years, most people look forward to retirement with fantasies about all the things they couldn’t do when they were working, whether playing golf, remodeling the kitchen, or spending more time with the grandchildren. Then reality hits.
“Okay, so I pick my grandchildren up from school two days a week, but what about the rest of the time?” asked a seventy-four-year-old woman. “Sure, I keep busy, but that’s just what it is—keeping busy. It doesn’t have a lot of meaning, if you know what I mean.”
“If I played golf every day, there’d still be too many days in the week,” said one seventy-six-year-old. “I mean, I love it but . . . ,” his words trailing off as if he were searching for a way to avoid the thought he didn’t want to speak.
The pleasures they’d looked forward to are indeed pleasurable, but not quite enough to still the restlessness that sets in, the sense that there must be something more, or to quiet the question that intrudes so insistently: Now what?
Go to any mall in America that houses stores like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Target, and all the other shops that eagerly hire older workers because they’re so reliable and you’ll find formerly retired women and men on the floor, usually doing jobs well below their capacity. Talk to them, as I have, ask them why they’re working, and nearly always the answer is some version of what this seventy-one-year-old former salesman said: “I’d been retired awhile, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I woke up one morning and thought, ‘What the hell am I doing with my life? Christ, if this is life, what’s being dead like?’” Then, he added with an ironic smile, “The extra cash doesn’t hurt either.”
Whether optimist or pessimist, all agree that something new is emerging, something we might call the next life stage, the one that never existed before, the one for which we have no name and no template. For those who see a half-empty glass, the problems dominate the conversation. For those who see it half-full, this “new old age” promises limitless options and opens possibilities earlier generations couldn’t even dream about.
Maybe it takes someone who is already well into old age to know that both are true and that neither describes the complex social and psychological reality of this new stage of life.
Four decades ago most studies of old age posited something called “disengagement theory,” whose basic assumption was that healthy aging required people to disengage from meaningful life activities. As people lived longer, healthier lives, it became clear that there was more than disengagement to these years, and the theory came under question. But as is true in many parts of American life, whether social or scientific, the new heedlessly sweeps out the old. Disengagement theory was discarded in favor of one that foresees a life of endless engagement—a new view of aging that’s as one-sided as the old one was. For like everything else about old age (about life itself, in fact), it’s not all or nothing, not disengagement or engagement, but both forces working inside us all the time: there is the pull of disengagement that feels like preparation for what is inevitably our future, a subtle pulling away, an inwardness that wants solitude and keeps us from entering the social world as fully as before. And there is the push toward engagement that seeks to give meaning to the present while delaying the future, the wish to be seen, to be heard, to be counted, to be needed.
But instead of complexity, we get over-simple treatises about the wonders of the “new old age.” It makes me think that old age is two different countries. There’s the real old age for those of us who live there and know its conflicts and contradictions. Then there’s the old age of those who write about it, usually middle-aged women and men who, like a child afraid of the dark, draw rosy pictures as they try to convince themselves that no unknown monsters await them.
IN A DROLL, smart essay, Anne Lamott writes eloquently about the blessings of aging. “Age has given me what I’ve been looking for my entire life—it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.” Would she give it up for thinner thighs or a flatter belly? On her bad days, perhaps, but mostly her answer is, “Are you crazy?”
Sounds great, no? Who can argue with the experience of growing into a self you like and respect? Who would say it isn’t one of the gifts of getting older? But she was forty-nine when she wrote those words, middle aged by today’s definition, and coming to terms with oneself is what that life stage is all about. As I write today, a forty-nine-year-old can expect to inhabit this middle stage for the next twenty years or so and, if she’s lucky, healthy, and open to the experience, these can be vital, growing years.
Sure, there will be losses in those middle years: the body sags, it hurts in places we didn’t know we had, memory slips, friends die. But there will also be gains. At work, they have the satisfaction of a job well done whatever their status is at closing time. At home, their children are grown, probably married or partnered, and have their own children. They revel in grandparenthood, the pure pleasure of loving a child, of watching her grow, of seeing their own future, the continuity of their line for at least another generation in that child.
But then comes “the new old age,” when they confront the next twenty years, and giving up thinner thighs is the least of their worries. “Every one of my friends loves being older,” Lamott enthuses, “my Aunt Gertrude is eighty-five and leaves us behind in the dust when we hike.” Maybe so, but I wonder how Aunt Gertrude feels when she goes home alone to nurse her sore muscles, eat her solitary dinner, and count up her losses.
I love it when I can match or best a younger companion in the outdoors, when at the gym I look across at some fifty-year-old huffing and puffing on his treadmill and I haven’t broken a real sweat. But these are transient moments of triumph that live next to the more permanent realizations about the diminishing self that old age brings.
