I talk about a pandemic surprise, visit to the dermatologist, cancer scan, and efudex.
Category Archives: Aging Process
A Seventy-Six Year Old Man Talks About Stuff for Five Minutes S2,E3
A Seventy Six Year Old Man Talks About Stuff for Five Minutes S2/E2
A Seventy Six Year Old Man Talks About Stuff for Five Minutes
A Seventy-Five Year Old Guy Talks About Stuff For Five Minutes Episode 3
A Seventy-Five Year Old Guy Talks About Stuff For Five Minutes–Episode 2
A Seventy-Five Year Old Guy Talks About Stuff For Five Minutes Episode 1
Old and Anxious in the Age of Anxiety
A while back Rollo May wrote a book called, as I remember, The Age of Anxiety. In my mind, this is a sort of 60’s book, like One Dimensional Man, that cast a critical eye on the ills of our society. His argument, in brief, was that as rules and conventions, governing, say, sex roles became ambiguous, and as religion lost its hold in our secular age, more and more responsibility would be put on the individual to determine his or her course in life or the contours of his or her “life-style.” And this increased sense of responsibility, along with having lost the automatic pilot of rules, regulations, and traditional values, would lead almost necessarily to an increase in anxiety. Or, yes, we are now freer than we once were, but we are also more lost.
I think this line of reasoning might be applied not just to our age but to “age” or aging period. In retirement, at 72 years of age, I find that most of the rules that once governed and determined my daily routine are gone. And they have gone, not because something as abstract as ‘the age’ has taken them away, but because the very material processes by which I might support and maintain those rules and routines have dramatically altered. I can no longer run without endangering my ankles, and I can no longer jump because my knees swell up. Sure, I could do these things I suppose, but then I would really pay for it, by becoming immobilized. There are quite a few things—some of them very important—that I can no longer do, not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t.
It’s the strangest thing to watch young men playing basketball. They run for hours flowing effortlessly, forwards and backwards and sideways, up and down the court. And I remember and can feel somewhere in my bones that once upon a time I could do that and I enjoyed doing it too, but I no longer can. It hurts to watch. I don’t know if it is worth it. I didn’t understand before when people would say, “That was another lifetime.” Now I do. I look at those young men and I think of things I did when I was twenty and I can’t imagine how I ever did them. That must have been another lifetime.
It isn’t just that “the age” is riven with anxiety—I think it is—but that anxiety is, as they say, baked into the process of aging. It’s a sort of double whammy. Living in an age of ambiguity at an age that itself is ambiguous. I mean old people don’t even know what to call ourselves. I happened to mention that, according to an organization for seniors, people over 70 years old are “elderly.” And one of the people sitting nearby said she was over 70 and be damned if she was “elderly.” People over 80, she said, were elderly. And identity concerns like this are small potatoes when contrasted with the really important ones like what are the rules and traditions for determining how long one should live (when in the past, not that long ago, one would have been dead already). Or what the hell should I indicate in my DNR’s?
Counting the Dead
The flu seems pretty bad this year. According to the paper, over 30 people here in California have died. But, inevitably, it seems, the paper goes on to report that these 30 people are all under the age of 65. And that probably the number of dead is much greater than 30 because of all the people over 65 who died of it. But they don’t know how many of those people that might be because they only count the number of people under 65 who die of the disease and not the number over 65.
Frankly, I don’t understand this practice. There must be some reason for it. Is the number of people over 65 so enormous that they just can’t be counted? Or could the paperwork produced by their deaths be too burdensome to doctors, clinics, and hospitals? If this is the case—and I am not saying it is—surely there should be at least some reporting, some attempts to keeps tabs, on the massive number of people over 65 who die from the disease. I really believe people, like me, who are over 65 might be interested. Or maybe, they do know the number over 65, but they don’t report it because it would be just too depressing for words.
In any case, I am confused, and really wish they would clear up the matter. I mean because I just can’t shake the impression that they don’t count the people over 65 who die because—I don’t know how else to say it—people over 65 just don’t count. Isn’t that generally the case in all such matters: those who don’t count go uncounted? Counting counts, if you know what I mean.
I am hard pressed not to infer that this is the case, especially when the headline to the article blares: 10 children dead while those over 65 who have died go not only unmentioned but also actually uncounted. But the children clearly have been counted. Somebody somewhere took the time and the effort to tally that score. Of course, having a child die is a horrible thing, and, maybe, having an elderly person (somebody over 65) die is just not as horrible. Still, would it take that much effort to count them? Or maybe the elderly tend to die alone and penurious in their tacky apartments and nobody is there to count. While people do tend to keep track of their children though occasionally they do get lost at the circus or something like that.
The Mind Object: Writing 7
Once upon a time, I read a lot of psychoanalysis. I liked especially a form of it called “object relations.” The basic idea is pretty simple; one’s mental health is in part dependent on one’s ability to form strong and stable relations with one’s objects. An object might, for example, be another person, like one’s mother or father, or it might even be an object: like a car. These relations stabilize us in the ongoing flux of experience.
One object relations theorist, the great D.W. Winnicott, wrote about the “mind object” or the mind as object. Took me a while to figure that out because, while most of the objects we attach to are outside us, in some sense, the mind seems to me something inside me. Or maybe I couldn’t figure it out because I didn’t like what he seemed to be saying. Some people, more than others, take their mind as an object. For example, he wonders about people who think about such things as: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound. I am such a person. I find it hard to believe that there are people who have not taken this question seriously. I am consternated when I think about that. Even though I know many people couldn’t give a hoot about such a question. And many people haven’t even heard this question and have no opinion on it, consequently, whatsoever.
So I am heavily invested, perhaps even over invested, in my mind object. But then I have never claimed to be balanced. It’s just that at this point in my life I find myself more and more troubled by the state of my mind. It ain’t what it used to be. I can’t concentrate all that much anymore, and I forget all sorts of things. And I just can’t “cognate” like I used to. When I was teaching, I would read something, think about it, and write up a whole lecture in my head. I didn’t usually use this lecture, but it was there, if I needed it, but not anymore. I can’t do that. And I used to have some fun at it—at putting those thoughts together in some coherent form—and now that source of fun is gone.
When my mind object was working, I could be my own best company. Now I am rotten company because my mind isn’t working. I start trying to think something and I forget what I am doing. “Words, words, words,” I think. And they don’t add up to anything. I just read an article about how stress can cause the brain to shrink. I think maybe my mind object is shrinking….