The Inside of Aging: Loss of status

This is #9 in a series of essays on aging.

If you visit a nursing home, you’re likely to come away depressed. It’s not primarily the smell of urine and ammonia, or the tile-floor facilities. It’s the residents, ground down into a gray pablum. They may sit frozen in front of a blaring television or lie pathetically in bed. Perhaps they are propped in a wheelchair in the hallway. Speak to them, and you may get no response. Or if you do, conversation can be as nonsensical as Alice in Wonderland. The residents appear to be almost interchangeable, having lost personality. Staff may carefully address them by name, but they could be anybody. Or nobody.

The picture changes if you know a little about their pasts. You may be meeting a symphony conductor, the mother of five children, an architect, a renowned high school English teacher. With a little probing you may engage in very interesting conversation about their lifetime of work, their family, their travel, their experiences. But probably not. Dementia and other illness may have taken away their ability to carry on a conversation.

All residents in a nursing home once had some kind of interesting life. If they can’t communicate it, however, they fade into gray for other people. That ability to talk—to be witty, to show curiosity, to carry the back and forth of conversation—may be the most important component of holding on to status. If you can talk, you still have a chance to be somebody to the world. If you can’t, your accomplishments will be forgotten very quickly. You will be forgotten very quickly.

A nursing home is the ultimate in lost status. Most of those who end up there are effectively disappeared. Even their family visitors have a hard time remembering their former dignity. That’s one reason many residents get few if any visitors. Family members wonder, “What’s the point?”

Most people don’t end up in a nursing home. It’s the endpoint for only a small percentage. All the same, it’s the extreme of lost status that all of us experience as we age.

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Your loss of status begins with appearance: graying hair, balding head, wrinkled skin, stooped walk. Facelifts, cosmetics, hair color and workouts may delay these, but not forever. If you are old, you begin to look old.

People automatically dismiss people who look old. If seated with them at a wedding, they make a little polite small talk and then turn elsewhere for conversation. The judgment based on appearance is particularly harsh with women. Almost as soon as they get gray hair they stop counting as interesting. Younger people think it’s only natural: they (we) have a deeply engrained belief that old people are of little value. I know. I was young once too.

Retirement brings another layer of lost status. The question, “What kind of work do you do?” becomes hard to answer. Dedicated hobbies and volunteering will not bring you much respect. We identify work with worth.

Here, too, women suffer the soonest and the most. “Do you work outside the home?” can be almost equivalent to asking whether you have a meaningful existence. Men join this indignity as soon as they get their last paycheck. Don’t even bother saying, “I worked in software.” As soon as you speak of your work in the past tense, you have thrown away your claim to significance.

It can happen even before you retire. As a writer, I used to encounter people who recognized my name. I might meet them at a party, or in church, and they would ask, “Are you the writer?” Often they couldn’t remember what I’d written, but they knew that I had published, an accomplishment they respected. That rarely happens now. I’m still writing, but my work is much less visible. I can feel status draining away.

Yes, we know that our worth does not depend on our appearance or on our career. It does not ultimately depend on whether we can talk. We are creatures created in God’s image. Our true worth is built on his love. Nothing takes that from us. But remember the nursing home. That loss of status and dignity may be superficial, but it is real, and it affects us all. And so do the lesser indignities that come with an aging body. We used to be somebody. Now we are trending toward nobody.

It’s a new world. The question we all face is: can we live graciously and happily in it?