Finally old enough to realize

I used to laugh when I heard about the aging population -- I mean the statisticians calling our attention to the fact that the average age of the population has been rising over the past few years. The way they word it, you could have thought there used to be a time when people were actually getting younger.

I never thought about getting old, as opposed to older, until after I turned 70 and my body began rebelling against itself. What used to be the occasional pain was found to be arthritis, and my doctor was afraid I might be suffering from osteoporosis. I also had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, and naps became a necessity when they had always been a luxury. My appetite for food changed, so that the joy I used to get from certain foods, such as chocolate, no longer seemed to be available.

And friends have left the scene, relatives have weakened. There is no longer an older generation. In crowds, I am often the oldest person in the room.

As you age, life teaches you to feel a kinship with more people, more creatures. We all share something mysterious called life, and you can come to appreciate something when you look into the eyes of a horse or a cat, something that was not there when you were younger. In one sense you are the key to the universe, and on another level you are the same as the worms that crawl out of the ground when it rains.

My father-in-law, now in his late eighties, has been getting more confused over the past couple of years. At first, we could see his anger at being dismissed by the medical profession. His life was just as valuable as ever, just as valuable as the next person's, and why weren't they taking him seriously any more? He was just as witty, garrulous, alert as ever, and we didn't understand how anybody could miss that.

But now he can't keep numbers straight, sometimes can't think of some basic words in the middle of a sentence, tells the same stories over and over again but can't recall some of the most important people or events in his life. He is still capable of walking around, though he needs extra time to go places, but is mind is fading faster than his body. He still sometimes gets angry at what people think, but he might later think the same thing he was angry about yesterday.

The hardest lesson to accept in life is the inevitability of change. Today is not the same as where we started, and tomorrow will not be the same as today. Yesterday was easy to accept because it was familiar, but now less and less makes the same kind of sense.

Change is good, you hear, because it's the stuff of life. Without it there is no life. But it's hard watching the world you grew up with fading, deteriorating, changing beyond recognition, moving inevitably toward decay and existence only in memory -- if you can keep that.

When my mother was dying, a friend told me she had gone to the wall with both her parents. In one, the body fell apart and the mind was sharp to the end. In the other, the mind collapsed first and it then worked for years to drag the body down with it. Both ways suck, she assured me.

Many people whistle a tune suggesting that we can never die, that we are eternal soul, that life is a gift, that attitude is everything, that we are passing through this vale of tears on our way to a better place. But they are whistling in the dark. Has anybody ever avoided pain along the road?

We welcome any emotional links we can forge, even if they are bound to result in pain when they end. And they all do end, for one person or another. Mark Twain once congratulated a friend on his engagement but told him he was exposing himself to life's sharpest pains as well as the most exquisite joys. The great emotional dilemma that hangs over my head is whether it would be better to outlive my wife or to avoid the pain of seeing her go. Both ways suck.

Yesterday my son's bike was hit from behind by a car and he was knocked down in traffic. He was not seriously injured, but the car drove over the bike (a well equipped apparatus with many high-end gizmos) and destroyed a month-old laptop computer, which was loaded with software and pictures and files, a machine he was using to produce radio-quality programs. Then the driver kept going.

When I found out about what he had been through, I felt as if I had been personally assaulted. I know he feels the loss of his stuff, but I have spent hours aware of the fragility of his own life, how close we are all, always, to losing each other.

Age not only gives you losses but the awareness of the possibility of other losses. What we have is ours for a minute, then no more. Change and pain and loss. The potential and the actual. And sometimes there are little joys that have to be grasped, appreciated, cherished.

How my dreams show that I am really lost

It began in an idyllic, hilly landscape, not far from a small town I did not know. When some of the people were going to town, I asked them to get me a map, but they laughed and said the place was too small, there were no maps. Toward evening, some of the people were gathering to walk to the shul in town to hear a talk by some famous rabbi, they said, a man I had never heard of. I wanted to go with them just to see where the shul was. Besides, nobody had asked me to walk with them, and I felt isolated from them even though I seemed to be sharing whatever they were doing. I decided to go with them because if I stayed I would have been the only person left there. We walked down the hill, turning on one or two streets, picking up more people along the way, until the whole world seemed to be going in that direction. I did not recognize any of the landmarks, and I knew I would have a hard time finding my way without them. When I caught up with some people I could only think of inane questions to ask, like when it would be over, how much farther we had to walk, how many people would be there. But it was getting chilly and I told somebody I had to go back to get my jacket. I asked if I had enough time before the talk, but the person next to me said nothing, just kept trudging on in the same direction. I turned around and walked back up the hill. I noticed some children I had not seen before, playing on doorsteps, and a few people walking in the oppposite direction, including some old ladies who might have been going to the shul. I could see some traffic above me and then I saw some steps, a kind of shortcut I had heard about, leading up to the main street. But once I climbed them and looked at the street signs, nothing was familiar. I thought we had walked only a few minutes down the hill altogether, turned only a couple of times, to get as far as we got, but I did not recognize anything in front of me or behind me. I thought about small towns I had been in, places where everything was just off the main street, and I walked one or two block, but even the traffic was gone and there was nobody to ask for directions. The street signs suggested nothing to me. At one intersection there was a street going up still another hill, and I wondered if I should go up there. Then I felt pain in the big finger on my right hand. It got more and more intense, and I noticed the nail was beginning to turn blue. Where in this strange town could I find a doctor to take care of it, I wondered. Just before I woke up, I was still trying to negotiate unfamiliar streets near the top of the hill, looking for anything that might be familiar so that I could find my way back to where I had started.