Welcome to the Honorable Society
of Ancients
You see us everywhere. Usually we are sitting down. We are driving the car in front of you, possibly making you nervous. We are sipping coffee at the golf club or flashing discount cards in the shopping mall. We are basking in the sunshine on a municipal park bench, feeding the pigeons. We are in the lawyer's office or the doctor's waiting room, looking at New Yorker cartoons. We are being wheeled about the corridors of a hospital. We are in the convalescent ward, but are probably not convalescing. We are in church, down near the front. We are in a nursing home, a senior citizens' home, an adult community. We are sitting at home watching our large Roman numeral clock, waiting for the next TV game show. We are on the deck of an ocean liner playing shuffleboard. We are writing a book.
We are the older folks.
Short years ago we were running the world. Some of us were heads of government, captains of industry,
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barons of finance, and masters of the computer age. We ruled; we managed; we directed; we taught. Others of us were ruled and managed and directed and taught, though it's doubtful whether we learned much. Some of us glittered in the public eye; our names became household words. Others of us were in uniform, facing the enemy at Kasserine Pass, Guadalcanal, Attu Island, or Pork Chop Hill. Now our uniforms are folded away in trunks.
Some of us reared families and made heavy sacrifices for our children. Others of us saw little of our children; we traveled hither and yon on assignments, some of which were important. Still others worked at menial jobs and barely managed to survive in a hostile world. Some of us made serious mistakes and have spent long years atoning for them. Most of us tried to live honest lives and to serve God and our country. We have our moments; now we have moved into the background and have become the Graying of America.
All of this is natural enough. It's the way life has been carrying on for thousands of years. Some societies have treated their elderly folks well; others not so well; but somehow the race has kept the life cycle going.
Today things have changed enough so that the older generation has become a major issue on the human agenda. It's not just that we are "over the hill" — there is no hill. Society accordingly doesn't know what to do with us. Some say we clutter up the landscape, and they wish we
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would get lost. They talk about ways of making us disappear. Others say that the way the elderly are treated is a moral disgrace and an environmental disaster, that we are the human race's greatest resource, that due to medical and industrial advances old age isn't old any more, and that our experience and expertise could be of enormous benefit to society if society would only make proper use of it all. There is just more of the good life with a lot of the negative elements (such as earning a living) more or less eliminated.
This whole debate is a personal problem for me. I am older but keep wondering how I got that way. I don't feel old. I don't even feel "spry." I just feel healthy, the way I have felt most of my life. For me life is an ice cream social. Was it not Seneca who said, "The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in a man's life"?1 The plethora of contemporary books about ageing — nearly all written by younger hands — I find to be depressing. They don't seem to describe me. Most of them are devoted to slippage; they take us on a downhill skid that inevitably ends in a "deep six."
As a consumer, a taxpayer, and a part-time member of the labor force, I take issue with the conventional view of old people. That is to say, I refuse to be dumped. I am enjoying too much just being alive, reveling in the beauty and goodness that the Creator molded into this planet, and being surrounded by the love of people and animals and the great God Himself. Furthermore,
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as a Christian I have by faith something even better to look forward to.
My present situation has changed from what it was a few years back. In 1986 my wife went to be with the Lord. We had lived together in a good marriage for forty-six years. I was fully prepared to take care of her for the rest of my life because I loved her, because she was the best friend I ever had, and because God made her His instrument to bring me into His Kingdom. Winola Wirt was a woman greatly cherished; as Billy Graham said to me, "We all loved Winnie."
Her homegoing left me resigned to very low expectations. Life had been good to me. Actually it had turned out far better than I had any right to expect, so that it left me in my mid-seventies with no regrets. I accepted the dictum of "conventional wisdom" that because my hair was graying, I was on the downside with nothing to look forward to but degenerative osteoarthritis and a pine box. Was the CW ever wrong, and so was I!
As time passed I began a diffident correspondence with a lovely lady in Canada who was an old friend of twenty years' standing. I mention this not because my social activities are significant in themselves, but because later in this book I intend to spike the prevailing misconception that love peters out with advancing years.
So when the publisher asked me to write a book about ageing, I lay awake in bed thinking: "Won't this interfere with the delightful walks I take with my present wife, Ruth? And what do I know about gerontology? There is a whole corpus
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of scientific literature on the subject, to say nothing of the popular stuff. Am I so sunk in the quicksand of self-esteem that I consider myself an expert in this or any other topic that happens to be under discussion?"
Then I recalled my recent visit to a nursing home, and thought of the men and women I had seen sitting in chairs, silent and motionless, waiting, as it seemed to me, to die. It reminded me of two passages I had read in a book on ageing by Dr. Paul Tournier, the noted Swiss psychologist and author. One was a statement by Professor Adolf Portmann of Basel: "The man who has not already learned to look for the meaning of his life is unlikely to organize his old age in a way that will enable him to find it then." The other was a statement by a Zurich medical student, David Kurzen, in an essay he wrote on "Old Age and the Bible." He said that "the Bible shows the total contrast between old age without God and old age with God."2
I decided that if I could give one older person a conception of what God wanted him or her to do, that would put fire in the eye and strength in the body, so that the body would rise up and leave that chair to rock itself, perhaps . . .
Eventually I prayed about it, and as sometimes happens even though rarely, I received an express reply that appeared to come straight from the desk of the great President, Chairman of the Board, and CEO of the Universe saying, "Why not?"
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1. Seneca, Epistolae 12, Classical and Foreign Quotations, W.F.H. King, ed. (London: Whitaker & Sons, 1887), 93.
2. Paul Tournier, Learn to Grow Old, trans. E. Hudson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 8, 229-30.
