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aging
Grief Is a Haunted House
The following column, called “Haunted House,” was written in November 1999, about a year after my wife died of pancreatic cancer.
Aug 02, 2026
Let’s go back a quarter century or so. Join me as I open up aa piece of the past, which I keep stored in containers on my computer, also known as old columns. I became curious about these oldies after I survived a vicious storm and temporary power outage the other day, and only missed the tornado that hit northeastern Wisconsin by a few miles.
Turns out I take electricity for granted! It was out in my retirement community apartment for about eight hours. I also take my personal safety for granted. As I browsed through some of my earliest columns, I also started thinking—up close—about life itself. The following column, called “Haunted House,” was written in November 1999, about a year after my wife died of pancreatic cancer. Here it is.
Haunted House
When my wife died, I spent my first month of mourning disentangling the house from its ghosts and clutter.
I was suddenly appalled at what a wreck the place was. Even under ordinary circumstances, we had fought a losing battle against miscellany. We shoved stuff into corners; chaos bestrewed itself with an easy shrug across every available surface of our lives. After a year of cancer—with such urgent matters as pain management, constipation relief, and a quest for miracles claiming every moment of our attention—all order in the house was shattered.
Oh, the shards and accumulated scraps of a marriage, stashed and forgotten, compressed into layers. Now it’s all luminous, each thing as it is surprised loose from hiding bearing witness to what once was.
I set to the task of cleaning and reorganizing more out of numb instinct than reawakened guilt. I needed a challenge, and this one was Herculean. But even more than that, I sensed that putting myself back together was somehow connected to putting the house back together.
I was at Barbara’s bedside when she died. I held her hand and watched her suffering dissolve in the last hour of her life; her ragged breathing grew calm and the pain furrows on her face loosened. A sudden cloudburst out the window caused me to glance up. When I looked back, her breathing had stopped. That was it. Death came as a gift of peace.
Despite its reputation, death, it turns out, is kind.
It helps to know this. It helps to know the only suffering, after the fact, is yours, the survivor’s; the only sharp edges are around the hole in your own life. But this can be endured, even welcomed. If there had been no great love, the ache would be small. So to me, grief in its intensity, the broken tear ducts—the downpour that came, for instance, when my daughter placed Mother’s Day presents, bubble bath, talcum powder, in Barbara’s still arms—is love all at once, love no longer paid out slowly, over the life of a marriage, but here now with the force of gravity. After death, love is a falling into her absence, not her presence. And that’s what grief is.
And cleaning the house my wife no longer lived in was a continuation of this, a falling in love all over again—a falling in love with the worn and familiar. As I began disturbing the settled dust, crawling around in three stories and 15 years of married life, I soon realized that everything I touched—this tumble of old letters and frayed linen, castaway toys and defunct appliances—was charged with Barbara’s absence. I wasn’t merely restoring order to a house, I was freeing the past, setting its genies scampering.
Basement storage: Cardboard box crammed with travel brochures and misfolded maps, the moldy remnants of trips spanning two decades. Out tumble Missouri and the Berkshires and Urquhart Castle and Kettle Moraine State Park.
Kitchen: That overflowing bookcase by the basement stairs. Spillage of old Weight Watchers pamphlets, never-used cookbooks, unwanted small appliances (gift Cuisinart that mysteriously alarmed Barbara, still secured in its Styrofoam packaging).
Upstairs linen closet: Baby blanket. Light blues and pinks, worn through in spots, numerous stains, the batting lumped in one corner.
Oh, the shards and accumulated scraps of a marriage, stashed and forgotten, compressed into layers. Now it’s all luminous, each thing as it is surprised loose from hiding bearing witness to what once was. In the language of life, these are metaphors, compressions of meaning almost too large for the heart to bear.
And my daughter’s tattered blankie is the most powerful of all, as I hold it against my face and know too much about loneliness. I fold it and remember what it was like to surrender everything for love.
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A Call to (Old) Arms: Don’t Let Trump Define What It Means to Age
We have to weaponize old age for good causes and shake a mindset that allows us to warehouse people because their presence is an inconvenience while covering up for those with money and power.
Oct 11, 2024
After U.S. President Joe Biden was shuffled off stage on trumped-up charges of senility, I started thinking seriously about the weaponization of old age in our world. Who gets credit for old age and who gets the boot?
At 86, I share that affliction, pervasive among the richest, healthiest, and/or luckiest of us, who manage to hang around the longest. Former President Donald Trump is, of course, in this same group, although much of America seems to be in selective denial about his diminishing capabilities. He was crushed recently in The Great Debate yet is generally given something of a mulligan for hubris, craziness, and unwillingness to prepare. But face it, unlike Joe B., he was simply too old to cut the mustard.
It’s time to get real about old age as a condition that, yes, desperately needs and deserves better resources and reverence, but also careful monitoring and culling. Such thinking is not a bias crime. It’s not even an alert for ancient drivers on the roads. It’s an alarm for tolerating dangerous old politicians who spread lies and send youngsters to war, while we continue to willfully waste the useful experience and energy of all ages.
Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.
We have to weaponize old age for good causes. We have to shake a mindset that allows us to warehouse people because their presence is an inconvenience while covering up for those with money and power. Out of shame or guilt or that feeling of elder helplessness, even smart old people all too often go along with arbitrary cut-off dates. I remember my dad, at 75 and retired, inveighing against the “dead wood,” especially in his field (education) that blocked progress and discouraged young energy and innovation. By 75, he maintained, people were sliding downhill, which was his way of justifying being shelved himself. He became increasingly depressed and listless, not because he was too old but because he had been made to feel useless.
