The Heritage of Old Age

In 2009/10, I was in the employ of the local Christian school.  My job, ostensibly, was to teach 8th grade English.  Often, my students wanted to be sidetracked by other concerns, primarily the concern of their final year at the school and all the celebration and ceremony that came with it.  I tried not to devote much class time to planning their 8th grade graduation ceremony or their 8th grade celebratory trip -- their send-off into the world of public education.  Instead, I tried to focus on English (surprise, surprise).  I had found that while they had been taught a lot of grammar (which is wonderful!) they didn't know as much about literature as I felt they certainly should by the age of 14.  So I undertook that, with varying degrees of success.  One portion of the class focused on mysteries, and within that section our "out loud book", the book I read to them in sections right after lunch, was Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.  The fun was listening to who they picked as the culprit and seeing their reaction when they learned the truth.  Many of them had fingered the Princess Dragomiroff, an aging Russian noblewoman.  After we finished the book, we watched the Albert Finney film version (painful as he is to watch in the role of Poirot, the rest of them are good).

When we first meet the Princess Dragomiroff in the film, she is in her compartment with her lap dogs and personal maid.  The camera zooms in on her, so we can get a really nice shot of all her wrinkles and general elderly-ness.  One of my students suddenly went, "Ugh!" and shuddered.  A second time, when the Princess reappeared, she exclaimed, "I'm sorry! She's just creepy!"  So I said, "I hope no one reacts like that to you when you're that age."

All of which brings me, finally, to today's topic:  Old age and our reactions to it.  My student was certainly not alone in her reaction to the aging.  Certainly Christie even describes the Princess in her book as a rather poised and imperial looking toad.  Nonetheless, I can't help but think of my student's reaction to seeing her on film as a reaction to the actress herself.  Wendy Hiller was not, in her youth, an unattractive woman.  She certainly had a different look to her, but not one that would have made the general population shudder in horror, and it seemed unkind to react to her in that way even if her appearance was altered by lighting and make-up, making her look older and more geriatric than she may have in real life.  However, my student's attitude encapsulates perfectly our cultural reaction to old age.

When I write these blogs, my very vast experience, I like to have my IPod next to me, so I can Google things.  As I started writing this, I Googled "Old age quotes".  I'm telling you this so that when I start tossing out quotes by Somerset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, Aristophanes, and Hugh Hefner, you won't mistakenly believe that I'm really, really well read.  But the page that I pulled up after my search, provides me with an interesting range on the ideas and ideals of old-age.  The one quote that tops the list, literally and figuratively, is from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  "The tragedy of old age," he writes, "is not that one is old, but that one is young."

His quote seems to aptly describe what I imagine it feels like to grow old.  On my next birthday, I'll be thirty, not old by any means, but inside myself I still feel seventeen.  I have felt that way since I was seventeen.  Imagine my shock when one of the the first kids I ever babysat graduated high school last year?  How can that be? I thought, I only just graduated a couple years ago myself... Eleven years ago, actually.  But there it is.  Imagine old age sneaking up on you like that.  Suddenly, you wake up one morning and find that you need help putting on your shoes or eating appropriately healthy food.

Hugh Hefner believes, "that age -- if you're healthy -- age is just a number."  Very insightful (I'm being somewhat facetious.  I realize you can't hear my tone of voice).  But so often health fails. And minds fail.  In my work as a sales associate (it just sounds better), I get to help a variety of people.  Recently, I've helped a couple of elderly customers find shoes that would offer support and stability.  One man had just had a vein (I think) removed from his leg and placed in his heart.  He was very weak, and his wife and I had to push the shoes onto his feet because he couldn't do it himself.  Again and again he apologized: "You'd think that as old as I am, I could tie my own shoes."  Yesterday, an elderly woman was brought in by her daughter-in-law to find shoes that would be softer on her instep.  She had to use a walker and relied on the support of her daughter-in-law, who also took off her old shoes, put on the new ones, made sure they fit right, then filled out her check and took it over to her mother-in-law to sign.  Throughout their time in the store, both women were light-hearted and joking.  The daughter-in-law was sympathetic and kind.

That struck me especially.  In a day in age when we so often brush past people who are slow and in our way, here was this quite beautiful example of service and love.  In 2006, Billy Graham was interviewed by Newsweek.  In that interview he stated, "All my life I've been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old."  The problem, I think, is that we arrogantly assume that we will be better, that if, like Hugh Hefner, we are blessed with good health, than we'll be fine.  Just fine.  But life so often seems more like a crap shoot.  We don't and can't know that we won't be sidelined by heart problems or blindness or dementia.  My own lovely Grandma had heart problems and dementia.  By the time I was in high school she was not the Grandma I remembered from my childhood, and the really frustrating thing was that I kind of kept waiting for her to snap out of it.

There is a tendency to think of the elderly as second-class citizens.  I know because I've done it myself. I was not as attentive a granddaughter as I wish I had been.  I do get frustrated when I'm stuck behind an older person who's moving slowly.  I often forget that what they are dealing with is irreversible.  We value youth so much, and yet it is so far from formation (if that makes sense at all.  It does to me.), so far from being any kind of a complete person. I don't know if old age brings that sense of completion, but I think it is our destiny.  Somerset Maugham writes, "The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.  The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquility of the evening."

Whenever I think back to that day with my 8th graders watching the Princess Dragomiroff shakily give her alibi to Poirot, I think about how easy it is to forget that life is more than just the present. That it is a very long, but also a very brief journey. My hope would be that when I grow old, people will treat me as a person -- without condescension or irritation.  Aristophanes believes that "the old are in a second childhood."  It sounds nice, but then I remember that, as a child, there wasn't a lot I could do on my own.