The Inside of Aging: Introduction

Years ago I wrote a book called As Our Years Increase. It considered the challenges faced at various stages of old age, with an emphasis on how families can work together.

Over the years I’ve had many people ask me whether I would update that book or write another one on the same topic. I never felt that I should. I’d said all I had to say, most of which stood up adequately when it came to actually living by my advice. My wife Popie and I went through the aches of aging with our parents. My father-in-law died of a heart attack, my mother died rather suddenly of lung cancer, my father took years to fade away with Alzheimer’s, and my mother-in-law died of I don’t know what—her body just wore out. Only one of the four, my father, died under institutional care, though my mother-in-law spent most of her last years receiving 24/7 care from teams of caregivers in her own home, such that my brother-in-law, who oversaw the finances, proclaimed that we were running a full-service nursing home with one resident. Three of our parents died under hospice care, which was a great help.

In other words, subsequent to publishing a book about caring for family members through their old age, I got to experience it. Overall, it went well. We had our moments of trauma and stress, but we made it through with love intact.

Yet while going through all that I learned almost nothing about how it feels to get old. I witnessed it from the outside.

I recall only two moments when I got a momentary glimpse of the view from inside old age. Once my father-in-law was remembering his childhood. Listening to him, I thought I heard a clarity and intensity that was new to me. (He was a practical man, not given to fits of philosophy.) Oh, yes, he said when I asked. Memories were flooding into him, so vivid he could almost touch them.

The other moment was with my dad. He told me, as though surprised, that he now thought his greatest accomplishment had been raising “you kids.” I have two sisters and a brother. My father’s love was never in doubt to us, but his focus was. He loved to read and think and preach sermons. He was a good dad, but I don’t think he woke up in the morning with his children on his mind. In his old age, to his surprise, his sense of what mattered had shifted.

I am 73 as I write, and witnessing old age from the inside. I realize that 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds will think I am just a novice. They are surely right. Already, though, I am in a different world.

In this account I’m not aiming to offer practical help. I won’t tell you how to pick a nursing home or how to write your will. It’s more about what I’m discovering for myself in this new world. Things look familiar, but when I get close and experience them, I find they offer a very different, quite unanticipated view of the universe.

Nobody ever told me to expect this. I thought old age was just life with more challenges. It is that, but it’s almost a different life. I seek to make public this different world, this new mindset, which requires so many adjustments and brings so many surprises.

The subject may appear to be a downer. Much of the inside of aging involves loss and disappointment, to which nobody looks forward. Yet I honestly can say I don’t find it depressing. I see it as new ground, unmapped, full of surprises and challenges. Is Robinson Crusoe’s story a downer? He lost everything and had to apply all his resources to surviving each day. Yet his story is a classic that still inspires.

I am Robinson Crusoe, cast on an island I do not know.

All of us know that we will get old. We see aging all around us, in our families, in our churches, while shopping and at our entertainments. People get old; we will too. Yet the reality comes as a surprise, no matter how well prepared we think we are. These essays attempt to map new territory, to give the lay of the land.

This is the first of a series, which I will try to publish more or less daily.