Aging by me, right now

What it means to be old

Drawing I made of myself from a picture taken a few weeks ago

Before I embark on another journey into the literature on aging, I decided to document how I feel about it in the middle of my experience of coming to terms with it, with no concerns about psychosocial models for this stage. A couple of months from now it will be too late for this. So here we go.

I remember listening to people describing their careers, or something that defined their lives and they excelled in, and saying “But then I got old”. Like that. As a period in the sentence and the end of the paragraph, and with the paragraph, the fun, the joy, the skills, everything. It’s like saying: “I was going to the beach, but then I caught a cold”. Except the beach is your life, which makes the cold… Old age was something to be feared. Something that happened suddenly, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, usually pronounced by a physician, a colleague, or a relative. Some things could postpone this feared transition. It’s the model that tells you that you never age until you become old. Then it’s terrible because it’s the collapse of everything that matters.

Like everyone, I bought this narrative, and read my environment according to it. For example, my grandmother never aged until she died, and my mother was always old and getting older. That’s what I thought. Maybe I still do, I don’t know. She was a piano teacher who taught great talents in her students’ generation. She, herself, had been a child prodigy and began a performer career as a pianist, when she got married to a monster who prohibited her from working, and beat her. She got rid of him, but never resumed her performer career. She was professionally much more accomplished than my mother. She continued to be so until a couple of months before she died, at 85 years old, in my arms. For some reason I keep thinking it was two months before she died that she gave up, and, in my head, got old and died. I don’t think it was two months, though, it must have been at least six, and never a year. I wonder why I am uncertain. Maybe because, for me, Grandma never aged. She was born to me, when I was born to her, like that: the lady with a pretty skirt and shirt, elegant, discreet, using darker, warmer colors and geometric patterns. She was elegant and smelled good, she used things like “powder”, and “cologne”. With grey, well-done hair, a little make-up, and mid-height heels. Grandma was 63 years older than me, and she looked the same, to me, until she was 85, two months before she died, because it was then that I saw death in her eyes. No, I didn’t, I saw the absence of life. That, to me, was aging. Grandma never “aged”. She was the same Grandma until she - “poof” - aged, had cancer, and died, in the same short act.

My mother, on the other hand, suddenly aged, at 43 years old. I was seven. It was the year she had a facelift. I don’t remember what she looked like before that. I remember thinking about that when I was 43 years old, and it was impossible to imagine having a facelift then. My mother had the facelift and was forever unhappy with the result that pushed back her hairline. She then used wigs, and spent hours with hair rolls on her head, which was disgusting to me. It was a time when she was particularly depressed and angry. My mother was always old, and always aging more.

I didn’t know what to expect, and the more involved in my academic tracks I became, the less I considered aging as something deserving of my attention, or old age as a magically distinct period of life. Biologically, it was a continuous and complex process, and socially, well, it’s all social construction, and today that’s all up for grabs in this chaotic societal decline. Not knowing what aging was, I would never age. I believed I would go on, and one day die. That’s the gist of it. I believed that intensely (and irrationally, and dysfunctionally), and I didn’t plan for the future. I beat myself so much over this that it’s not even funny but, truth be told, most of my peers didn’t either. However, many of them stayed in the same career, and their professional environment provided them with an automatic track to this preparation. A blueprint to aging, even if limited. If they didn’t plan for their future, institutions did. I didn’t and didn’t have institutions planning for me.

It didn’t help that I became a competitive athlete at 42 years old (one year younger than my mother when she had a facelift). This second athletic career began at an age when the dominant theme about life was maturity and preparing for retirement. I won my first world championship when I was 50 years old, and it was in the open age class, not master. There was no difference in methodology in preparing someone like me and a 20-year-old. I never looked anywhere to check how other coaches or researchers were adapting powerlifting competitive training to old people. I wasn’t old. Not yet.

At 57 years old I had COVID, which evolved into long COVID, and then I got old. Like that. Until March 25, 2020, my birthday, I was a healthy adult with some annoying health issues, and on April 7th, when I went to the clinic to collect a sample for testing, I became old. It would take another three years for me to realize, in shock, that I was, indeed, old.

