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aging
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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