Lynn Z. Bloom, "Mapping the Surprising Territory of Old Age: A Conversation with Memoirists" (Assay 12.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.2

Lynn Z. Bloom

Mapping the Surprising Territory of Old Age:
A Conversation with Memoirists

“All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing.”
--Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

Surprises

Before I surprised myself by turning 90, I believed that old age happened to other people, but not to me. I wasn’t in denial, I just didn’t think about it except when I had to make decisions related to age. Should I have a mammogram? A colonoscopy? Would it be better to cash in an annuity at 90, or defer it until I reached (gasp) 100? Should I extend my AARP membership by five years, or only one or two? Or, as the age-old joke goes, should I stop buying green bananas?

I did, however, concentrate on planning my 90th birthday party; if it was the last one I’d ever experience (who could predict?), it had to be one to remember. My grandson Paul, a gifted jazz pianist, volunteered to play a celebratory concert, as he had done for Martin’s and my 60th wedding anniversary (also my birthday) three years earlier. Martin, a collagist in retirement, had died suddenly in his sleep, two years before, so this would be a solo event—with a hundred guests on a sparkling summer afternoon, homemade cake and cookies, and Martin’s collages as party favors. We were in for another happy surprise; Hannah, Paul’s newlywed wife and an accomplished jazz tap dancer, climaxed the concert with an amazing rendition of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” in tandem with her husband. A year later, the vibe still resonates in conversations—and in my heart.

I want to die as I have lived my life— with no regrets for things I can control. I have tremendous regret for the deaths of Martin and Bard, who died of glioblastoma two years later, but I could not save their lives. Now that I’m over 90, people—my family, colleagues and former students, friends from many places worldwide where we’ve taught and traveled—have begun to treat me as a World Heritage Site, a venerable entity to be admired, taken good care of, and visited. Women, many very successful, some in frequent contact, others I haven’t heard from in years, say I’m their role model; on Mother’s Day my beloved daughter-in-law Sara gave me that gift, the best ever. Students and friends tell me what I’ve meant to them—and why.

My life and work endure, intertwined. I give lectures on the Thanksgiving and Chocolate chapters of Recipe, my most recent book. Out-of-print works revive, the most recent a podcast-in-process of Forbidden Diary, my 1980 edition of Natalie Crouter’s 550-page World War II diary of civilian internment in the Philippines, being dramatized by woman captivated by its compassionate story of international friendships. Projects fueled by passion—politics, protests, philanthropies—abound; no one in the world should go hungry, so food banks are a priority. In the spirit of leading edge humanitarians, I too would like my last check to bounce.

The View from the Bridge

I was expecting memoirs of the aging and aged to provide role models for this inevitable voyage into waters charted and uncharted, more authentic and inspiring than the plethora of self-help books written by peppy people much younger than their readers. For some months I floundered in the shoals, looking for ninetysomething professional authors whose experiences paralleled my own, but they were scarce.

Finally, when I lowered the age limit to 70 (but it could have also been 60) and focused on the topic of aging, a number of authors swam into view, some panting and grumbling from the exertion, many floating happily with the current, others making waves of their own. And I realized that together these authors were mapping the territory of old age.

Donald Hall and Doris Grumbach represent the naysayers, for whom the terrain is rutted with deep valleys but no peaks. (I could have added Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty and May Sarton’s string of acerbic lamentations, such as Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy Ninth Year and At Eighty Two, but enough is enough.) The rare upbeat exceptions have written essays rather than entire books about aging: Gloria Steinem’s Doing Sixty & Seventy and Oliver Sacks’s Everything in Its Place," “The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.)” and “My Own Life” and so I draw on them. What could these authors tell me—and other readers—about becoming old?

There are vast numbers of retrospective memoirs by older people assessing their lives—relationships, accomplishments and more—that do not focus on age, from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography to Anthony Fauci’s On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service—so I am not considering these here. Indeed, Steinem (My Life on the Road) and Sacks (On the Move: A Life) came roaring in on books with motorcycles on the covers, both written when they were 75. Because these works are largely unrelated to age they’re off the table.