That moment of realization started something. Some movement inside me, that now I think is a gigantic readjustment, a realignment of self-representations and even life narrative. It’s a new course in life unless the person crosses the age threshold while well anchored in an institutional and social environment, in which case many really can live without an abrupt transition into old age.

My father was one of the few healthier examples I had, and realized too late to learn the lesson for me there. He retired from his faculty position at the university at about 70 years old and accepted a position in a public technology research facility, where he continued working until, I believe, late into his 80s. It was a transition, but it was one as smooth as it could be: he continued teaching graduate school at the university, and the research facility was inside the campus, minutes away from the building where he worked for all his life. The community was more or less the same. He did take the step of effectively retiring, which requires acknowledging that the track he was on ended. He accomplished what he wanted as a faculty member, and he was done. I’ve seen his peers reacting very strongly against retiring.

However smoothly one may navigate the or the many transitions into old age, there are moments of coming to terms with ending things and saying goodbye forever. Admitting that you will never again travel to a place that you often visited, never again see a friend from another country, never again postpone beginning that new sport, or doing that marathon, or hiking a certain track you used to do. That moment is soul-crushing, especially because you realize that the last time you experienced the thing you lost, you didn’t prepare yourself, and never said goodbye.

I find documents from projects that I didn’t apply for, or pursue, but “someday” I would. Some of them have been there for 30 years. I never ended them, not really. Like so many adults, I lived under the illusion that there would always be time in the future.

The moment of truth was when I realized that that’s what all those folders were, shelves in the museum of my unlived lives. It was time to bury them. Honor them, if I will, but say goodbye to those projects and to the mummified versions of myself that created them.

That freed up a lot of space in the head, it’s amazing. I have no idea what exactly happens next because that’s where I am: at almost 62, coming to terms with the fact that I am old, saying my goodbyes to all those unlived lives, finally allowed to rest in peace. What I do know is that this newly freed space is space for imagining new forms of being in this environment, possible for me today, with my current body, mind, and history. Without the burden of those unlived lives, I can see potential in myself for paths I had never considered before. All that because I can start imagining a story for this new person I transformed into, and, with the story, a future.

Without that realization, which was pretty difficult for me, I believe I’d be forever anchored to those unlived lives, and would eventually go entirely mad with sorrow, with no tools to keep going. I wonder if that is not what happens to many people with messy, unscripted lives, like me, who end up without a blueprint to navigate this stage. All those people who don’t retire from an established career, and live on a predictable income at their old age, all those who slip through the cracks of the established roads, are increasingly more frequent in today’s aging population. I look at them now with different eyes. I remember when I saw them at the margins of my urban world, and, beyond generic social considerations, secretly thought that I’d kill myself long before reaching that point. I realize now how close to them I am right now, and I’m not ready to give up. A couple of accidents, a couple of unfortunate decisions, and badly planned life choices, and I would be one of them, and now, unlike before, I am trying to plan to not get there, not just count on the option of suicide.

That’s a major shift in perspective, for me. It’s shocking to admit to myself, but I am only now thinking about diet, for example, in terms of quality of life and clinical intervention to prevent unwanted developments. Until now, diet was related to performance, and I saw it as a macro-nutrient delivery complex. All I had to do was apply the logic of competitive sports performance to performance in life. Of course, it didn’t work. Performance not only in training but in daily tasks is part of the quality of life now. It means admitting that, from where I stand, there is a higher chance of function loss and general health degradation if I don’t deliberately intervene against it.

Not only am I vulnerable to a lot of bad stuff, but a lot of bad stuff will happen anyway, whether I take measures to prevent it or not. I might as well prepare for them as I imagine and plan my future as an old person.

I wish I could already include paragraphs on wisdom, legacy, and transcendence, and I’m confident that I will, in the near future. At this time, embracing old age means that I have work to do, right now, creating the foundatin of my blueprint: how to preserve my health, and survive.

Right now, that’s how I look at aging.