The Shadow of the Shadow of Death

The difference between what you thought aging would be, and what it is

Detail of “Old Man and His Grandson” by Domenico Ghirlandaio, c. 1490

The 80th birthday party we had for my dad last week - it was wonderful and he’s in great shape, thanks for asking - has me thinking about the aging process and how my understanding of it has changed over the last few years. Watching as your parents age can be more insightful than your own subjective experience; it’s close enough for you to get a good look but distant that you don’t fully personalise it - though in the last few years I’ve gotten the fully personal side, too. One of my key takeaways of my forties is that while at a literal level I understood what old age meant and why that mattered, watching aging happen to myself and those around me has transformed and intensified my understanding in a way that I never could have predicted when I was sixteen or even twenty-six. Society does not prepare you for these transformations; in particular the process has inverted my understanding of Gerontocracy - why older people hang on to power the way they do, the ways in which our system has seemed in recent times to set youth and age against each other, and why.

The first surprise was that aging happens in a saw-tooth formation. I had thought that growing older would be smooth and regular; that you wake up every day having left a little more in the bed so to speak, that your capacities gradually shift, and to the extent you were aware of all this it would be akin to flipping through a photo album, with each picture showing you a little greyer, a little crumblier, a little softer. It’s not like that at all. Having seen it in action I realise now that you can (for example) be 60 for a few years, then retire or break a hip or lose a family member, and a year later have the mind, body and physical mannerisms of a 72 year old. This can happen more than once, and I should have guessed since it’s how aging works when you’re younger - it comes in spurts - but I didn’t. It can work in the other way too; you can be 45 and something really good can happen (a promotion, meet a new partner) and become 39 overnight. But the reality of life is these sudden jumps as a result of aging almost always happen in a negative way - piling on multiple years in an instant with a traumatic incident or change. I’m happy and healthy and have nothing to complain about, but Covid was one of those for me, as it was for many others; every plague year was worth two years or more of biological time, another item to add to the charge sheet.

Another thing that I didn’t realise about aging is how your relationship with ideas of possibility, potential, change and optionality. I never realised until I myself got older how much of a person’s self-worth and value to others was bound up in the idea that, like all young people, you are on the way to becoming something greater, bigger, better than you are. It never occurred to me that you come to a point where you simply Are, and you don’t have the excuse or lee-way or glamour of “becoming” anything. They don’t know it themselves but all younger people rely on potential as a way of getting themselves through life’s difficulties, and making the present a little more bearable. We think of the young as being preemptively dismissed but as you age you realise that people were cutting you all kinds of slack out of the respect for the sense of possibility and promise any young person naturally exudes. The idea that aging naturally closes off some paths of your life was a brand new concept to me. This isn’t simply about failure; every young person has dreams ambitions and plans that go in multiple directions at once - they can’t all be realised, in part because some of them are unrealisable, in part because they are mutually contradictory, and in finally (meeting a partner for instance) because it’s out of your hands.

Lots of the literature or media I had consumed during my life had made these points to me in one way or another, and I didn’t realise the point had gone over my head until I reflected on it later. I read Richard Price’s book Lush Life when it came out, and missed the point entirely. Price was a writer for The Wire, and also wrote Clockers and a number of other great crime thrillers with a social realist bent. Lush Life is about bourgeois-bohemian New York in the hipster era - central character Eric Cash is living as a “creative” while actually making all of his money from managing a restaurant. In the book he ruminates on this dilemma:

“So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages.

That’s last part is a little joke, but at whose expense? He manages a restaurant; that’s what, in reality, he actually does and is, his pretentions to scriptwriting, acting, visual art and so on notwithstanding. The book ends with him accepting his life for what it is, which what happens to most people. This is a particular horror for content creators and artistically inclined people but you see it with everyone. Again - as a younger person you “know” that a mid-life crisis means you get half-way through your life, look around and think “is this all there is? Is this all I am?” but you don’t comprehend at all how traumatic that is, or why. You certainly don’t know that while one calls it a midlife crisis, what you experience in truth is a kind of mini-death, with certain possiblities being fully and finally closed regardless of whether they were load-bearing parts of your psychological outlook, with all that implies.

These mini-deaths are examples of another facet of aging unknown to young people, which are hard stops enforced on you by nature. The career and life-goal type ones I’ve described above are common. The Menopause is one of the most brutal examples of the other. I don’t think there’s any such precise biological transformation with men where nature permanently closes a door on you. But of course the experience of aging includes loads of these types of Finality Experiences, these mini-deaths, through illness, phsycial change, and the deaths of others around you.

