It was a routine hearing test that prompted me to question what it means to live the challenging life of an octogenarian. After the familiar tests — squeeze the button when you hear a sound, first the left ear then the right, repeat each word after me — the audiologist asked if I was still working. I was taken aback by the question and launched into a detailed explanation, until it dawned on me that she simply wanted to understand the kinds of sound environments I navigated each day.
I simplified. Yes, I “work” at home much of the day, and therefore the less expensive hearing aids would be sufficient. But yes, I also go to restaurants, concerts, and lectures and would benefit from the improved noise-canceling advantages of the more expensive model.
For me, however, the word still lingers in the air, functioning not as a simple adverb but more like a fraught question expressing — surprise, doubt, admiration? My paranoid self read the audiologist’s accompanying smile as a condescending nod of recognition that some people in their 80s continue to participate in larger worlds, rather than withdraw into narrower lives either by choice or necessity. Embedded in “still” (how can one little word carry so much weight?) lurks a bushel of older, conventional assumptions about life trajectories, retirement, and work marked as a burden to be escaped rather than a source of meaning and fulfillment.
I have never followed a traditional career path. My work life has included 10 years as a nursery school teacher, a doctorate in education at 40, followed by a decade as an H.I.V./AIDS advocate and two more as a teacher-educator. Although I don’t have a full-time job now, I have professional and personal commitments that require daily attention. I write about education in collaboration with younger colleagues for scholarly journals and author occasional essays for general audiences. I also sit on the boards of two professional organizations and manage the photography archive of my first life partner, Robert Giard.
I assiduously try to stay in regular touch with a slowly disappearing cohort of friends and family, because those connections sustain a sense of well-being for them as well as for me. The biggest challenge of all, however, is to make sense of what it means to find myself, willy-nilly, in the midst of middle-old age.
Of course, no matter the moments of surprise such as occurred that afternoon in the audiologist’s office, most of us are not suddenly thrust into old age. Against our common-sense association of aging with the elderly, it is more scientifically accurate, and I believe emotionally satisfying, to understand aging as a lifelong process. We are no sooner born than we begin to age. Reciprocally life offers continuous opportunities for renewal and generativity.
Beginning with the Bible, Western literary traditions focus more often on questions of our mortality rather than describing the process of aging from within. This makes sense since, until the 19th century, with its radical improvements in science and public health, life was relatively short, 30 years on average if one survived infancy, 50 or 60 if one reached 30.
Adjusting to the length and quality of our increased life span, contemporary sociologists would place me in middle-old age, the transitional moment between young-old age, when we are mostly healthy and vibrantly engaged in the world, and old-old age, when physical decline may limit our movements, and when we find ourselves more oriented toward the pleasures of living fully in the present than toward larger, more ambitious projects. While I am usually skeptical about the age-bracketing of life-span theorists (young-old 65-74, middle-old 75-84, old-old 85-plus), because I know there are incalculable variables determining how and why any individual experiences aging, I find comfort in the labels that identify me as a “normal” member of a particular cohort.
I wore the label of young-old age proudly. My last book, “Early Childhood Aging and the Life Cycle: Mapping Common Ground,” describes the difficulties and accommodations we face in our 70s and identifies many of these as later iterations of earlier developmental tasks. Over the last two years, however, my body has been sending me a new set of messages that I find myself resisting. They tell me that I have crossed an invisible border and am now living in the country of middle-old age. Despite the litany of mishaps and medical interventions — bike spills, unexplained brown-outs, a new hip — I arrived for the hearing test after an hour’s workout at the gym and a 20-minute bike ride in a cold Toronto drizzle. Both bike and gym involve moderate risks, and each is a source of agency and pleasure. As a caregiver to my frail parents, I argued for safety and longevity over risk in the interests of quality of life. For myself I am tipping the scales in the other direction.
How do I know that I have arrived in the country of middle-old age? For one, I have experienced a fundamental shift from a once-confident trust in my body to a heightened sense of physical and emotional vulnerability. My many encounters with health-care providers have confirmed that the sources of my chronic pain cannot be fixed. At best I can hope to slow further deterioration through diligent maintenance routines. There’s no going back, only the hard work of avoiding further decline.
