Last fall, I toured high
schools with my fourteen-year-old, whose current gig ends after eighth
grade. At two quite different schools, one public and one private, we
heard about the school-sponsored theme nights that enliven football or
basketball games. “We had ‘Senior Night,’” the tour guide at the private
school told us, “and all the members of the senior class came with
walkers and canes, bent over like this” (she demonstrated, giggling)
“with their socks covering their trouser cuffs—it was hilarious!” We
heard a similar account at the public school.
I get the joke: the contrast between the fresh-faced high-school
seniors and the octogenarians they emulate, the incongruity of teenagers
robed in the clothes of the elderly, the playful adolescent humor of it
all. And perhaps it should not be surprising that in a culture where
pretty much every segment of society is fair game for taunting and
mocking, “senior citizens” would be ridiculed by their grandchildren’s
generation. But it still saddens me. For as Alison Gopnik observed in a
column in the
Wall Street Journal on
the challenges of aging ,
“It’s hard to avoid feeling that there is something deeply and
particularly wrong about the way we treat old age in American culture
right now.”
When my children were younger, they accompanied me every Sunday to
take Communion to a group of older people in an assisted-living
residence near our church in Connecticut. We visited with Camille, who
always cried, and with Frances, almost one hundred years old, who
dispensed lavish handfuls of candy from her larder (thus becoming a
particular favorite of my kids). There was Rudy, a veteran of World War
II, usually a bit grim-faced, but grateful for our knock on the door
nonetheless. He took a particular shine to my youngest child and once
gave him a huge stuffed dog from a carnival that was twice as big as he
was. We called him Spike and he took up residence in our basement
playroom until one day when a seam ripped and reams of bead stuffing
spilled out onto the carpet. There was the other Frances, who organized
everyone for Communion, and Marie, and Florence, and Mildred, gentle
soul and avid reader, who loved to tell us about her latest large-print
find from the library’s bookmobile.
Yes, many of the residents of The Mews used walkers, or suffered from
incontinence, or didn’t hear as well as they used to. But as the years
went by, each one of them became a friend, lighting up when they saw my
children walk through the door, eager to share a moment of conversation
or a memory, grateful for the gift of the Eucharist as I pressed the
thin wafer into their hands. We have moved away, now, but I think of
them often, particularly every Sunday morning. And it is on their behalf
that I bristle a bit when I see schools condoning a theme night that is
premised upon making fun of an entire class of people, the elderly.
Every life is a “strange eventful history,” to quote
Jaques’ famous speech in Shakespeare’s
As You Like It.
Over the course of a lifetime, each human person constructs a chain of
identities, a concatenation of his or her experiences and relationships
in love, work, and play. When we take these precious and unique
individuals and lump them all into a category based on only one aspect
of their identity, in this case their age, we do them a real injustice.
This is true, of course, of any such reductive view of the human person,
whether the reduction is taken according to gender, or disability, or
sexuality, or color.
People aren’t one thing; they are many. That white-haired woman who
is a little unsteady on her feet now—maybe she used to love to bake, and
spent decades working for a law firm, and cared for her sister until
her death. The grizzled old man in the chair by the window? Perhaps he
worked as a pharmacist, stayed with a difficult wife for fifty years,
had an amazing garden and sixteen grandchildren who adored him. Whatever
their strange eventful histories, they are not just “old people.”
In his poem
After Long Silence, W. B. Yeats wrote, “Bodily
decrepitude is wisdom.” Instead of looking at older persons and seeing
the stooped shoulders, the halting gait, and the white socks, perhaps we
can instead pay attention to what they have still to give: the special
wisdom that radiates through and from the wrinkled countenances, and the
fullness of personhood that accompanies the accumulation of years.
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