Not Looking Forward to Old Age

A new book by Susan Jacoby confirms what I’ve been thinking lately: old age isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. For the past generation, scientists, doctors and other sages have told us we can maintain healthy living way beyond retirement years if we just eat right and exercise. That’s a lot of bunk. At 52 I’m already starting to deteriorate, although I walk every morning and avoid junk food.

“We need to face reality and base both our individual planning and our social policy on the assumption that by the time men and women reach their eighties and nineties, not the best but the worst years of their lives generally lie ahead,” Jacoby writes in Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. Ninety really isn’t the new eighty.

Not that we don’t buy into the fantasy. A recent HarrisInteractive poll showed only 12 percent of Americans didn’t want to live until age 80. Fully one in four said they wanted to last until sometime in their 90s. Amazingly, an additional 37 percent want to live to be 100 or older.

I certainly don’t want to join the centennial club. There won’t be technological advances enough to keep my mind and body sharp. Those who make it to 85 these days have an almost one-in-two shot of landing in a nursing home as well as developing dementia.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is because of the condition of my almost 93-year-old mother. She was spry at 89, able to drive a car and manage her checkbook. Then she broke her hip. Rehab didn’t go well. She began using a walker and still got around OK, but the short-term memory began to go. The situation worsened last summer when she fell three times, then had to move into a nursing home, with a wheelchair as her new mode of transportation. She has been in hospice care since last fall, after losing 15 pounds in four months. Most of her day now is spent in bed, no longer capable of writing letters, dialing the phone or controlling bodily functions. I imagine the end will bring a further loss of memory and more physical ailments.

It’s painful to see my mother so frail and helpless. I don’t want my children to have to remember me that way a few years down the road.