Emerson said, “’Tis strange that it is not in vogue to commit hara-kiri, as the Japanese do, at sixty. Nature is so insulting in her hints and notices, does not pull you by the sleeve, but pulls out your teeth, tears off your hair in patches, steals your eyesight, twists your face into an ugly mask, in short, puts all contumelies upon you, without in the least abating your zeal to make a good appearance, and all this at the same time that she is moulding the new figures around you into wonderful beauty which of course is only making your plight worse.”
The year Zola died, he said, at 62, “I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.”
The PR flak Harlan Boll defends his lying about his celebrity clients’ ages by saying, “The American public doesn’t really forgive people for getting older.” Which is of course true. Jackie Kennedy said if she knew she was going to get cancer at 65, she wouldn’t have done all those sit-ups. In jail, O. J. Simpson bemoaned to his girlfriend that the once admirable, apple-like shape of his posterior had collapsed into middle-aged decrepitude. Gravity sucks.
By the time you reach 65, you’ve lost 30 to 40 percent of your aerobic power. The walls of your heart thicken, and you’re more likely to develop coronary disease. Sixty percent of 60-year-old men, and the same percentage of 80-year-old women, have a major narrowing in at least one coronary artery. A stiffening in the walls of the major arteries results in a progressive increase in blood pressure, which imposes an increasing load on the heart. Since the heart has to work harder for each heartbeat and use more energy, the overall efficiency of the cardiovascular system drops significantly. One and a half million Americans suffer a myocardial infarction each year. Seventy percent of heart attacks occur at home. If you survive a heart attack, you’re virtually guaranteed to die eventually of a heart-related illness. My father had a heart attack at 86 (more on this later), had his heart stop beating for 30 seconds during electroconvulsive therapy at 92, and several months ago he was hugely, irrationally afraid that his upcoming colonoscopy (he’d had some bloody stools, and his doctor wanted to figure out what was triggering his ceaseless seesawing between diarrhea and constipation) would cause his heart to stop for good.
At 65, you’ve lost one ounce of your three-pound brain and one-tenth of your brain cells. The motor area of the frontal cortex loses 50 percent of its neurons, as does the area in the back controlling vision and the area on the sides controlling physical sensation. The gyri—the twisting, raised convolutions in the cortex within which you do much of your thinking—experience the greatest atrophy. The brain of a 90-year-old is the same size as that of a 3- year-old. The details of the new Medicare drug benefits program perplex and annoy everyone, including me, but they’ve completely defeated my dad; he no longer grasps concepts he used to grasp. His mental operations do seem, on many channels, newly simple.
Joints age owing to deterioration in cartilage, tendons, and fluid. The fluid contained within joints begins to thin. More friction is created. Nearly everyone age 65 or older shows some abnormality of the joints; one out of two people has moderate to severe abnormality. One-third of American women over 65 have collapsed vertebrae as a result of bone thinning, or osteoporosis. The more bone you have as an adult, the less likely you are to develop osteoporosis. (Generally speaking, it’s best and easiest to head off aging’s ravages when you’re young, which is exactly when you aren’t thinking about them.)
When you’re a young adult, the reflex that tells you it’s time to urinate occurs when your bladder is half full. For people over age 65, the message isn’t received until your bladder is nearly full.
