Covid-19 and Us Elderly

(My thoughts as in mcsweeneys.net)

The way we elderly were dismissed at the start of this COVID-19 thing, as if we had passed our expiration dates anyway, was just an exaggeration of how we are treated all the time. If we are occasionally shown respect, it is for our longevity, not our present usefulness. To the young we look like dried-up fruit. They don’t realize that inside these parched exteriors, a rich mental life and torrents of emotion are still rushing like spring floods.

Albrect Dürer’s Mother

I used to assume I was an aberration, a grotesque exception to the deceleration that seemed synonymous with advancing years. If I found myself getting excited about a new idea or weeping from music that used to make me feel merely exalted, I figured I’d better keep it to myself lest someone try to medicate me. When I fell in love — it could be a toddler or a puppy as easily as a human being, a sudden pang as startling as my first kiss — I scarcely recognized this “I” as the same man I was twenty or even ten years ago.

And it’s not just intensity. There’s a difference of kind. That first kiss in the hallway of my teenage girlfriend was intoxicating, stupefying. But what I call “falling in love” now seems to be experienced by a different kind of being, before an undeveloped gray creature but now multi-colored and winged. Where did he come from?

I’m not alone. Other old people feel what I feel but keep it to themselves: It’s disgraceful, even pathological, to experience deep feeling at our age. When was the last time anyone saw two flabby, wrinkled bodies coupling in a movie? Passion is the provenance of youth, a scandal in the old. If we’re noticed at all we’re seen standing, not quite steadily, on a line at the supermarket looking a bit overwhelmed, or leaning against a railing to catch our breath — scarcely sensible, never mind living at a pitch some people take illegal drugs to achieve. If we’re seen holding hands in public, people stare and wonder what sort of ember could possibly glow in such dry, wasted forms.

The worst of it is not that the young don’t realize what we are, it’s that we ourselves don’t appreciate it. No one holds us in greater contempt than we do. We not only don’t celebrate our enhanced sensitivity, we accept its medicalization all too readily. Indeed, we do fall into genuine depression. How could we not? But is depression not appropriate to someone no one values, a mere burden to family and society in general? And do we not, in fact, turn into husks, old fools, even demented old fools as a result? How could we do otherwise, apart from the sturdy minority who maintain some sense of self-worth?

It’s not easy to resist an environment that reinforces such negative attitudes. Ask any member of a so-called minority group. Yet, we elderly are the goal humankind has striven so long to reach: an old age with bodies and minds still in working order, ready to impart not just wisdom but what it means to feel life at its deepest level. Reaching this point used to be the privilege of a select few. Now threescore and ten is commonplace. Why should we not share the blessings of this maturity with everyone else? Would it not be irresponsible to do otherwise?

Where I Came In

My latest at Eclectica.org. How we keep expecting the change that never comes and life keeps repeating itself.

“If the film actually did somehow manage to end in a different way from what you had earlier witnessed you might be surprised but probably not shocked as long as the lovers got together and peace and justice again prevailed in the land. Anything was possible once the usher had torn your ticket in half in that popcorn-scented lobby and handed you back the other half as a kind of talisman and three-hour visa into a world of happy endings….”

Read the entire essay.

Tears in the Morning, Clearing by Afternoon, Some Wisdom Possible Before Sunset

Tears in the Morning, Clearing by Afternoon, Some Wisdom Possible Before Sunset

Thoughts on the heightened sensitivity that comes with age.  My latest, in the new issue of Eclectica.