The media give us endless stories about the new ways of being old that are now open to us—about the seventy-five-year-old who runs the Boston marathon in respectable time, the eighty-five-year-old who plays a mean game of tennis every day, the ninety-one-year-old who climbs El Capitan in Yosemite, another nonagenarian who still has an eye for the women and the wherewithal to do something about it, the eighty-two-year-old who sells her first painting.
I know these possibilities. I am, in fact, the eighty-two-year-old who sold that painting. But I also know the complex of feeling and fear that drives people to such adventures in their old age: the deep-seated need for something to give meaning to a life, the illusion that if we climb one more mountain we can control not just life but death as well. And I know, too, that while these are inspiring feats, worthy of note, having achieved the goal, we face yet again the question, “Now what?”
FOR MOST OF US, even those who are healthy and active, our extended old age will most likely feel like some combination of blessing and curse. Certainly there are moments when we enjoy what feels like the “warm autumn” celebrated in a New York Times Magazine article entitled, “The Age Boom.” There’s something to be said for being freed of responsibility, for waking up each day to the knowledge that you’re not obliged to perform, for feeling you’ve earned the right to pick and choose what you’ll do and who you’ll do it with, for having the time to read the novels you’ve hungered for but couldn’t get to before, for having the emotional leisure to reflect on your life and the world around you in more depth than was possible when the demands of daily life kept you busy.
But these newfound freedoms come with a price. Ask anyone who is living this new life stage and you’ll hear also about the times when it feels like a cold and lonely winter. For along with the gift of time comes the realization that time itself is now finite, that we hold the end always in our sights. It’s a showstopper. A fifty-ish friend tells me he’d like us to join him and his family on a trip two years hence, and all I can think is, If I’m here in two years.
How do you plan for a future when you don’t know when time will stop? That’s true for all of us, of course, but for the old it has an immediacy that can’t be denied. “There is not time to become anything else,” laments Doris Grumbach in Extra Innings, “There is barely enough time to finish being what it is you are.”
The limits of time, for me at least, are both a blessing and a curse: a blessing when I experience the relief that it will soon be over, that I can give up the struggle to make meaning of these years and just go to sleep, even that permanent sleep we call death; a curse because then I remember that when I die, I’ll never again hear my daughter’s “Hi, Mom” on the phone, never see my adorable four-year-old great-grandson grow up, never laugh or cry with a friend again, never see another sunset, never read another book, never write another line, never paint another picture, never wander through the galleries of the Met, never taste another hot fudge sundae. Never: a cold and lonely word.
It’s not just the realization that we’re close to the end that makes this time so difficult. For the pleasure in our newfound freedom to “just be” comes with the understanding that it’s possible only because we’ve become superfluous, because we’ve lost our place in the world, because our presence is no longer needed, and that in addition to being unnecessary—or perhaps because of it—we’ve also become invisible, just another one of the old people, featureless and indistinguishable from one another, who take up space on the bus.
Invisible. “You know what I miss most as I get older?” asked Mary Cantwell in a conversation with novelist Jean Rhys. “That look of anticipation in a man’s eyes when he first meets you.”
“Yes,” sighed Rhys, then well over eighty and not far from death, “I miss it still.”
It’s not just that we’re no longer seen as desirable sexual partners. Rather, invisibility follows us into many corners of life where we used to count, whether on the job or in the social world. “I’m a lot smarter today than I was thirty years ago, and I’m better at my job now than I was then,” said a sixty-five-year-old executive who lost his job to one of those corporate mergers we know so well these days. “But these yo-yo kids who are in charge don’t even see me and what I can do; they only see my age, and that’s the end of it.” It’s a plight common enough to warrant a New Yorker cartoon featuring a cigar-smoking, bewildered-looking seventy-ish man looking out the window of the office he’s about to leave for good and saying ruefully, “I think I’ve acquired some wisdom over the years, but there doesn’t seem to be much demand for it.”
How can it be otherwise in a society that idolizes youth, that has little reverence for its own history, that moves so quickly that yesterday’s knowledge has already been rendered obsolete? In such a social setting, whatever wisdom about life we who are old have gathered seems like ancient history, not . . . What’s that word that has dominated our lives for the last several decades? Ah yes, “relevance.” We’re not relevant.
Until now, we who are old were tethered to society through a series of institutions—school, work, family, church, community—that structured our lives, defined our place in the world, and gave shape to our identity. We had goals then, things to accomplish, from raising the children to climbing the professional ladder, that gave life its meaning. But as Freud noted a long time ago, a strange thing happens with success. Instead of entering into that subjective state of grace we expected success to bring, we often become unsettled, feeling adrift, as if something has gone out of life.