Any twenty year old can tell you as part of aging “one day some people I love will be gone and I’ll miss them” but no twenty year old has processed what that means. It’s not that you miss them, it’s that they were removed from your life before you were finished. The trauma is in the introduction of the concept that there isn’t always more time, and that optionality and possibility are temporary conditions and won’t always provide an exit. Your options suddenly and permanently truncated before you’re ready, and you have to carry the burden of the sudden severing the rest of your life. The idea that it (whatever “it” is) wouldn’t happen might have been central to who you are. “He’ll reconcile with me eventually because he’ll see I was right”, or “I’ll forgive him in time because I’m a better person” - but suddenly “he” is gone, and that didn’t happen, so you have to re-evaluate who you are. That’s so much more than merely missing someone, or regretting an absence and I don’t think I could have understood before I myself began again to age.

I’ve said so many negative things about aging that I’m going to want to say one positive thing, which will seem contradictory but isn’t. One of the best things you learn as you age is that you can miss your shot, and it’s alright. One shouldn’t waste opportunities and there’s no sugar-coating a true loss, but only death is fatal. There’s such a thing as youthful pessimism - since the young see themselves as full of possibility, potential and life that can create panic and anxiety because you’re anxious to capitalise on it at every moment, and you catastrophise when things don’t go your way. One nice thing you discover is that while “I’ll never get this opportunity again” is literally true - that once a moment is gone, it’s gone - it’s substantially false because other opportunities come along in different guises, unexpected doors open up, and you learn that the thing you settled for is as good as or better than what you missed out on. I’m continually surprised and delighted by how many chances life gives people to turn things around, make amends, start again and so on. Life is full of second and third chances and no failure is ever a total disaster.

About the political implications of all this.

Thinking about old age, and how different and horrifying it is from what I thought it would be, has given me a different perspective on the problem of Gerontocracy. It is often seen as a war of age on youth, and motivated by a hatred and/or contempt of the latter by the former. It’s become common to hear talk of generational class warfare, that what has happened in the last while is a massive transfer of power and resources from young to old, and that a transfer of power than needs to happen in the other direction (here’s Jimmy Carr saying something to that effect, and Scott Galloway saying something similar).

So the impression you could get is that, in value terms, you have the olds on one side and the youth on the other side; that we centre old age and place little emphasis on youth. But of course the exact opposite is true.

The purpose of gerontocracy is to use power to extend the privileges of youth - the dynamism, vitality, energy, possibility - into old age. This includes “fight the man” style political stances, which are so often dominated by older people spiritually throwing their voices as young people; just look at the sea of grey and bald heads at No Kings protests, or at the counter-protests in response to anti-immigration riots in Belfast. I’m not saying that all left wing political activity by older people is pathological, some of it is entirely justified. But the motivation behind it is not purely benign. Not only do we regard the attitudes of youth as all-important but every part of how society is arranged facilitates the maintenance of them into old age. Longevity discourse, and the disembodied magic mirror of the internet and ubiquitous screen time all sit alongside each other and result in a maximal focus on preserving youth, a maximal ability to trick yourself that you haven’t lost it, and the maximal paranoia that you really have. The result is a culture that sees no purpose in old age other than using the resources and power during life to imitate and preserve youth and its privileges, by taking those things away from young people if necessary.

There are lots of structural reasons for gerontocracy, including that people who accumulate wealth and power don’t like letting it go. But philosophically, Gerontocracy is the logical conclusion of a society that regards youth as all-important, the qualities of youth as the central ideal in all thought and action, and regards old age as worthless, humiliating and terrifying. It is symptomatic of a society that has done nothing to prepare itself, psychologically, for the shadow of death entering its field of vision.

My dad on the other hand, luckily for both of us, has aged well. At his birthday we spent a long period reminiscing about the songs he played on guitar when we were growing up - like Irish men of every age, he was and is a great one for a sing-song and has a fine voice. My brother and I were recalling not just the early childhood classics of the Wheels on the Bus and We’re All Going to the Zoo Tomorrow but also a Hard Day’s Night and the Wild Rover. Yeah, my aunt chipped in, and added her recollection how he used to bang out The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel, and really lean into “a come in from the whores on 7th avenue” line (to my grandfather’s consternation, apparently). And, she said, let’s not forget Leonard Cohen - Sisters of Mercy and So Long, Marianne - those ones were the definitive ones in his playlist. Now: I have never in my life heard my father sing a Leonard Cohen song. I didn’t know he knew any, and moody songs of that type aren’t what I associate with him. So we learned in this conversation that he had this whole range of songs he would play when he was younger, and he put those aside and developed another as he aged. In other words he did both the most interesting and hardest thing that a human being can do. He changed. Life! It can be done!

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