Now I understand from the inside how and why my mother kept a special calendar for marking medical appointments. There never seemed to be enough time. When the practical and existential dimensions of time are topsy-turvy conflated, there can never be enough of either. Along with my age cohort, I am experiencing the loss of people and capacities that we once took for granted. My thoughtful self tells me that it’s better to lean into these realities rather than struggle against them. Some would say it’s better to be the water — fluid, flexible, adaptable — than the rock — rigid, fixed, and unforgiving.
I’ve spent my entire adult life as an early-childhood educator, albeit with a penchant for using my life outside of school to understand what happens in classrooms. I became interested in the full life cycle during my 50s when my parents began a sudden and steep 10-year decline, which I described in a 2006 memoir, “My Father’s Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents.” Not long after that I began to reflect upon what it meant to enter young-old age myself. I wanted to learn from the fraught aging of my parents about how to prepare for the future and explore its implications for teaching and learning at every level.
I began by going back to the work of the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, with whom I had studied as an undergraduate at Harvard, only to find a simplified description of the last stage of life as a struggle between ego integrity, a sense of completeness and satisfaction, and a fall into despair, marked by feelings of fragmentation and failure. Eventually his wife, Joan Erikson, created a more subtle template by adding a ninth stage of life, during which, she argued, we re-experience all the challenges of earlier phases of development. This enhanced description of old age, based on her interviews with people in their 80s, was more finely articulated and offered a complicated assessment of the psychological forces at play during later life.
While helpful in understanding my parents’ struggles as I witnessed them, Joan Erikson’s work still lacked a vision that would enable me to look forward to old-old age. How am I to manage the onslaught of the all-too-real losses, physical and emotional, that mark our lives when we live well into our 80s and 90s?
More recently I have discovered two overlapping streams of research that seem to capture the lived experience of those who are aging well in their 80s and 90s and offer a mind-set to which I can aspire. One group of researchers identified a posture that they came to call “senior cool.” With elements of indifference, reserve, and intellectuality, it countered popular narratives of the elderly as a burden to caregivers and society at large. Another line of research identified some old-old as thriving through a growth into gerotranscendence, a posture in which they feel an increased cosmic connection with past and future, a coherence about the life they have led, no regrets, and a desire for more moments of solitude.
Both streams of research, including interviews and theorizing, suggest that in the last period of life there is a certain withdrawal and disengagement from things that once mattered, as well as an overarching desire to be fully present to self and others in our day-to-day lives.
In middle-old age I am not withdrawing. Indeed, writing remains a critical way that I try to soften and massage what too often feels hard and fixed, preventing the emotional flexibility needed if I wish to be more water than rock. Drawing on my own lifelong practice, as Joan Didion famously put it, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” I write to discover and rediscover myself as learner and teacher. At the same time, I also write to find out who I am not and what I don’t think. As Zadie Smith wisely commented, only when the words are finally on the page can we recognize what does not have the ring of truth, what may belong to others but not to ourselves.
My own texts often describe the texture and welcome relief of letting go the scholarly and personal responsibilities that once seemed a critical part of my identity. I am outraged by the latest political injustices, at the same time grateful that I am no longer of a generation experiencing the full burden of social change. For me, senior cool and gerotranscendence form an aspirational bridge on which I can imagine a lsatisfying old-old age, despite the physical and emotional crises that may ensue.
The poet John Keats identified negative capability as a time “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching for fact and reason.” With a foreshortened sense of time, I am challenged to accept the uncertainties that middle-old age has brought, and to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us in the present.
This is not to paper over the all-too-difficult realities of grief, isolation, and loss. Rather, it is to dig deeper into ourselves, in the time remaining, to find a heightened tolerance for ambiguity and complexity while also clearing space for more moments of relief from the inevitable wounds inflicted in the course of an ordinary life. As for all the irritable reaching for fact and reason to which Keats refers, I’ve done my share, and I’m ready for others to take over that work.
Jonathan Silin, Ed.D., lives in Amagansett and Toronto.