OLD AGE IS THE REVENGE OF THE UGLY - A GOOD ARTICLE TO READ

Old Age Is the Revenge of the Ugly

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/lifelines/201207/old-age-is-the-revenge-the-ugly

The fear we all must face

Published on July 5, 2012 by Gordon S. Livingston, M.D. in Lifelines

The most obvious derivative to our fear of death is the terror of aging. The devalued status of the elderly in this society speaks to our progressive worry about our own inevitable decline. What is required of us to accept our mortality and retain hope in a future in which we will not participate?

From our earliest years we are dissatisfied with our age. When we are children we envy the freedom of adults to manage their own lives. As teenagers, especially, we chafe at the restrictions imposed on us as we seek autonomy in ways constructive and rebellious. Those of us who make the transition to adulthood usually, but not always, in our early 20's (Have you seen the numbers of young people moving back home after college?) are still confronted with the tasks of earning a living and finding someone we imagine we will still love in our 30's and beyond. Somewhere in this phase of our lives we begin to worry about aging.

Absent in all this anxiety about aging is any sense that growing older might have its compensations. Freed of the urgent striving that marks our early adulthood, one would think that the elderly would have time to slow down and indulge the pleasures of mind and body that do not require the reflexes and strength that are gone forever. When I encounter older men who play golf I am surprised at how often I hear stories of high school or college athletic triumphs. The theme is always the same: I wasn't always like this. Many of them have braces on their knees, damaged on fields distant in time; but the recollection is never bitter, always wistful, as if what they are now, old men trying to play an impossible game, is a rebuke to what they were once and might have been had they not been injured.

The subtext of these conversations is that the old have lost most of what we celebrate in this culture: energy, physical attractiveness, sexual adventure, a sense of possibilities, and the capacity to change the future. People instinctively prefer freedom of choice to the dead weight of habit and feelings of limited control. One of the major components of happiness is something to look forward to. As the distance between us and our life expectancy narrows, it is hard not to be discouraged, which explains the higher incidence of depression in this age group. In the words of Tennyson, "We are not now that strength that in old days moved earth and heaven." It is as if the implicit contract that governs our lives had never been properly explained to us. We didn't, when young, read the fine print: if you are lucky enough to grow old, you will be stereotyped and marginalized by the society you live in, even by your own children. You will gradually become slow of thought and movement and have to cope with unexplained pains. You will experience unspeakable losses that, finally, will include the loss of yourself. This is the bargain. Perhaps if we had absorbed this part of the contract we could see it through in good humor and without complaint. That would certainly be a relief to those who must follow us.

Instead, we appear more inclined to act surprised and offended by what seems to be a rebuke to our sense of specialness. On his deathbed the novelist William Saroyan supposedly said, "Everybody has got to die, but I always believed that an exception would be made in my case." Perhaps this unconscious assumption allows us to avoid what could otherwise be a morbid and immobilizing pre-occupation with our mortality. Whatever we believe about why we are here, we seem to take the most satisfaction from what we create. For most of us this pleasure resides in our children and their children, those who carry our genetic material into the future. Few of us are lucky enough to have work that provides real creative satisfaction. It is in the nature of most jobs that little of what we do lives on after us and most of what we do can be done as well by others so that our absence is not missed.

Those of us who have chosen occupations in which we serve others — cocktail waitresses and psychiatrists, for example — hope that our efforts have improved the lives of a few of the people we have encountered. But it is not too modest to believe that the numbers of human beings who are really better for having encountered us is small and that we live on in few hearts beyond those who loved us. When they are gone, so, finally, are we. Since I am in a time of life when one contemplates one's impact on the world, I recently tried to estimate the percentage of those thousands of patients I have seen over 45 years of work who are significantly better for having met me. My best guess is around 25 percent. Another 60-70 percent changed their lives little or not at all as a result of our conversations. I comfort myself that relatively few, therefore, are worse for having met me, but perhaps I am, even now, giving myself the benefit of the doubt. When I was in training I told one of my supervisors that I would be interested to find out in 10 years how a patient I had worked with in the hospital was doing. Only now do I understand his response: "Don't look back."

So, if we elect to take honest inventory of our lives as we near the end, perhaps modesty can co-exist with satisfaction. It is given to few of us to leave anything behind that is memorable to others, much less permanent. Perhaps it is enough to have loved those we could, done as little harm as possible, and grown old with enough courage to give hope to (or at least amuse) the small audience who cared enough about us to pay attention.

--
V.RAGHAVENDRA RAO,
Apt # 6R,140,PROSPECTS AVENUE,
HACKENSACK, NJ-07601.USA.
--
V.RAGHAVENDRA RAO,
Apt # 6R,140,PROSPECTS AVENUE,
HACKENSACK, NJ-07601.USA.