Then, at 76, he was given the chance to help other old people with their tax returns and, ultimately, their confrontations with local government. He promptly perked up and became an active advocate for elder rights until his accidental death at 100.
My old friends and I talk constantly about our aging, how to suffer it, outwit it, gang up on it, or even strategically give in to it. We’ve decided that nobody in power is doing anything meaningful about it because, beyond exploitive eldercare, they haven’t figured out how to turn a profit.
Meanwhile, the really rich coots like Rupert Murdoch, at 93, are still tomcatting around and fussing with succession plans, while Warren Buffet, at 94, is cagily toying with his billions to avoid inheritance taxes.
Those old boys are anything but role models for me and my friends. After all, they’ve been practicing all their lives how to be rich old pigs, their philanthropy mirroring their interests, not the needs of the rest of us. In my pay grade, we’re expected to concentrate on tips from AARP newsletters on how to avoid telephone scams and falls, the bane of the geezer class. And that’s important, but it’s also a way of keeping us anxious and impotent.
Those Falls
This screed isn’t just the product of my stewing over old age. An incident in the parking lot of a big box store on the day after The Great Debate set me off.
Here’s what happened: An elderly man in the car beside mine stepped out of the driver’s seat, lowered his cane to the concrete, and pitched over flat on his face. His wife immediately ran to him from the passenger’s seat. I got there next, phone out, and asked her if I should call an ambulance. She was adamant: No! Within two minutes there were six of us, including four elderly gents, helping him turn himself over and sit up. There was no blood on his face, just one skinned kneecap.
He shook off attempts to help him stand, looking angry, humiliated, and embarrassed. I finally rolled a shopping cart next to him and he used it to clamber to his feet. Even with his cane planted on the concrete, he still seemed shaky, but he got right back in his car with his wife and hurriedly drove off. The rest of us looked at each other and wordlessly drifted away.
I then sat in my car trying to sort out what I had just experienced. On the one hand, the quick response of a largely elderly crew was thrilling proof that we were still up for the game, that we could still help each other. But I found the embarrassed, almost hostile response of the fallen man—and the wife who obviously knew what he wouldn’t stand for—discouraging. Why hadn’t he acknowledged our desire to help him? Why had he driven off so brusquely without even checking himself out?
And why should he have felt so obviously mortified by a common accident? Because it was such a marker of old age? Why hadn’t the rest of us, me included, tried to be more persuasive about helping him? Were we too inappropriately understanding of old age’s sense of vulnerability, weakness, helplessness? The seeming diminution of manhood? Would a woman have acted differently?
I then mentioned it to a woman—my wife Lois and she promptly asked me, “Did it remind you of your fall?”
How had I forgotten that?
Just last winter, while walking the dog, my legs had slid out from under me on my icy driveway. I was suddenly flat on my back. I thought about inching down the driveway to a fence where I might be able to pull myself up. It would be a long trip, but…
A voice suddenly boomed out behind me. “You alright?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I said as cheerily as I could.
“Yeah, right. It’s Jim Read.”
The local chief of police! I felt embarrassed. Strong hands boosted me up, guided me down the driveway to safe ground, and frisked me for broken bones. I barely had a chance to say thanks, before he was back in his patrol car, pulling away.
A few months later I ran into him. He shrugged off my thanks, as if he either didn’t remember my fall or considered it too commonplace to dwell on.
Role Models
Those incidents stay in my mind as symbolic of how routinely we oldsters shrink from confronting our vulnerabilities. And then I thought about two people I had once known and one I still see who faced them head-on
My prime role model, my dad, helped form my attitude toward aging and, in my own old age, he—or at least his memory—lives with me still. Above all, he taught me not to be afraid of the whole process. The second crucial figure—remember for years I was a sports reporter for The New York Times—was New York Yankee and then New York Mets manager Casey Stengel who showed me how aging could be used, for better and for worse. And my current inspiration, the 95-year-old artist Jules Feiffer, continues to offer me a blueprint for having a late working life. What they’ve all taught me is this: Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.
I met Stengel in 1962 at the first spring training of the New York Mets. He was then 71 years old, incredibly old to the 24-year-old sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. (And remember that “old” started much sooner then.) He was bitter at having recently been fired after a long and historic winning career with the Yankees. “I made the mistake of getting old,” he would tell me.
It does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee.
Most sportswriters readily accepted the decision of the Yankees and treated Stengel as a comical figure, too old to manage effectively. They wrote him off as “the ol’ Perfesser” and his rambling monologues as nonsensical “Stengelese,” when all conversation with him required was careful attention. (Mind you, I’m not innocent here. More than 60 years later, I still cringe at descriptions in articles I wrote then of his “pleated face” and scuttling, crab-like gait.)
Stengel could be cruel. One spring, he called a press conference and trotted out the two least talented rookies in training camp. He regaled the sportswriters with predictions about their potential and how they represented the future of the brand-new Mets. National and local press and TV outlets featured them. A few days later, they were cut from the team and never heard from again, corollary casualties of Casey’s revenge on the media.
At the time, I felt sorry for those young players. But even as one of the victims of his nasty prank, I couldn’t help appreciating how he had used our ageism against us. We swallowed his story. After all, how could that old coot bamboozle us?
