The Coming of Age by Simone de Beauvoir. Copyright © 1972 by Andre Deutsch. Reprinted by permission of the Putnam Publishing Group.
Reading 2: Successful Aging
John Rowe and Robert Kahn
Satchel Paige, baseball’s legendary, indestructible African-American pitcher, was as famous for his fast answers as for his fastball. He began pitching at the age of seventeen and was for many years restricted to what was then called the Negro Baseball League. Born near the turn of the century, he was already a veteran at the pitcher’s mound when the racial barrier was relaxed. However, the decades rolled by, and he continued to pitch. As he did so, Paige became purposefully vague about his age, a subject of increasing speculation among sportswriters. When one of them put the question bluntly—”How old are you?”—Paige gave him a classic answer: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” The question—and Paige’s answer—have as much to do with society’s definitions and expectations of aging, and successful aging, as with Paige’s own personal experience. By physical measures, at least, Paige was certainly aging successfully. But his wariness about coming clean with a hard number speaks volumes about our society’s skepticism about competence in old age. What, after all, does it mean to “age successfully”? Does America think of aging per se as a bad thing, even when good things continue to develop—or emerge for the first time—with age? What, actually, is “success”? …
Successful Aging or the Imitation of Youth?
Modern society, perhaps especially American society, seems to regard aging as something to be denied or concealed. Women are freed, happily, from the corsets and similar instruments of torture that fashion once decreed. But a massive and inventive cosmetics industry does its best to persuade middle-aged and elderly women—and, increasingly, men—that they will lead happier lives if they change their hair color from gray to some improbable shade of blonde or red, camouflage their hair loss, and cover, erase, or abrade their wrinkles.
Photographs that advertise the products in question show people who are invariably young in appearance; photographer and makeup artist collaborate to send the incessant message of youth. And what cosmetics and computer-enhanced photography cannot do, plastic surgery offers to accomplish. The implication of all this information and misinformation is that the ultimate form of successful aging would be no aging at all. A psychologist might be tempted to say that underlying this denial of the aging process is a more deep-seated denial: refusal to acknowledge the fact of human mortality and the inevitability of death.
Our view of successful aging is not built on the search for immortality and the fountain of youth. George Bernard Shaw, when he was in his nineties, was asked whether he had any advice for younger people. He did. “Do not try to live forever,” said Shaw, “you will not succeed.” Or, as psychologist Carol Ryff put it in a thoughtful article, “Ponce de León missed the point.”
In short, successful aging means just what it says—aging well, which is very different from not aging at all. The three main components of successful aging—avoiding disease and disability, maintaining mental and physical function, and continuing engagement with life—are important throughout life, but their realization in old age differs from that at earlier life stages….
Old age has been called a “roleless role,” a time when it is no longer clear what is expected of the elderly person or where he or she can find the resources that will make old age successful.
For earlier life stages, the expectations are clearer. Children are expected to attend school; in fact, they are legally required to do so. Able-bodied adults are expected to be employed or to be actively seeking paid employment. Parents of young children are expected to care for them. None of these societal expectations generates perfect compliance, but all of them are felt and most of them are backed by law.
The years after child-rearing and employment present a sharp contrast to these expectational patterns and arrangements for their fulfillment. Almost nothing is expected of the elderly. The spoken advice from youth to age is “take it easy,” which means do nothing or amuse yourself. The unspoken message is “find your own way and keep out of ours.”
Many older men and women do better than that…. They find new friends, partially replace paid employment with useful voluntary activity, maintain some form of regular exercise, and enjoy a measure of increased leisure. But many others do much less and age less well.
Source: Successful Aging edited by John Wallis Rowe and Robert L. Kahn (pp. 36–37, 48–49, 51–52). Copyright © 1998 by John Wallis Rowe, MD, and Robert L. Kahn, PhD. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.
Reading 3: Vital Involvement in Old Age
Erik H. Erikson, Joan M. Erikson, and Helen Q. Kivnick
Elders have both less and more. Unlike the infant, the elder has a reservoir of strength in the wellsprings of history and storytelling. As collectors of time and preservers of memory, those healthy elders who have survived into a reasonably fit old age have time on their side—time that is to be dispensed wisely and creatively, usually in the form of stories, to those younger ones who will one day follow in their footsteps. Telling these stories, and telling them well, marks a certain capacity for one generation to entrust itself to the next, by passing on a certain shared and collective identity to the survivors of the next generation: the future. Trust … is one of the constant human values or virtues, universally acknowledged as basic for all relationships. Hope is yet another basic foundation for all community living and for survival itself, from infancy to old age. The question of old age, and perhaps of life, is how—with the trust and competency accumulated in old age—one adapts to and makes peace with the inevitable physical disintegration of aging.
After years of collaboration, elders should be able to know and trust, and know when to mistrust, not only their own senses and physical capacities, but also their accumulated knowledge of the world around them. It is important to listen to the authoritative and objective voices of professionals with an open mind, but one’s own judgment, after all those years of intimate relations with the body and with others, is decisive. The ultimate capacities of the aging person are not yet determined. The future may well bring surprises.
Elders, of course, know well their own strengths. They should keep all of these strengths in use and involved in whatever their environment offers or makes possible. And they should not underestimate the possibility of developing strengths that are still dormant. Taking part in needed and useful work is appropriate for both elders and their relationship to the community.
With aging, there are inevitably constant losses—losses of those very close, and friends near and far. Those who have been rich in intimacy also have the most to lose. Recollection is one form of adaptation, but the effort skillfully to form new relationships is adaptive and more rewarding. Old age is necessarily a time of relinquishing—of giving up old friends, old roles, earlier work that was once meaningful, and even possessions that belong to a previous stage of life and are now an impediment to the resiliency and freedom that seem to be requisite for adapting to the unknown challenges that determine the final stage of life.
Trust in interdependence. Give and accept help when it is needed. Old Oedipus well knew that the aged sometimes need three legs; pride can be an asset but not a cane.
When frailty takes over, dependence is appropriate, and one has no choice but to trust in the compassion of others and be consistently surprised at how faithful some caretakers can be.
Much
