It's a Hell of a Thing to Get Old

We got the call at 2am.

He had taken his last breath just moments before, although we didn’t know it at the time. The voice on the other end of the line simply said “he’s unresponsive - CPR initiated.”

At least that’s the way we remember it.

My father-in-law was 93 years old and we’d been side by side with him during his slow decline over the past few years. Throughout it all, I couldn’t help wondering how much of that decline was related to his ever-shrinking world.

As his eyesight faltered, the jigsaw puzzles and the newspapers went away.
He sat in his recliner, right in front of a television he could no longer see, not because he got anything out of it, but because it was familiar.

The only thing that still got him up and going (other than time with his family) was growing things. He’d make his way across the room with a walker (when we were lucky) or in any manner of half-run half-stumbles that would make our hair stand on end and ride his chairlift to the basement where pots of dirt spilled out across the carpet in front of the sliding glass door.

There, he would pull all sorts of organic material from his pockets - seeds, half dead cuttings he had grabbed from the yard, whole fruits and vegetables - and plant them in those pots of dirt. In addition to the constant fruit flies (which unnerved my mother-in-law to no end) he actually grew stuff.

The sliding door was shaded by the deck above it, so there was very little light. He sometimes watered and sometimes didn’t. But somehow, there was always something growing. I guess life always does find a way.

This morning, I’m getting ready to accompany my husband, his brother and wife, and my mother-in-law to meet with the funeral director.

I drag a tiny brush caked with dark brown powder across my eyelid. I have to finesse it now to avoid the “old lady” creases. Sometimes I don’t even recognize these eyes. My mother’s voice rings in my ears, “it sucks to get old.”

Once you hit 50 - a number I’m well past - you hear it more and more.

Friends stop wearing sleeveless dresses because they don’t like their upper arms.

Conversations over a glass of wine slowly creep into joint pain territory and someone drops the “bone-on-bone” bomb heralding their upcoming knee or hip replacement.

My 93 year-old mother in law has an entire comedy routine that she puts on at every doctor’s appointment to call out and overcompensate for her mottled, sun spotted legs.

Good lord, I think to myself, what do you expect at your age? How are you possibly still worried about that?

That is, until my daughter says the same to me.

Our battle with aging isn’t just about our bodies or our vanity.

Last week, in one of my groups, a woman began to cry while talking about a recent insight she’d had. It wasn’t some huge, dramatic revelation. It was simple and clear, and I watched as every face in the room said, yes…that.

With her permission, I’m sharing her words.

“For years, I said, and I felt, in my head, I'm 38 years old. I don't feel that anymore. In some ways, that's really good, because I haven't been 38 in almost 30 years.

I don't know how thrilled I am with being 65. But I am 65. And so often in my life, I've missed fully celebrating the time that I was in - because I was pretending I was somewhere else, like I wasn't ready to be there.

I don't want to end up turning around, being 85 and saying, holy sh*t, I missed my 60s and my 70s.”

The conversation in another group this week centered around grief and regret and the insidious way they tend to feed each other.

These complaints may seem like small potatoes depending on what’s in front of you right now. But they’re bigger and far more important than you think.

They are not just grumbling. They’re clues into the beliefs we carry about what it means to get older.

Becca Levy, a Yale psychologist who’s spent decades studying aging, makes a startling case: what we believe about aging does not merely describe our experience of getting older.

It helps shape it.

The story we carry about being old doesn’t just sit quietly in the background.

Before we ever become old, we are taught what old means. By the time we arrive there, the story is already waiting for us.

We carry implicit and explicit biases about most groups that are outside of what we recognize as familiar. Aging is maybe the only “other” category most of us are lucky enough to join. The bias we once aimed outward eventually turns inward.

That bias is sneaky because it sounds like we’re simply being realistic.

How often do we say or think…
Those days are over.
She’s slipping.
Or (embarrassingly my own) “Why would she still care so deeply about what she looks like at her age?”

These are not just things we say or think - they’re things we mistake for the truth. And that’s where it gets serious.

We have a habit of treating belief as if it lives in a little room called “mindset,” separate from the body, behavior, health, and possibility. But research keeps complicating that neat division.

Becca Levy’s work suggests that age beliefs are linked to memory, stress response, recovery from disability, cognitive recovery, and longevity. In fact, Levy’s earlier research found that people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with more negative self-perceptions.

Other studies on belief have found that what people believe about exercise, food, stress, or healing can change measurable physiological outcomes - blood pressure, body composition, hunger hormones, pain response, even markers related to cellular aging.

This does not mean we can magically think ourselves out of grief, illness, or aging. But it does mean that the stories we carry are not passive.

Grief is real.
Aging is real.
The body changes.
People leave.
Roles shift.
Possibilities narrow in some directions.

Our emotions around these things are real and require real expression. It’s critical that we allow ourselves the space and the grace to fully feel them. But it’s equally important that we monitor the meaning we make of these life changes and stages.

A story told enough times begins to ring as truth.
The mind, handed a felt “truth,” will search out evidence to prove it so.
With that evidence, a belief is formed, often completely outside of our awareness.

And so the belief goes to work, shaping our world everywhere from the cells in our bodies to the opportunities that present themselves to us.

For me, I’ve been working on changing that story - asking myself to look at life, death, and everything in between with more awe and wonder than fear or judgement.

This morning, when I looked in the mirror at my pudgy middle and goofy little aging face, I actually smiled.

Not because I suddenly loved everything I saw.
But because I was still here to see it.
Still changing. Still grieving. Still growing in imperfect light.

It’s a hell of a thing to get old.

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