That Thing We Forget About Aging
We talk about wrinkles and the loss of youth, but omit mentioning the much larger looming losses
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I’m traveling down the Nile, contemplating temples and ruins built thousands of years ago. As I stand in awe in front of these monuments left behind by people gone so many centuries ago, I can’t help but think about the fleetingness of time.
This piece on aging, time and loss was written before our Nile Princess cruise set out but it feels timely to release it now.
When disaster strikes, it robs us of words. We stand stunned in the face of the catastrophe without the means to utter our surprise, our anguish, and our pain. The words we are left with are inadequate and banal — unable to convey the immensity of our feelings.
I’ve been looking for words for weeks now. Three, to be precise. Three weeks ago, a friend had a devastating heart attack. I missed a message on that Saturday evening because I was watching Adele sing her heart out in the sold-out Munich stadium.
Only hours before I finally read the message on Sunday, I liked a picture on his Instagram. It showed him and his friend about to set out on the golf course where the heart attack would strike him down.
As I watched Adele sing, he was fighting for his life in intensive care. When I found the message, they had put him in an artificial coma to help him heal.
For three weeks, we’ve been holding our breath, hoping for news that he’s improving. Suspended between having to keep moving forward and not wanting to leave him behind. Waiting for him to come back to us. And tell us everything is alright. So, we can stop pretending we know that everything will be alright.
We all know we are going to die, don’t we? But do we understand we will die? Do we truly appreciate the fact that one day, from one moment to the other, we will be gone? And so will everyone else we know.
We know that it is inevitable. There is an end to our road. Our road, everyone’s road. And when our road ends, the world will continue as if nothing has happened. Nothing of significance. Just another person who has disappeared into nothingness.
A scary thought. So, we joke about our mortality. Laughing in the face of death is a common way to deal with the terror we feel when we dive into that place where we understand that we will end.
And yes, aging brings us closer to that moment every day. This we know.
But what we fail to grasp is that every day also brings us closer to the death of our loved ones. Our parents, friends, brothers, sisters, and everyone we know. Every day we age, the likelihood that they will leave us behind grows.
While our death, our transition into nothingness may be scary when contemplated. In the end — pun intended — it is the end. Once we’re dead, we will not suffer. We’re over.
Those who suffer will be the ones who love us and are left behind. As we will suffer when they go. Death is harder on the survivors. They have to live with the loss.
The death of others is harrowing; it leaves a permanent hole in the fabric of our lives. A hole that we might get accustomed to but that remains. And can’t be filled.
The older we get, the more holes there will be. People shaped holes that accompany us until we create our own hole in the lives of others.
Aging is living with more and more loss.
While we openly talk about the loss of our youthful features and bodies, we rarely spend time speaking about the actual loss we will experience.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen the specters of the holes that are to come looming ever closer. And I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it.
My father is slowly descending into dementia. His body is failing, along with his mind. He still recognizes us when we Facetime but has forgotten most of his life. The edges of the hole he will leave become more visible every day. I have recurring dreams of hopping on a plane and rushing across continents, only to be too late to talk to him one last time.
My mother feels smaller every time I hug her. I keep wondering how much longer until there’s nothing left in my arms. I resent having to work and so little time to spend with her.
My brain understands the concept of life and death: this circle that has to be fulfilled, but my heart rebels against it. I feel my emotions twisting and turning inside me to escape this truth.
I don’t yet know how to cope with this knowledge of inevitable loss.
Should I try not to worry about it? Or should I think about it a lot so I will be prepared? Can we be prepared?
The Buddhists seem to think we can be. From the “Tibetan Book of the Dead,” I learned that we must prepare for death to rescue ourselves from the cycle of rebirth we’re caught in.
But then Buddhists believe that being reborn is bad. I don’t. Neither that we will be reborn nor that it would be bad if we could. I’d welcome it. I’d be soothed by the knowledge that after death, my loved ones would go for another spin. I’d love that for them — and me.
“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”
I don’t believe in the afterlife — unfortunately. I’m sure it would make things easier. Incidentally, I think that the afterlife was invented to make the idea of death more palatable.
The thought of death not being “The End” is soothing. Despite being an atheist for a long time, I did believe in some prolonged existence. Rebirth, universal energy. Some way to alleviate the terror of non-existence.
But then a friend gave me Julian Barnes's Nothing to be Frightened Of and forever cured me from hoping there might be a life after death.
If you want to keep believing that there is more to death than “nothing” and don’t want to spend months paralyzed in terror because you’ve lost all that upheld that belief, don’t read this book.
I wish I had been warned. But I made peace with nothing and the terror left at some point. I no longer worry about my end.
Now, like Julian Barnes, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”
I don’t know how to make peace with the terror of knowing that with aging, I’ll lose all the people who are important to me. And the emptiness they’ll leave behind.
My friend is not dead. He is still in intensive care, still struggling for his life.
I visited him today because I’m going away for two weeks. I couldn’t go without seeing him before I left, and I hoped seeing him would reassure me that he would still be there when I returned. It didn’t.
Seeing him kept alive by machines, tubes going in and out of his body, sedated, unable to speak, just made the hole he has left in the fabric of my life bigger. And increased my fear that this hole would become permanent.
With aging, we will experience loss. Death is inevitable, but somehow, our society has relegated death so far from life that we barely acknowledge it exists. It is carefully hidden from view.
Death has been separated from life. It takes place in its own space, carefully hidden from the living. There are no more wakes at home, no old people cared for and dying among the living.
Hospitals, hospices, and institutions hide the end — the slide into nothingness — from view. We don’t have to think about it, so we can pretend that the worst thing that will happen to us as we age is a few wrinkles on our face.
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My aunt lived to be nearly 100 years old. When my father passed at 93, she lost her last contemporary. She told me how hard that was, that living among the young, no matter how beloved, left her feeling uprooted, unmoored, and lonely. Thank you for your article. Well done.