But there was another side to Casey. That same first season with the Mets, on a muggy night in Houston during pre-game batting practice, I watched him respond to a middle-aged man, dragging a sullen-looking teenage boy, who beckoned from the stands. “I wonder if you remember me, Case,” he said, mentioning his name. “I pitched against you in Kankakee.” (He was referring to a pre-World War I minor-league team in Illinois at the start of Stengel’s long playing career.) The teenager kept trying to pull his father away.
Casey read the situation. He said, “The old fireballer himself. Why I was sure glad when you quit that league, I never could hit you a-tall.” Casey kept talking until it was time to manage the game.
The man and the boy returned to their seats, grinning, shoulders bumping. When I caught up to Casey, he just shrugged and then admitted he had no memory of who the man was.
Later, I told the story to one of the “Stengelese” sportswriters and he suggested Casey had staged the scene to impress The New York Times’ soft-hearted, liberal rookie reporter. “You should write that,” I responded. “It’s another way of looking at him, proves he’s still pretty sharp.”
“It’s not what the fans and the editors want,” the older sportswriter said. “They like the nutty old-fart stuff. It sells.”
The nutty old-fart stuff still sells—in the case of Joe Biden as a way to diminish, dismiss, or even demonize him. Soon after his debate debacle with Donald Trump, a stylish young editor at GQ asked me to write an old man’s take on the president’s situation, a welcome nod to experience. The first thing I thought of was how hard it is for any of us to give up what I call “the warm,” that cheering spotlight of attention. I thought of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who I had ever so long ago covered as a reporter and how, in his final fights, he was humiliated because he couldn’t acknowledge getting older, losing strength and power, stuck as he was in the victory culture male’s sense of power and triumph, of never surrendering.
Biden must have shared that until he committed what functionally was political suicide, even if it was acclaimed as a selfless sacrifice.
My current inspiration, my friend and former neighbor Jules Feiffer, the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, is seriously hearing- and sight-impaired and can barely walk. But he can still think, laugh, and draw. Every day.
Jules is one of those “shining examples”—especially after his first attempt at a graphic novel for middle-graders, Amazing Grapes, just got a rave review in The New York Times and tons of attention (“mostly because I’m so old,” he assured me). But it’s his spirit, often mislabeled as “youthful” instead of humane, that offers hope. Even as he admittedly struggles to hang on to what’s left of his Bronx-born American dream in the Age of Trump, he never gives up on himself or his ability to keep nudging his readers toward their own sense of possibility and change. His nearly completed next book—yes, there already is one!—will be an illustrated commentary on his (and our) strange times.
Okay, so where do I go from here? In fantasy, Dad, Casey, and Jules would make a fine team to deal with this increasingly disturbed and disturbing world of ours. If only. But how exactly do we put such a team together? We’re all short-timers, no matter how old we get, but we can’t let the bad guys wait us out. We need to treat old age as an identity and ourselves as part of an ethnic-style group deserving attention.
Yes, it does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee. And somehow the shining examples of individual super seniors like Dad, Casey, and Jules tend to remain just that—shining examples—rather than models for small-scale collective action.
But consider this my call to (old) arms. After all these years, haven’t we earned the right to be loud and obstreperous?
A Gang of Elders
As the former president of my town’s senior citizen organization let me tell you this: Old age is just a wrinkled extension of who you’ve always been, whether you end up frolicking in a golf cart at a luxury retirement community or waiting in semi-darkness for Meals on Wheels.
The board of my group was made up of a dozen oldsters who variously worked remarkably hard or were remarkably lazy, proved innovative or simply obstructive in distinctly alert or zombie-like modes—pretty much, I thought, as they must have acted all their lives. The nice ones could be passive, the mean ones relentless. Institutional memory was generally a good thing, but all too often presented itself as numbing anecdotage. Those seniors I dealt with then defined themselves by class, education, or economic position, but rarely age. Beyond creaky joints, treated with wry humor, and recommended doctors, old never seemed to be a shared identity.
Why not? Maybe because we didn’t have a clear social mission. The group’s main job was supporting—by fundraising and lobbying—the town’s senior services, mostly nutritional and logistical. We did that well, from buying an $85,000 wheelchair-accessible bus to renovating the local church kitchen that serves much of the food at senior events. But we could never get it together for the next major step—creating a political force. Maybe we could get seniors out on election day, but we couldn’t get them to vote for the candidates that might serve their immediate interests, much less help deal with climate change, water quality, community housing, medical and healthy food accessibility, and the like.
We couldn’t mount a resistance. We couldn’t recapitulate the spirit of the Gray Panthers, the group formed in 1970 to combat forced retirement, reform nursing home practices, and protect social security. Founder Maggie Kuhn said: “Old age is not a disease—it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.”
The Gray Panthers were created to be an intergenerational group although its energy came from the anger and experience of its older members. The Gray Panthers exist, working for peace and equal rights. Understandably it’s not a commercially sexy group and doesn’t get a lot of publicity. Still, in the age of Donald Trump, go join them anyway and remind the world that he is not what it means to be old, although statistically he would be our oldest president if the worst-case scenario occurs in November.
Or start your own club. Be a club of one. Register old people to vote and drive them to the ballot box. Don’t be shy. What have we got to lose? They can’t eat us, can they? Sharpen the end of your cane, affix spurs to the front of your wheelchair. Die trying.
While you’re at it just try not to fall. And if you do, let someone help you up.
