Growing Old

I'm afraid of growing old—we're all afraid. In fact, the fear of growing old is so great that every aged person is an insult and a threat to the society. They remind us of our own death, which means our body won't always remain smooth and responsive, but will someday betray us by aging. The ideal way to age would be to grow slowly invisible, gradually disappearing, without causing worry or discomfort to the young. In some ways it does happen. Sitting in a small park across from a nursing home one day, I noticed that the young mothers and their children gathered on one side, and the old people from the home on the other. Whenever a youngster ran over to the "wrong" side, chasing a ball or just trying to cover all the available space, the old people would lean forward and smile. But before any communication could be established, the mother would come over, murmuring embarrassedly apologies, and take her children back to the "young" side. Now it seemed that the children didn't feel any particular fear and the old people didn't seem to be threatened by the children.

The division of the space was drawn by the mothers. And the mothers never looked at the old people who lined the other side of the park. These well-dressed young women had a way of sliding their eyes over, around and through the old people; they never looked at them directly. The old people may as well have been invisible; they offended the aesthetic eye of the mother.

My early experiences were somewhat different. Since I grew up in a small town, my childhood had more of a nineteenth century flavor. I knew a lot of old people, and considered some of them as friends.

There was no culturally defined way for me to "relate to" old people except the rules of courtesy which applied to all adults. My grandparents were an integral and important part of the family and of the community. I sometimes have a dreadful fear that mine will be the last generation to know old people as friends, to have a sense of what growing old means, to respect and understand man's mortality and his courage in the face of death.