Five percent of the U.S. population live in a nursing home. When I asked my father a dozen years ago whether he’d ever want to consider moving into a retirement home in Seattle, he replied, “I don’t know how long I’ll be working. Right now, I can get out there and cover the games (basketball, baseball, football, etc.) and turn in two or three pieces each week. I’m not down to my last two bits. Still have some money in my savings account, plus the money I get from Social Security and the annuity I bought in 1977, plus what I get each month from the paper. I’m like the man betting in Las Vegas who says, ‘I hope I can break even. I sure could use the money.’ I miss you and Laurie and Natalie and Paula and Wayne [my sister and brother-in-law, who live forty miles south of Seattle in Tacoma] more than words can say. But life at Woodlake offers me many activities. And there’s also the god-awful Seattle weather. I look on the retirement home as a terminal stop. We old-timers joke about those places, calling them ‘God’s waiting room.’ Where the average age is deceased. (Gallows humor.) So I would like to spend the rest of my days in my own apartment here in Woodlake. For one, I couldn’t afford a retirement home. I’m not ready for that type of living. Or spending. Here I quote again from my steno notebook of memorable phrases (don’t know who wrote it or where I read it): ‘Each man picks his own hill to die on.’ My ‘hill’ certainly would not be a retirement home. Ideally, it would be out on a golf course. Bing Crosby and a couple of other well-known people have died on golf courses. Nice way to go if you’ve lived a good share of years. Not fifty or even sixty.”
There are now more people in the United States over 65 than ever before. Only 30 percent of people ages 75 to 84 report disabilities—the lowest percentage ever reported.
Five to 8 percent of people over 65 have dementia; half of those in their 80s have it. One of many dementias and the most common, Alzheimer’s affects 1 in 10 Americans over 65, 1 in 2 people over 85. Alzheimer’s patients are more likely to have had a low-stress (i.e., mentally unstimulating) job. Zero sign, though, as yet of Alzheimer’s in my father: he’s still reading and rereading Robert Caro on Robert Moses, Philip Roth on Newark, Arnold Rampersad on Jackie Robinson, Gar Alperovitz on the decision to drop the atom bomb.
According to Noel Coward, “The pleasures that once were heaven / Look silly at sixty-seven.”
At 68, Edmund Wilson said, “The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.”
“Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine,” William Dean Howells wrote to Mark Twain, “but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step. I was born to be afraid of dying, but not of getting old. Age has many advantages, and if old men were not so ridiculous, I should not mind being one. But they are ridiculous, and they are ugly. The young do not see this so clearly as we do, but some day they will.”
Thomas Pynchon says, “When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death—how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.”
Fifteen years ago, on a gorgeous spring day, my father and I jogged down my block. A school bus of middle- school girls rounded the corner. He puffed out his chest, let out his kick, put himself on display. Rather than ooh or aah or whistle or applaud or ignore him, several girls stuck their heads out the windows in the back of the bus and did the cruelest thing possible: they laughed.
“You’re only young,” AC/DC sing on
In your late 60s, you eat less. Your metabolic rate decreases slightly. Men lose 3 percent of their skeletal weight per decade (my father now weighs 150); women lose 8 percent. Throughout adult life, men lose about 15 percent of their total mineral density; women, 30 percent. The diameter of your forearm shrinks, as does the diameter of your calves.
The density of your skin’s circulatory systems—veins, capillaries, arterioles—is reduced, which is why old people feel cold sooner. Also, your skin functions less well as a barrier because the skin is thinner—like wearing too light a coat. As you age, your facial skin temperature falls. For older people, a comfortable temperature is 10 to 15 degrees higher than it is for a younger person.
Each day of your adult life, you lose 30,000 to 50,000 nerves and 100,000 nerve cells. Over time, your heart, lungs, and prostate enlarge. The level of potassium in your body declines. After age 70, your ability to absorb calcium is dramatically reduced.
Tolstoy wrote to his wife, Sonia, who was 16 years younger than he was, “The main thing is that just as the Hindus, when they are getting on toward sixty, retire to the forests, and every religious man wants to dedicate the last years of his life to God and not to jokes, puns, gossip, and tennis [jokes, puns, gossip, and tennis: paging Milton Shildcrout…], so I, who am entering my seventieth year, long with all my heart and soul for this tranquility and solitude.” He died at 82 when he collapsed in a train station, in flight from Sonia, with whom he’d been quarreling.
At age 70, the mass of your corneal lens is three times larger than it was when you were 20, which causes you to be more farsighted; after age 70, you become more nearsighted. The lens becomes thicker and heavier with age, reducing your ability to focus on close-up objects. Your sensitivity to contrast declines, as does your ability to