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Resisting Giveuptitude: I Can’t Do It Alone
The following words are a contemplation of the great unknown, whose presence becomes increasingly more visible as the aging process obfuscates more and more of my certainties and, indeed, rattles my optimism.
Feb 25, 2024
Excuse me as I ponder eternity—briefly.
Like it or not, this is the essence of... uh, aging. As I wrote a year ago: “...once you actually hit it—that three letter word, ‘old’—watch out: ‘An aged man (as Wiiliam Butler Yeats pointed out, as he sailed poetically to Byzantium) is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick...’”
Nonetheless, hooray for my good fortune! I’ve been dancing around at age 77 for a while now, and before I start complaining about the aches and pains that come with it, I have to acknowledge—indeed, revere—the mere fact of making it this far. So many people don’t, due to the random will of fate, but also due to the hell of war, which remains humanity’s cancerous addiction. How can I complain when the bombs I help pay for are killing children?
So the following words are not meant to be complainy—just, rather, a contemplation of the great unknown, whose presence becomes increasingly more visible as the aging process obfuscates more and more of my certainties and, indeed, rattles my optimism. The core of this optimism is the mantra that helped me make it through middle age: Be positive and productive! It was my psychological—my spiritual—cane. Now it feels broken.
The aging process seemed to be in control of things now, in a deeply emotional way, rather than my sense of productive purpose.
In its place I seem to have an anti-mantra, which I refer to simply as giveuptitude. You know, life is just a doggone inconvenience. Addressing it pragmatically—paying bills on a regular basis, for instance—doesn’t seem to yield the benefits it used to. The negative consequences of not doing so are still present, of course, but I am feeling less and less a sense of “equality,” you might say, with the process of life. The difficulties of living keep mounting, no matter how many damn bills I pay or chores I do. And giveuptitude, which for me amounts to surrendering my day to computer games, junk food, and a random wandering through YouTube, becomes ever more enticing.
Come on, Bob. Be positive and productive! Work on your book—you know, the book that will explain the nature of peace to Joe Biden and those other war-addicted pols out there. This book (and I quote its beginning):
Let’s start the book with a moment of silence. Nine minutes and 29 seconds of silence, maybe, in honor of a man who lost his life to a retributive, fear-driven system of justice, and in honor, as well, of the uprising that began to emerge in the wake of his death.
This book hopes to be a continuation of that uprising.
The man is George Floyd. Nine minutes and 29 seconds was the length of time a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck, suffocating him, in October 2020. He (or somebody) had supposedly tried to use a counterfeit bill at a grocery store. His death was caught on video: one more video captured on a passerby’s cellphone, overturning the police “justifiable homicide” version of events, and outrage—deep, historic and, oh Lord, complex—began sweeping across and beyond the country.
This is a time of consciousness shift. Humanity is altering its understanding of, and relationship with, power. The goal of this book is to help this shift along: to give some language to it.
But first, the silence.
Yeah, that’s the book I’ve been dancing with for a decade. Perhaps sharing a few paragraphs of it in public will help bring it back to life. I think what happened is that I shrugged and gave it back to infinity a few years ago—after an absurd bicycle accident that apparently shattered my belief in “being positive and productive.” What’s the point?
I was on a borrowed bike, riding with family through a nature preserve in Wisconsin. We were on an asphalt path. The group stopped for a moment and.. well, the bike I was riding was slightly higher than the one I normally rode and for some reason—still a mystery to me—rather than dismounting I simply stayed on the seat, holding the handlebars. The bike fell sideways. My face hit the asphalt. Big ouch!
I won’t go into further details, except to note that the big, psychological ouch never quite went away and suddenly, so it seemed, eternity wasn’t on my side any longer. My mind was still intact, I wasn’t sick (didn’t get Covid), but... the aging process seemed to be in control of things now, in a deeply emotional way, rather than my sense of productive purpose. This was something I hadn’t experienced before. I began making a completely unconscious decision: to surrender to giveuptitude. Or at least partially surrender. I still write my weekly column, but the book... felt lost in infinity.
In sharing a fragment of it publicly, I think I’m saying this: I can’t do it alone. I don’t even know what I mean by that, except I know it to be true. I have to be humbly vulnerable as well as positive and productive. This is how that first chapter (tentatively) ends:
What if we organized ourselves, socially and politically, in reverence not to some linear certainty—the law—but to this unknown, which demands of us not obedience and submission, but rather an ongoing openness to that which we don’t know: the infinite universe? What if we organized ourselves around our best efforts to absorb, connect, and understand?
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A Few Thoughts on This Admission: I Am Old
As more and more of us live to advanced years, it is crucial to accept and even embrace our condition.
Sep 24, 2023
Much to my surprise, I find that I’m now part of a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.
I am old.
And indeed, it’s quite a shock to find that the world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did only 10 years ago. Growing old, it seems, is a condition that Western post-industrial society and culture do not consider meaningful, useful, or even valid. And yet, the truth is, and this is also a surprise, that as we become old, we enter a time of life, even with its losses and deficits, that is not a defective version of youth or middle age, but is something quite different, with its own qualities, discoveries, and surprises.
But as the world becomes perhaps more distant and out of our control, we begin to see patterns we had never imagined or only dimly sensed.