Freud thought such feelings were a response to the guilt we experience over our good fortune. Perhaps so, but it surely isn’t that simple. For this is one of those times when winning and losing are opposite sides of the same coin. We finally achieve a long-sought goal, and instead of the unambiguous joy of winning, we feel something else, an emptiness where the goal lived, a sadness that suggests loss. After organizing our lives around the pursuit of a goal—raising the children, writing a book, getting tenure, a big promotion, winning the gold, actually or metaphorically—we find that it’s not the destination that has given life its meaning and continuity but the journey itself.
THIS IS THE DILEMMA of the new old age. The journey continues, but to what end? If we discover ourselves at midlife, old age—yes, even the new old age—is when we lose what we found, when the vigorous, vital, growing, passionate self is replaced by something new. You look in the mirror and see a face that looks like you but isn’t you, at least not the “you” you hold in memory. It’s somewhat like running into an acquaintance you haven’t seen in years, knowing that you knew her once, that there’s still something familiar there, but not being able to place her in time, space, and memory.
The face falls, the body rebels—physical changes that are mirrored in the psychological shifts that age demands. It’s the two together that are so hard to bear. The self we sought and fought for through our earlier years, the one we finally grew into, the one that defined us to ourselves and the world outside isn’t exactly gone; it’s turned into a pale shadow of what we once were. As a friend, age seventy-five, wrote me awhile ago, “I hate it when my body won’t do today what was so easy yesterday. But I think the thing that troubles me most about my age is that the old passions have faded. Not just sexual passions but the passions for living as well, for walking the beach, for—I don’t know what—for all the things I used to get passionate about—politics, eating, traveling, socializing, even friends. Only music remains. It’s like there’s someone else inhabiting my internal world, and I miss the old me terribly.”
He’s not living a life of the walking dead. He remains an active man, going to the gym every day, writing and publishing his work as he has for years, and, despite his lament, still taking pleasure in his family, his friends, his beloved dog. But the spark with which he once used to engage this life, that small, fiery light that was so much a part of him is missing.
Yes, I know about the seventy-ish woman who put an ad in the New York Times seeking partners with whom to explore her sexuality. I’ve read all those articles and books about women who blossom, sexually and otherwise, in old age. I just don’t know who these writers are talking about. Not that such women don’t exist. But to cast them as representative of women in old age (even in late middle age) is a travesty, the fantasy of those who have bought the cant that old age is only a state of mind, people who need to believe that they’ll never be old and never die, and who want to impose those beliefs on the rest of us as a way of abating their own anxieties.
As for me, I read my friend’s words, listen to him when we speak on the phone, feel his despair, and know that he speaks to my heart as well. But I know also that this is only one side, that in another part of me (him, too) I really don’t want to engage the world in the same old way, that it’s a blessing to be less driven, to be able to slow down, to be more contemplative, to bank the fires a bit. As Bill Moyers put it so eloquently in an article announcing his retirement two years ago, “You feel an irresistible urge to slow down, take your foot off the accelerator, touch it to the brake—gently, but surely—and start negotiating yourself out of the fast lane.”
Yes, I say to myself, I know just what he means. But again, there are shades of gray, as, judging by his continuing public presence, I suspect Moyers has discovered. I took myself out of the fast lane nearly three years ago and have no wish to go back. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still miss it. Not the speeding along, but the person who drove the car. She was the self I lived with for so long and knew so well. There’s a hole inside me where she used to live, a hole I can’t help probing, my mind wandering to it as if impelled by some unknown force as I mourn her loss.
I think of those lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: How dull it is to pause, to make an end/to rust unburnished, not to shine in use. I know one doesn’t have to rust unburnished, but it sometimes feels like that. Then I go to my studio, take brush to canvas, and watch a miracle in the making, a miracle I could never have known without the gift of time this new old age has brought.
As I stand before the easel feeling something very like joy, I grasp more fully than ever the duality of this time of life, the reality of both the pains and the pleasures, even while recognizing that the pain outweighs the pleasure too much of the time. But that’s just the point. It’s some of the time, not all of it.
Those of us who now live in this new old age are moving through unmapped terrain, searching for a path where few have gone before. No small task, but one well worth the doing, not just for ourselves but as part of the legacy we will bequeath to our children. We may not always like it, but what choice do we have? As an eighty-three-year-old friend who just wrote her first novel remarked, “There aren’t a lot of options. We either sit on the railroad platform and watch enviously as the trains streak by, or climb aboard a dilapidated one that chugs along slowly, knowing that it could stop at any moment. But at least we’re traveling.”
