Aging, Mortality: Some Book Suggestions

During the past few years, I have been giving special attention to how people age. This is important to me as I move into what my kids and younger friends euphemistically call my "autumn years". Whatever they may be called, I know that I am getting older--next month I will be 63. How do I age well and gracefully?

My mother, who will turn 84 in less than a month, provides the great example of a person with humor and loads of well-earned wisdom. We talk each week on the telephone. Sure, lots of the discussion is about health and who among her decreasing number of friends is sick or has died. But we also laugh about old memories and about silly things that are happening in my life and hers. I look forward to these discussions each week. This past Sunday we talked for 75 minutes. I look to her for clues as to how I might be or how I would wish to be at her age, if I live that long.

In addition to talks with my mother, my reading has been an important part of my personal inquiry into aging. I was attracted to the title of Jonathan G. Silin's book, My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). Silin, who lives in Manhattan where he works as a professor at the Bank Street College of Education, discusses the ups and downs of relating to his parents during their decline and eventual death. He discusses openly his impatience when he can't get his dad to listen to him or his joy when some small task is accomplished to his father's or mother's satisfaction, even when they are practically bedridden.

One very moving and even troubling segment of the book is set in a lawyer's office where it becomes painfully clear to Silin, but not necessarily to his parents, that the careful plans they had put in place for their affairs after death, had been almost entirely rendered obsolete by changing times and their limited finances.

While Silin is dealing with the problems of his frail elderly father, he receives news that his long time partner of many years has suddenly died. When his father demonstrates that he will miss his partner, a deep moment for Silin has taken place. While the author writes well about his parents and his responses to their decline and deaths, his comments about his partner's death are very restrained. Yet, who could surpass the tribute to this partner in the last paragraph of the book: "In the end it was Bob Giard, my partner of thirty years, who made work on this project possible. For it was Bob who taught me how to love and how to forgive, when to fight fiercely and when to let go. Above all he understood that it is in the smallest acts of human kindness that we often reveal our deepest feelings and our profoundest respect for human life. It is hard to imagine entering the country of the frail elderly without him" (p. 164).

If you want to enter the grim "country of the frail elderly" then I suggest that you pick up another recent release by one of America's foremost authors. Philip Roth has written Everyman (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). This is a very slim novel. But the scope of the plot encompasses all of life. The protagonist is first introduced at his own funeral. From there it is a walk down memory lane. Mostly it is a walk that involves failed relationships with women, an out-of-control libido, distastrous relations with his two sons (but not his daughter who adores him in spite of his foibles). He realizes that his life was messed up just as he himself is about to leave life. But this protagonist is not a victim of finitude or even his own failings. The novel details his own resistance to the ultimate obliteration that is death . . . . of course death wins out but the guy put up a fight that can only be admired.

In America age is often cosmeticized so that we imagine that we will be old "some day" but that we will be jogging, having sex, traveling, having a good life as senior citizens. Both of the books that I am suggesting indicate that death still lurks in the wings as the final word. Both Silin and Roth cannot attribute meaning to death. I believe that this can only happen in faith settings. But their books should be read for their insights into what happens when we enter that country of the frail elderly.