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A Ceremony of Losses
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“Old age is a ceremony of losses,” wrote the poet Donald Hall, who in his old age wrote movingly on the subject. I still have a way to go before I can speak with the same authority that his great age brought him (he lived to be 89). But I have long since blown past the biblical three score and ten, closing in on four score.
My granddaughter, now in college, served as the canary in the coal mine when she was still a little girl. “You know, Papa,” she told me matter-of-factly, “you’re old.” I had to laugh. At that point, I wasn’t even collecting Social Security. What did she know, anyway? She probably thought her daddy was old, and he was barely out of diapers himself, as far as I was concerned.
Then again, I’ve learned we’re not always the best judge of our own condition in such matters. Old age sneaks up on you. I am reminded of the character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises who was asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replied. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Gradually, then suddenly — that’s also how you get old.
In my case, the “gradually” part started around age 40, when I had to give up running because of arthritis in my knees. Since the arthritis was caused by the running, I did not immediately associate it with advancing age. But, of course, the arthritis didn’t stop just because I gave up running. I won’t bore you with a recitation of all the aches and pains that have ensued in the nearly four decades since. I tell people I sometimes wake up feeling like the Tin Woodman after he has been left out in the rain — and in my case there is no handy oil can I can use to lubricate my joints.
My wife has had a front-row seat for all this, and she finds it a bit perplexing. Her mom lived to be 89, and her dad was 105 when he died. Her biological clock is clearly calibrated differently from mine. “You’re only as old as you feel,” she once told me. “That’s precisely the problem,” I replied. “When you get to be my age, you’ll understand.” My wife is, in fact, two months older than I.
My father-in-law showed few signs of slowing down until close to the end. He had little patience with well-meaning neighbors who cautioned him about shoveling snow in his driveway or cleaning out his gutters. When he turned 100, people congratulated him. But he remained mindful of all those who were no longer around to help him celebrate, which was just about all his peers. His wife, nine years his junior, had died several years before. He still had plenty of friends, but he had outlived all five of his long-lived siblings, as well as virtually everyone he had grown up with. At the time of his death, he was the last surviving member of the Rutgers Class of 1928.
None of my three college roommates was still here for our 55th reunion; none even reached the median age of death for a white male in this country (73). My three younger siblings, all now in their seventies, are still with us, thank God. But my wife’s older sister, who confidently expected to benefit from her family’s history of longevity, isn’t. She died at age 73 from ovarian cancer. My wife, ever the realist, always pushes back if I dare to suggest she will outlive me.
Gradually, then suddenly — that can also apply to the inevitable aging of one’s brain. Just as I no longer take stairs two at a time, I find my mind is no longer has the same spring to its step. Names, faces, facts, places sometimes defy easy retrieval and may stubbornly refuse to surface at all. All this is pretty much par for the course with folks my age. Senior moments, they call it. But, of course, for some us the momentary lapses don’t end there.
Soon after my father died, my mother was diagnosed with vascular dementia — a first cousin to Alzheimer’s disease, caused by tiny strokes. Her brain became sort of like Swiss cheese; if her mind hit a hole, she grew befuddled, as when she asked me how to remove the cap from her fountain pen or how to run hot water in the tub. The rest of her brain remained more of less functional — until the whole thing was eventually hollowed out from within. It was her fate to suffer what Shakespeare called a “second childishness and mere oblivion.”
I am struck by Donald Hall’s use of the term “ceremony of losses” to describe old age. “Ceremony” is a word that ican also be applied to rituals of mourning. Funeral services might include this verse from the Book of Job: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” In Job’s case, his losses — all of them grievous — are sudden, not gradual. Satan, acting with the Lord’s full knowledge and acquiescence, strips Job of every worldly possession: his oxen, his asses, his sheep, his servants, his sons and his daughters – everything except his wife, who advises him to curse God and die.
And yet, for all his suffering, Job does not suffer the ravages of old age. When at last the Lord deigns to speak to him out of the whirlwind, the blameless Job is devastated anew for daring to demand some explanation for his misfortunes. In the end, he gets both less and much more than he bargained for. No explanation is ever forthcoming, but he has met God face to face. A curious kind of transcendence takes place in which Job accepts that he has lost everything and embraces his essential nothingness. "Therefore I will be quiet," he concludes in Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Book of Job, "comforted that I am dust."
There are differences in language and tone in the final chapters of Job that suggest to at least some biblical scholars these were later additions to the original. In particular, there is a kind of happily-ever-after vibe at the very end that seems suspiciously out of keeping with the rest. Job once again experiences a sharp reversal of fortune. He winds up with sheep, camels, oxen and donkeys by the thousand, as well as another seven sons and three daughters (poor Mrs. Job!). And, this being the Old Testament, he lives another 140 years, “old and full of days.”
The story of Job is one in which the Lord first taketh, then the Lord giveth back with interest. For those of us not destined to live another 140 years, we shouldn’t be surprised if things unfold the other way around. Whether gradually or suddenly, we all die in the end. We will be stripped of every worldly possession: house, cars, investment portfolio, sons and daughters, spouse. We will be beyond caring, of course, and in the end perhaps we might even take comfort in the fact we are dust.
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