“Ageism” is an attitude people inflict on themselves. Old people are what almost everyone will become. But somehow, this part of existence is treated as something that must be actively ignored, as if old age were an infectious disease transmitted by acknowledging it. Or a misfortune that can be averted by denying it. “You’re only as old as you think you are,” said my son recently. “Only young people think that,” I snapped. Contemplating dying and death is, it seems, more appealing than imagining being old.
Most books and articles on aging offer brisk, hard-nosed advice about patient management or wishful thinking packaged as self-help. But Atul Gawande has written with unsparing clarity about the bleak fate of institutional powerlessness, offered in the name of “care” and “safety,” which almost half of us face in old age. The number of euphemisms for “old” proliferate, as if by not using the word, we could forestall the fact. But the intense and complex inner experiences that come with aging are rarely probed.
We cannot escape the fact that old age is a time of loss. Old, we experience depletion in many parts of our lives. Our bodies and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. More difficult is the loss of friends and family and the changes in the social institutions where we once had a place. Most difficult and certainly most frightening is the threat or actual loss of mental capacity. None of these occurrences are part of how we thought of ourselves or planned our future. As we age, our lives become strangely unrecognizable. We realize that life is no longer in our control. And old age ends only when we enter a terrain that is truly and completely unknown.
Thus, more than any other time in life, old age is the time of deepest and most pervasive uncertainty. The uncertainty regarding our financial sustainability is not the least of these, but somehow comes to epitomize the perilousness of our situation. How we will manage being ourselves, being in our world, is no longer obvious. So we feel the world moving away from us. We can no longer reach out and grasp and cling, control and shape what’s happening. Our future is no longer limitless. It is genuinely and utterly unknowable.
But as the world becomes perhaps more distant and out of our control, we begin to see patterns we had never imagined or only dimly sensed. Our world, our selves become less stable and less secure. Everything is more intensely transitory. Situations, objects, places, people become, moment by moment, very deeply to be cherished, valued; loved, not in spite of being impermanent, but because they and we are only together for this moment. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells, sudden sounds, temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. We take less and less for granted.
Late in their lives, Titian, Michelangelo, O’Keeffe, Tagore, Jean Rhys, Palladio, Daisy Loongkoonan, Paul Cézanne, Janáček, Maria Martinez, Stravinsky, and many others found new and unexpected ways of looking at themselves and their world. They continued and even extended their arts. In old age, as their bodies weakened and the world changed, they did not look away. Instead, in worlds of decline and loss, they experienced new tonalities, new music, new patterns. Having exhausted more conventional possibilities, they discovered new relationships to melody and harmony, to narrative, to color, form, light, and space. They found unforeseen paths, articulated subtleties and beauties never before encountered. The work they have left us and the stories of their lives are signposts for us.
This is not to say that we, the old, will all accomplish extraordinary things. But our situation, the actual experience of aging, is an opening for all of us. We here encounter something unexpected, sometimes frightening, sometimes revelatory. And now, as more and more of us live to advanced years, it is crucial to accept and even embrace our condition. This time of life offers new viewpoints in a world that cannot stop its habitual obsession with consuming and polluting. It does so, even as those who care for us cannot imagine our inner life, the uncertainty, peril, and, above all, the continued restless searching which is mind itself. Old age may seem too painful to contemplate and explore, but indeed we must. It is a time of life we might wish to ignore but which all of us, the living, will and must share. It is inevitable. And it is, in its own way, a gift.
For, as Thoreau once said, “Not ‘til we are lost… not ‘til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
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In the US, All Elders Are on Their Own
Pretty much anyone who isn’t affluent can find that old age brings economic desperation.
Sep 22, 2023
For 12 years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table. We used melted paraffin from an electric waxer to affix strips of paper to guide sheets the size of the final pages.
Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a local commercial printing press where our run of 2,000 copies would be printed.
This was, of course, before ordinary people had even heard of email. Our entire editorial process was mediated through the U.S. Postal Service, with letters flying constantly between our two cities. On the upside, through 12 years and 48 issues, we only had to hold four in-person meetings.
My article was depressingly prescient about just how much this country would expect aging people to shift for themselves by the time I reached that strange period of my own life.
All of which is to say that I’m old. That fact—and recent events in the lives of several friends—have brought to mind the first article I ever published in LesCon: “Who’s Going to Run the Old Dykes’ Home?” It’s a question that’s no less pertinent today, and not just for lesbians. My worldview was more parochial back then; I naively believed that someone—the state or their families—would look out for heterosexual elders, but that we lesbians were on our own. It turns out that we—the people of this country—are all on our own.
Playing Aging Roulette
These days, my partner and I seem to be doing a lot of elder care. Actually, I’ve long been a source of tech support for the octogenarian set, beginning with my own father. (“OK, you’re sure you saved the file? Can you remember what name you gave it?”) With our aging friends, we also help out with transport to doctors’ offices, communications issues (with landlines, cell phones, and the Internet), and occasionally just relieving the loneliness of it all.
In recent months, elderly friends of ours have faced losing their housing, their spouses, their mobility, or their cognitive abilities. I find it terrifying and ache because there’s so little I can do to help them.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m daily reminded that getting older can indeed be frustrating and frightening. It pains me to know that my bones are weakening, that I don’t hear as well as I used to, that my skin’s drier and wrinkling, that my once familiar face in the mirror is growing ever stranger. I’m lucky that—like my father who used to say, “After 70, it’s all maintenance”—I’ve managed to maintain a fair amount of brown hair on my head. I especially hate the way words that used to leap down my tongue in merry cadence now frequently lurk sullenly in the backwaters of my brain.
