Elderhood - the aging process - Column

Christian Century, Oct 5, 1994 by Martin E. Marty

ONLY SOMEONE who carries Swiss genes, wears two watches, consults two calendars, and has weekly, biweekly, monthly and (two) quarterly editorial deadlines would be compulsive enough to calculate, as I did recently, what part of a century her or his life has consumed. It occurred to me the other day to use the calculator on my "only-nerds-wear" digital watch to measure what part of my biblical "three score years and ten" or four score years were gone. I used five score for mathematical ease, not out of optimism. It comes to this: at 2:19 A.M., October 2, I will be exactly two-thirds of a century old. I intend to sleep through this moment of passage.

People my age find it difficult to see ourselves from the perspectives of the young. As 26-year-old graduate students, my classmates and I were ready to help our venerable professors in and out of their chairs--people like Daniel J. Boorstin and church historian James Hastings Nichols. When Boorstin retired and Nichols died I became aware of their ages and looked back. Both had been about 39 when I studied with them. I am 27 years older now than they were then, and I have to picture myself through the eyes of students who may be mentally helping me with my chair.

W.H. Auden said we are all always a certain age "inside," to ourselves. I'm 35 inside. So it came as bit of a shock to read Eugene C. Bianchi's Elder Wisdom: Crafting Your Own Elderhood, a book which I commend to you no matter what your age. The author interviewed me a year or so ago, and it all seemed natural: How do you cope with aging processes? was his nice question. Now the book is here and I am reading about elder wisdom, elderhood, the company of elders.

Now and then when chatting I work the topic around to: "Isn't it amazing how fast life speeds by? And yet how young we are!" Not once, not once, has someone said, "I agree about the speeding, and you folks do seem young, you are so young." No, usually it is, "You still around?" Or: "My parents had to read your books in college." Or: "My grandparents started reading you in the CHRISTIAN CENTURY in 1956." Or: "Given your years, you look pretty well preserved."

After reading Bianchi, I read Jean Amery's On Aging: Revolt and Resignation, an elegant book of unrelieved gloom by a novelist who, seeing no point in living, took his own life at his two-thirds-of-a-century mark. The epigraph to the book is from Proust:

I had lived like a painter climbing a road overhanging a lake, a view of which is hidden from him by a curtain of rocks and trees. Through a gap he catches a glimpse of the lake, with its whole expanse before him, and he takes up his brushes. But already night is coming, the night in which he will not be able to paint anymore and upon which no day will follow.

It is impossible for Bianchi's book to match that in elegiac tone and artistic splendor. But I'll remember, as long as I will those lines of Proust, any number of utterances in Elder Wisdom. They include sombre and realistic lines, and now and then something like this, remembered by young sister Margaret Ellen Traxler, 69, who grew up in a closely knit rural Minnesota. Her doctor father and nurse mother had helped birth babies and bring health care to many in those Depression days. "On his deathbed, her father turned to her mother and said: 'Oh, Mama, haven't we had fun!'" Yes, blood, tears, sweat, wrinkles--and fun.