Feeling Old

I don’t remember the exact moment or even the exact week that I began to feel old but I know it was some time in 2008. Before that moment, whenever it was, I felt like a thirty-something man living inside an aging body, not so much trapped as looking out through Older Eyes and denying that the world looked different. But some time after I turned sixty-four in May, that changed. Don’t get me wrong … the circumstantial evidence had been steadily accumulating. It became harder to keep my weight down and exercise hurt more than the intensity justified, during and especially afterwards. I began to shave my head to avoid looking like Dick Cheney and my ears to keep from looking like Yoda.

But in 2009, denial became impossible. When Paul Newman died at 82, I was saddened by the passing of my wife’s favorite actor but I also found myself calculating how many years I had left. Eighteen doesn’t seem like much. I began to get a weekly blizzard of helpful advertisements telling me how to sign up for Medicare and Social Security and what supplemental insurance I’ll need in my waning years. After taking care of such matters for my father for years now, it feels like I’m getting his mail. I even got a letter from the Neptune Society (http://neptunesociety.com). The Bucket List, a slightly funny film about of couple of old coots to the young couple in front of my wife and me in the theater, had me pondering my life between laughs. The fact that the couple was texting through the entire movie led me to utter (to myself, thankfully) that certain marker of advancing cootism: “What is wrong with young people these days?”

So, I’m old. And it’s not so bad, except for that thing about eighteen years or so left. That’s not much time and I’ve got a lot to do.

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Tags: death, perspectives

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