These are the people—old, disabled, permanently unemployed—who, according to the political philosopher Iris Marion Young, experience a particularly sinister form of oppression: marginalization.
In a piece about our aging political class, Robert Reich, secretary of labor for President Bill Clinton, has written charmingly about the “diminutions” that come with growing older and his own decision to stop teaching after decades of doing so. His take on anomic aphasia is similar to mine. He laments his trouble remembering people’s names, noting that “certain proper nouns have disappeared altogether. Even when rediscovered, they have a diabolical way of disappearing again.” I know what he means. For some years now, whenever I want to talk about cashew nuts, all I can initially think of is “carob.” Some devious gremlin has switched those words somewhere in the card catalog of my brain.
But even as I grieve for capacities lost and departing, I’m still not ready to come face to face with the only true alternative to aging: not some tech bro’s wet dream of eternal life, but the reality of death. I’m opposed to dying, and, had the universe consulted me, I’d have left mortality out of its design completely.
No One Else Is Going to Do It for Us
Written more than 40 years ago, parts of my piece “The Old Dykes’ Home” are flat-out embarrassing now. Getting old seemed so strange and far off before I was even 30. When I imagined being aged then, I think it was with the piercing sorrow of Paul Simon’s song “Old Friends/Bookends”:
Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy.
In other ways, my article was depressingly prescient about just how much this country would expect aging people to shift for themselves by the time I reached that strange period of my own life. Not only old dykes, but pretty much anyone who isn’t affluent, can find that old age brings economic desperation.
Yes, U.S. citizens and permanent residents over 65 can get medical attention through Medicare, but the standard program only covers 80% of your bills. Beginning in 2006, we gained access to some prescription drug coverage, but that requires sifting through an ever-changing menu of medications and the ability to predict today what meds you might need tomorrow.
Most people who live long enough will receive some monthly income from Social Security, although the amount depends in part on how much they were able to earn during their working lives. But we’re constantly staving off attacks on Social Security, including attempts to privatize it, reduce benefit amounts, or increase the age at which people can collect because Americans are living longer. That last proposal, as economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, is really another way of penalizing low-wage workers. As he wrote,
Life expectancy has indeed risen a lot for the affluent, but for the less well-paid members of the working class, it has hardly risen at all. What this means is that calling for an increase in the retirement age is, in effect, saying that janitors can’t be allowed to retire because lawyers are living longer. Not a very nice position to take.
Suppose the disabilities of age mean you can no longer safely live in your own home. Well, you’re on your own. Unless you can afford to move to some kind of assisted-living facility, you’re in real trouble. Your main alternative is to spend down most of what you own, so you qualify for the pittance that your state Medicaid program will pay a (most likely for-profit) nursing home to warehouse you until you die.
The threat of being old and unhoused is very real. A recent major study of unhoused people in California found that almost half of them are over 50 and 7% over 65. As housing costs continue to rise, we can only expect that more old people will find themselves on the street.
Back then, I wrote that, under capitalism, we could expect the “owners of wealth” to do very little for people who are no longer creating profits through their labor—or indirectly, by doing the work “to make it physically and emotionally possible for the paid laborers to go out in the world and work one more day.” Why, after all, should capital take any interest in people who are no longer a source of profit?
In retrospect, it seems clear to me that I was then inching my way toward an ethos that could free the project of caring for each other from the claws of capitalism.
These are the people—old, disabled, permanently unemployed—who, according to the political philosopher Iris Marion Young, experience a particularly sinister form of oppression: marginalization. “Marginalization,” writes Young, “is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.”
There were some other missing pieces in that article. I left out the fact that it’s easier to justify low pay for the art (and science) of caregiving when most of its practitioners are women. I failed to envision caretakers organizing on their own. I never imagined that, decades later, a National Domestic Workers Alliance would arise to represent the interests of the poorly paid, disrespected workforce of immigrants and women of color who largely do the work of caring for the aged in this country.
I had just lived through an episode in which on the bus to work I suddenly fainted from pain caused by a herniated disk in my back. I found myself lying on my bed for several months recovering while living on a monthly welfare check of $185 and food stamps. Still, the lesson I drew was that the solution to caring for people with chronic disabilities was what had then worked for me: drawing on a community of volunteers, a roster of almost 30 women who took turns shopping for groceries, doing my laundry, and ferrying me to doctors’ appointments. Why couldn’t that work for everyone?
That network of support existed, however, because I belonged to a lesbian community self-consciously constructing a parallel society tucked inside the larger city of Portland, Oregon. It was packed with institutions like a women’s bookstore, a drop-in community center, a women’s mental health project, and a feminist credit union, among others. I acted with a women’s theater company and, at times, worked as a secretary at a women’s law cooperative.
In reality, though, we weren’t nearly as independent as we thought we were. Most of those institutions were staffed by women paid through the Comprehensive Education and Training Act, passed during the presidency of Richard Nixon and continued under Jimmy Carter. When Ronald Reagan and his new brand of Republicans took over in Washington in 1981, those salaries disappeared almost overnight—and with them, most of our community’s infrastructure.
So, my answer to the problem of aging then was to endorse an ethic of volunteerism rooted in specific communities, like our lesbian one. “Feminists,” I wrote, “are rightly uneasy about asking each other to perform any more unpaid work in our lives than we, and centuries of women before us, have already done.”
