Aging
It’s not surprising that we have many guests on Prime Time Radio whose expertise is the process of aging. Two diverse guests resonated with me recently and caused me to think more about aging than I usually do.
Aging is something I find it easy to not think about since there is not too much I can do about it. But Anne Kreamer’s Going Gray reminded me that many of us believe that, by changing our external appearance, we can appear not to be aging. This is sheer delusion, of course, but as Kreamer realized, she had spent over $65,000 in the past twenty years coloring her hair to avoid going gray.
(Listen to my conversation with Anne Kreamer with Real Audio.)
Yet she was not a day younger after all that investment. She is clear: that the perception is that women with gray hair are regarded as more antique than their tinted sisters and she may be right. Except that she found many successful women, youthful in mind and action, who had gone gray long ago.
Then there was Lillian Rubin, author of 60 on Up: The Truth About Aging in America. She is in her eighties and recently began a new career as an artist. She sold her first painting at the age of eighty-two. Her book is a sometimes-brutal look at aging.
She points out, for instance, that we spend millions of dollars on keeping men and women alive but a fraction of that, if anything, on ways to make their old age more comfortable or even tolerable. Life, it seems, is more important than how that life is spent.
She points out: “We say we want to die with dignity and mean it, but we’re so frightened of death that we submit to often painful and undignified medical procedures in the often vain hope of putting off our meeting with it just a little longer.” Perhaps that is a human failing, like the desire to believe that tinting our hair to cover the gray does something significant for the way we age.
(Listen to my conversation with Lillian Rubin with Real Audio.)
Both books made me assess how well I’m handling aging. At times, the best times, with equanimity and rational acceptance of what is. At other times, the worst, a frustration at the lack of control it is possible to achieve over the last decades of life.
I do not enjoy counting pills every morning and every night; pills that lower my blood pressure, control my cholesterol, shrink my prostate and take away inflammation from my knee. I do not enjoy looking at menus and seeing things that I know I can’t have if I want to control my blood sugar. But it is all part of aging that I must accept because there is little alternative.
My hair is gray, my knees man-made; my back is never what it used to be and I am shrinking. I hope I can approach the rest of aging with the dignity that Rubin talks about. I plan on it. But another part of aging that we cannot escape is that things change. What I fear most about aging is the loss of the ability to adapt. So far, so good.
I wonder what you fear most about aging and how you’re coping. Share it with us by clicking "comments" below. We post your comments soon after you send them.
Aging is something I find it easy to not think about since there is not too much I can do about it. But Anne Kreamer’s Going Gray reminded me that many of us believe that, by changing our external appearance, we can appear not to be aging. This is sheer delusion, of course, but as Kreamer realized, she had spent over $65,000 in the past twenty years coloring her hair to avoid going gray.
(Listen to my conversation with Anne Kreamer with Real Audio.)
Yet she was not a day younger after all that investment. She is clear: that the perception is that women with gray hair are regarded as more antique than their tinted sisters and she may be right. Except that she found many successful women, youthful in mind and action, who had gone gray long ago.
Then there was Lillian Rubin, author of 60 on Up: The Truth About Aging in America. She is in her eighties and recently began a new career as an artist. She sold her first painting at the age of eighty-two. Her book is a sometimes-brutal look at aging.
She points out, for instance, that we spend millions of dollars on keeping men and women alive but a fraction of that, if anything, on ways to make their old age more comfortable or even tolerable. Life, it seems, is more important than how that life is spent.
She points out: “We say we want to die with dignity and mean it, but we’re so frightened of death that we submit to often painful and undignified medical procedures in the often vain hope of putting off our meeting with it just a little longer.” Perhaps that is a human failing, like the desire to believe that tinting our hair to cover the gray does something significant for the way we age.
(Listen to my conversation with Lillian Rubin with Real Audio.)
Both books made me assess how well I’m handling aging. At times, the best times, with equanimity and rational acceptance of what is. At other times, the worst, a frustration at the lack of control it is possible to achieve over the last decades of life.
I do not enjoy counting pills every morning and every night; pills that lower my blood pressure, control my cholesterol, shrink my prostate and take away inflammation from my knee. I do not enjoy looking at menus and seeing things that I know I can’t have if I want to control my blood sugar. But it is all part of aging that I must accept because there is little alternative.
My hair is gray, my knees man-made; my back is never what it used to be and I am shrinking. I hope I can approach the rest of aging with the dignity that Rubin talks about. I plan on it. But another part of aging that we cannot escape is that things change. What I fear most about aging is the loss of the ability to adapt. So far, so good.
I wonder what you fear most about aging and how you’re coping. Share it with us by clicking "comments" below. We post your comments soon after you send them.
posted by Mike Cuthbert at 11:28 AM
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