On getting old
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Every year at my annual physical my doctor will remind me that age is, “just a number.” I always find this a strange observation, coming from a man who’s spent half the morning turning various functions of my body into the very numbers he’s suddenly so dismissive of. And if he’s positing age as a relative number, I would argue that it’s a relative number that very quickly turns into an absolute. When I turned forty, everyone said forty was the new thirty; when I turned fifty, everyone said fifty was the new forty; but when I turned sixty, no one said sixty was the new anything. It was just sixty. It was just old.
Now I’m seventy and have a veritable team of doctors extracting numbers from me on a regular basis, all of which, by the grace of God, remain good. (Actually, I have one set of numbers that are consistently bad, but they’ve been bad for so long—with no visible impact on my health—that at this point the doctor would probably be more concerned if they were suddenly good.) I exercise regularly, take my vitamins, watch what I eat, and still work full-time. I’m actually in quite good shape—for my age. I’m told I still look good—for my age. And I’m very active—for my age.
The first time I felt old was when (years ago, now) at the end of a haircut the barber asked if I wanted him to shave my ears. I was mortified at the time, but certainly didn’t want to be some poor old thing with odd bits of hair sprouting from wherever it could get a foothold. Now it’s just part of the routine. He automatically does my ears, then, politely, even a bit sheepishly, he’ll say, “Nose? Eyebrows?” “Yeah,” I say. “Sure, go for it.” At the end of it all he says, “There you go, handsome!” and I tip him heavily.
But I feel oldest when I consider my 401(k). After a particularly annoying spell at work (I’m the Language Guy [staff writer/copy editor] for a large engineering firm), I’ll visit my 401(k)’s website to see how my “retirement strategy” is doing. The central component of my own strategy is to fix my gaze on the current total in my account and keep dividing it by the number of years I might reasonably still be alive after retiring: “If I lived five years…If I lived ten…” Then I google actuarial tables to see how long I should live (13.59 years, they say). And I’m not so much alarmed by the fact that I could only live comfortably off my 401(k) till I was 83.59 if I only ate cereal and never got sick as I am by the fact of an evening at the computer calmly calculating my imminent demise.
It is when confronted by facts such as these that many old people, myself among them, turn to the Bible, where, if anyone considers age to be just a number, it is certainly the Lord Our Maker. Consider Genesis alone. While death was part of the fallout from original sin, it seems rarely to have been sudden. Adam lived to be nine hundred and thirty: his son Seth, to nine hundred and twelve; and all the succeeding grandsires down to Noah to either eight or nine hundred-some years, with Methuselah clocking in most famously at nine hundred sixty-nine. Noah was six hundred years old when he pulled the door shut on the ark—and lived three hundred fifty years after that—and Abraham was celebrating his centennial when Isaac was born.
I can’t, of course, imagine living nine hundred years—and certainly not nine hundred years in the Bronze Age. I do, however, find it interesting that it’s with Abraham, the Father of Faith, the point where salvation history starts its slow pull into focus, that human longevity starts whittling down, becoming more realistic as it also becomes more miraculous. Abraham lived to be 175; Jacob, 147; Moses, 120; King David, 70. And David’s most famous descendant, the one by whom eternity broke into time, the one for whom not just age but all of history was just a number, the one whose real name was “I Am”, died when he was thirty-three.
And as the New Testament begins, it’s primarily the old people who recognize that something strange, mysterious, and wonderful is going on. It’s an old man burning incense in the Holy of Holies who’s told by an angel that he’s to father the prophet of the Messiah; it’s his barren old wife, suddenly fruitful, who immediately senses her young cousin is carrying divinity—simply from the sound of her voice. It’s three men old with the wisdom of the East who know enough to bow down before an infant king. It’s old Simeon in the Temple who praises God for letting him see, “the salvation prepared for all the world to see.” It’s Anna, the 84-year-old widow who talked about the child to anyone who would listen. It’s the old who realize the world has suddenly become entirely new.
St. Luke doesn’t record that Anna was otherwise running from one doctor visit to the next or that Simeon had some manner of 1st century “retirement strategy”. On the contrary, he tells us that their lives were centered on the Temple, on God, on his covenantal promise—and on keeping their eyes open for its fulfillment. And for some reason, when it finally presented itself, they were able to see it more clearly than the younger people around them. Seven years before he died at the age of 75, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem called Morituri Salutamus, an elegy to long-lost youth as well to life itself in all its fervid abundance. But in the final stanzas he hymns the quiet fruitfulness of old age and a prophetic vision denied to those still in the full light of life. The poem ends with:
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
So as my twilight fades away I’ll just keep watch for the stars. It’s still the New Testament. And although it may not seem like it sometimes, everything is still entirely new. I just need to keep my eye on the stars, stick close to the Temple. Because I may be old, but—like the Magi, like Anna, like Simeon—I know a savior when I see one.