Nevertheless, I argued, “the truth is… no one is going to pay us to take care of each other… and we can’t afford to believe the capitalist and patriarchal lie that we are cheating each other when we ask each other—even strangers—to do that work for free.”
In retrospect, it seems clear to me that I was then inching my way toward an ethos that could free the project of caring for each other from the claws of capitalism. But I was naïve about the amount of time and energy people would be able to spare outside of their day’s labor—especially as real wages were about to stagnate and then begin to fall. I didn’t imagine a time to come when people without much money would need to work two or even three jobs just to get by. I didn’t think, as I do now, that it would be better, instead, to focus on raising the status and pay of caring work.
Even back in the 1980s, however, I recognized the limits of volunteerism. I knew that I’d been lucky during my period of temporary disability. I was an outgoing person with quite a sizeable set of acquaintances. With a reasonable levity of spirit and a dependable store of gossip, I knew then that I could make taking care of me relatively pleasant.
But I also knew that no one’s survival should depend on having a winning personality. Instead, as I wrote at the time, we needed to “develop simple, dependable structures to serve those among us who require physical care.”
How hard could that be, after all? “A file of volunteers and a rotating coordinator could do the job,” I wrote then. Here, too, I was more sadly prescient than I even realized. In recent years, the market for aging care has indeed found a way to commercialize volunteer efforts like the ones I imagined in the form of Internet-based options like Lotsa Helping Hands and Mealtrain.
On Our Own?
My point back then was that, as lesbians, we were on our own. No one was going to run the Old Dykes’ Home if we didn’t do it ourselves. (Perhaps I should have foreseen then that someone might indeed run it, if they could make money doing so!) I figured we had 10 to 15 years to develop “formal networks of support to deal with illness and disability,” because eventually each of us would need such structures. We lesbians would have to look out for ourselves because we lived then “on the edges of society.” I didn’t realize at the time that we shared those edges with so many other people.
Building volunteer structures was, I thought, just the short-term goal. The longer-term project was something much more ambitious: to build “a world in which the work of caring for each other happens not at the fringes of society, but at its heart.”
I still believe in that larger goal, and not because it’s a lovely fantasy, but because it’s a response to a fundamental reality of life. It’s a fact that human beings, like all beings, live in a web of interdependence. Every one of us is implicated, folded into that web, simultaneously depending on others, while others depend on us. The self-reliant individual is an illusion, which means that constructing societies based on that chimera is a doomed enterprise, bound in the end (just as we’ve seen) to fail so many on whom—though we may not know it—we depend.
The truth is that we have much less control than we’d like to believe over how we’ll age.
Aging really is a roulette game. My partner and I are gambling that good genes, regular exercise, a reasonable diet, and sufficient mental stimulation will keep our limbs, organs, and minds hale enough to, as they say, “age in place.” We plan to stay in the house we’ve occupied for more than 30 years, in the neighborhood where we can walk to the library and the grocery store. We don’t plan to get Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or congestive heart failure or (like yet another friend) take a life-changing fall down a flight of stairs. Having somehow forgotten to have children (and never wanting to burden even our hypothetical offspring in any case), we’re planning to take care of ourselves.
Talk about hubris!
The truth is that we have much less control than we’d like to believe over how we’ll age. Tomorrow, one of us could lose the disability lottery, and like so many of our friends, we could be staring at the reality of growing old in a society that treats preparation for—and survival during—old age as a matter of individual personal responsibility.
It’s time to take a more realistic approach to the fact that all of us lucky enough to live that long will become ever more dependent as we age. It’s time to face reality and place caring for one another at the heart of the human endeavor.
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Making Art Means Participating in the Human Collective
Art, or the effort to create art, is always aiming at something, though usually not something obvious.
Sep 03, 2023
As I trek toward the Great Unknown, as life’s struggles seem to intensify, some odd questions keep recurring.
Art—what is it again? Why does it matter? How does it matter? What does it mean to be “good” at it?
That last question, in particular, can cut like barbed wire—especially if you’ve been swimming all your life in a sense of mediocrity, having learned that the Temple of Art is the home of the blessed elite. There’s “Mona Lisa,” then there are scribbles and doodles: baby stuff. End of discussion. Your grade is C-minus. Welcome to consumer culture.
A mantra popped into my head: If it’s fun, it means it’s alive.
So why do I care about art? Indeed, why now? As I grow older (by which I mean “old”), I refuse, refuse, refuse to retire: to quit writing, to quit believing I’m doing something that matters... to quit believing that humanity is collective and, at the deepest levels of our being, we all participate in this collective. This is what I call art, even though I don’t know what I mean by that. Or at least I don’t mean something that’s simple and certain, or even particularly serious—at least not in an academic sense. Serious can be fun.
Yeah, really. This is a relatively new bit of awareness for me, for which I thank a number of friends, who have, you might say, pulled me out of a trance of certainty. In particular I thank Dawi, a poet who showed us some of the recent drawings he’s been doing. They woke me up. I remembered the feel of a drafting pen in my hand. I loved to draw, once upon a time—to scratch and scrape a fine penpoint across paper, to let the lines wiggle and squirm and dance. Yet somehow they were mixed with precision. Sometimes a face would emerge. What mattered was that my childhood emerged.
Was it any good? I felt it was as I drew, but it never was good enough—not for a drawing career of any sort to emerge. And eventually I set the pen aside, or mostly aside. I stopped drawing on a regular basis. I knew I wouldn’t find fame. I wouldn’t make money. I needed a serious career and this wouldn’t be it.
