SPEAKING OF AGE

“You’re not old,” I was told, not for the first time, by a friend in his 50s. I had just begun to explain how a situation looked from my perspective as an old person, when he protested my use of the dirty word “old.” From the near-panicked look on his face, you’d have thought I’d begun to describe a sexually transmitted disease at a sedate dinner party. To many 50-year-olds the very word “old” may, indeed, seem as unnerving as “gonorrhea.” But avoiding the word will not enable us to deny our way out of the last stages of life. Even a tummy tuck, hair graft or a dose of Viagra won’t enable us to jog through our 60s and 70s without becoming old on the way. 

            Once you hit 60, some people, including age mates, may refer to you as an “elder,” a term of respect that assumes you’ve been acquiring wisdom, rather than, year after year, stubbornly practicing mistakes, as some of us do. “Older” inexplicably implies you are not really old yet, and is meant to blur the naked truth of the stage of life you have reached. But a glance at a basic grammar book will tell you the suffix “-er,” a comparative adjective, means “more so,” not less so.  So why do “tall-er,” “fat-ter,” “young-er” and “smart-er” designate more than the root word without its suffix, while “old-er” is meant to imply you are less old? If the question confuses you, that probably means your head is on straight. 

If, at 62, instead of using the euphemism “senior,” you bluntly ask for an old person’s discount at a movie theater, the clerk may greet the request with a puzzled frown or nervous giggle. A recent professional publication referred to it’s theme as the “autumn of life,” meaning of course, the life of the old.  Okay, along with the autumn leaves, our arches and jowls fall, and some of us are more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of aging bodies and minds.  But, like stalwart oaks, many remain both resilient and sturdy, even in the “winter of life.”

When will we begin to view old age as a stage of life that needn’t be an embarrassment, that is neither wholly good nor bad, but a mix of delights, losses and complex challenges?   When will we recognize that to lose our clear sight, short-term memory and even the capacity to walk unaided is not a matter for shame or secrecy?  That it is not somethinglike death in this cultureto be whispered or referred to only in euphemistic language?  Sure, anxieties, aches, pains and new losses make their appearances.  But we might cheerfully bid farewell to stresses on the way up the career ladder or worry over what the neighbors will think.  Those losses can clear the decks, so we can do as we please for a few years. 

In recent decades many oppressed groups have burst out of socially imposed closets.  We can join those who have re-claimed descriptors such as “queer,” “Black,” or “African American.”  It’s time to stop fooling around with words meant to deny the existence of the last phases of life.  It’s time to boldly re-claim the solid, reality-based status implied in that venerable word: “old.”

A slightly modified version of this article was published in Prime Time.