But after Dawi’s art woke me up, and I thought about all the time I waste in the present moment, I started scribbling again, because why not? Take my time. Enjoy. I started splotching random colors on the page, mixed with wiggling lines and black and white checks. I found myself immersed once more in childhood wonder. A mantra popped into my head: If it’s fun, it means it’s alive.
And it struck me that this is art. This is how it should be defined. This is how it should be taught.
But there’s more: Art, or the effort to create art, is always aiming at something, though usually not something obvious. There’s ache and awe in the creative process, quietly present with the fun. When I begin a project, when I feel it start to matter, I think of it as a reach into humanity’s collective, evolving whole.
Careful! This gets quickly dangerous. Here’s where I want it to be good—you know, objectively good. Unique, original, special. That wanting can quickly kill the art, yet somehow—paradoxically—it’s part of the process.
And then Alison came for a visit: my daughter the stained-glass artist, who lives in Paris—who designs, creates, and installs stained-glass windows for people. She also writes poetry. She came to Chicago to see her dad, to connect with lifelong friends, and more. She has a connection with a man who has worked in stained glass all his life, who’s ready to retire. He has an enormous collection of stained-glass pieces that he accumulated over the years, including church-window fragments. Some of them are stunningly beautiful. They can’t simply be left to gather dust. Maybe a new home is possible.
And after Alison spent a day at his studio, she and I—can you believe it?—talked about the nature of art, the nature of creativity. She made an interesting distinction as she talked about her stained-glass work: the difference between shards and fragments.
Shards are pieces of broken glass—perhaps violently broken. She feels freer to give them new life. Fragments, on the other hand, preserve a closer link to their original whole. They may be part of a broken church window or some other historic work. Both are often beautiful and radiant, but the less broken they are, the more they still communicate what they once were and the less free she feels to reshape them.
This got my mind spinning. I don’t work with stained glass, but I couldn’t stop thinking about fragments of a shattered church window, and imagining myself creating something with them—mixing art and God, you might say. Mixing fun and spirit. And it felt like the essence of creativity.
When I taught writing over the years—at elementary, high-school, and college levels—the essence of my message to the students, regardless of their age, was: We are all writers. We all have our own voices. Learning to write means finding that voice.
And those voices, I now realize, are full of both shards and fragments: craft and spirit. This is art, regardless of genre. Art is fun. Art is alive.
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The US Isn't Ready for the Climate Emergency's Impact on Older Adults
Efforts to build resilience have failed to consider what climate change means for this vulnerable population.
Aug 13, 2023
We will remember the summer of 2023 as our hottest season on record—at least until next year. Communities in Texas and Florida endured weekslong stretches of record-setting high temperatures, and Phoenix beat its own previous record when it reached an average monthly temperature of 102.7 in July. For many, there is a growing sense that this is the beginning of a “new normal” for which we are unprepared.
We are also largely unprepared for a rapidly aging population. In about a decade, more Americans will be over 65 than under 18 for the first time. This demographic shift is well underway in the places hit hardest by climate-fueled heatwaves. Florida and Texas have some of the nation’s largest concentrations of people over 65—4.6 million and 3.9 million, respectively; only California has more, with 6 million. Arizona saw its 65 and older population grow by nearly 55% to 1.4 million between 2010 and 2020.
Extreme heat and other climate impacts are already disproportionately impacting older adults. Yet to date, efforts to build resilience have failed to consider what climate change means for this vulnerable population.
For older adults, climate-fueled disasters can be a matter of life and death. From Hurricane Katrina, where over two-thirds of the more than 1,300 people who died were older than 60, to last winter’s storms in Buffalo, New York, older adults are far more likely to die in extreme weather events than younger people. That holds true for heatwaves as well. Deaths from heat-related illnesses claim the lives of 12,000 people each year, of which 80% are over 60.
Why? On top of the physical effects of aging, older adults are more likely to have underlying health conditions or take medications that interfere with a body’s ability to cool itself.
Low-income older adults are especially vulnerable, as they struggle to pay higher electric bills from greater use of air conditioning. Indeed, 17% of low-income older-adult-headed households report that they have had to forego necessities for at least one month to pay an energy bill. The majority of older adults live outside of nursing homes, and among those, 27% live alone in their homes, often lacking social networks that could help monitor their safety and well-being. What’s more, some are unable to procure food, prescriptions, and healthcare when they don’t drive—as is the case for nearly 20% of older adults—and can’t safely use public transportation during heatwaves.
As temperatures rise in our rapidly aging nation, we must plan to ensure resilience for the country’s oldest residents. Fortunately, solutions that meet the needs of older adults also benefit people of all ages. For example, programs that support seniors in weatherizing their homes can bring down cooling costs and deliver a more resilient housing stock. Bus shelters with shading and seating can make public transit feasible for older adults on hot days—and serve people of any age who can’t afford to or are unable to drive.
And help for older adults to both understand and access more energy-efficient technology (like heat pumps) and renewable energy solutions can relieve pressure on the electric grid during peak operations, helping to avoid blackouts and secure a more stable energy supply for all customers.
Our demographic future is clear, and the “new normal” of climate change has arrived. All Americans will be better served if we take steps now to prepare. We owe it to the older adults we love—and to ourselves, as we age—to ensure more comfort and safety in the face of a changing climate.
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