In this essay I’m in dialogue with Hall, Grumbach, Sacks, and Steinem, my perspective expanded by Atul Gawande’s inspiring Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014). I’m excluding views of the aged by younger authors writing about old people, such as Robert Coles’ elegiac The Old Ones of New Mexico (1973), and Roz Chast ‘s scary graphic chronicle of her aging parents’ long goodbye, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2015).

What I have learned from reading and from life itself, like dealing with loss, and grief, there is no uniform way of aging, a guerrilla activity in the theater of life. No matter what our best laid plans, whatever the books say, we improvise daily, hourly, as we hit the waves, the wind, the tides, even as we also react to what we read.

Ageist Stereotypes

Donald Hall
I’ll start with the naysayers, Hall and Grumbach, on the grounds that an eloquent grouch can provide a powerful negative model—in my reading, of how NOT to go gently into that good night. Donald Hall, US Poet Laureate 2006-7, becomes ever more cantankerous in the successive memoirs following the death of his beloved second wife, Jane Kenyon, herself a distinguished poet, from leukemia at 47. In The Best Day the Worst Day, Life With Jane Kenyon (2005), amidst a cascade of morbid details about Jane’s deterioration over fifteen months, Hall (65 at the time) inserts a brief portrait of his mother at 90, also deteriorating: “She claimed that old age was a blessing: She could read the same mystery twice, having forgotten the plot.” On her 90th birthday, although plagued by attacks of congestive heart failure that would soon put her in a nursing home, “she could hobble to the toilet with its raised plastic extension; she could hobble to the kitchen nearby.” During Hall’s visits to her care facility, “There were times when Lucy was so deaf that I talked to her by writing on a pad; at times we could speak at a normal volume. . . . My mother’s one complaint was the establishment’s food. One day she spoke with wistful longing about how she would love a piece of apple pie. I bought her a slice at a family restaurant nearby and watched as she ate it with a plastic fork from a plastic plate, ninety years old, dying, barely able to walk with her arthritis, with pale piercing blue eyes and seamed face transformed by the rapture of gummy apple pie” (67-68).

This portrait is simultaneously a stereotypical view of a very old person and a grotesque caricature. Lucy is deaf, diminished, unattractive, crippled by memory loss and limited mobility, her pleasures in life restricted to her son’s visits and a piece of “gummy apple pie.”

I recoiled in shock. Hall was depicting his mother as she was in 1994, not in medieval times. She doesn’t resemble anyone I know now, or have ever known in my adult life except when they were literally dying, wasting away mentally or physically—and I am surrounded by old people because I live in a CCRC (continuing care retirement community). My friends and neighbors include an unusual number of dynamic people in their 80s and 90s.

Has Hall, a consummate writer sensitive to every nuance of expression, violated familial ethics and decorum in presenting his own mother as decrepit, lacking in dignity and agency? Probably not, judging from his consistent authorial practice of exposing to readers his own and Jane’s most intimate physical indignities throughout The Best Time/The Worst Time and Life Work. He is equally unsparing in his own self-portrait in Essays after Eighty (2014): defiant about smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and seldom exercising: he once walked four miles and would never do so again. The cover photograph depicts the hairy visage of a wild man, old, wrinkled, feral, and frightening. “Old people are a separate form of life,” he says, complaining that despite his literary stature, he is treated as invisible, irrelevant, or with condescension by younger people, teenagers on up (7-8).

Perhaps this is because, “averse to innovation” (120), Hall refuses to use a computer, or because, with mobility problems requiring a walker or a wheelchair, “I’m hard to handle” (120). Or because, at least in essays and memoirs, over and over he repeats the litany of his personal life: “Decades followed each other–thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life"—marriage to Jane—“then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I traveled to another universe” (7), increasingly frail as a consequence of falls and strokes anatomized in “The Planet of Antiquity” (Unpacking the Boxes 175-95). A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety (Hall died at 89 on June 23, 2018) delivers the coup de grace: “You Are Old. In your eighties it gets hard to walk. Nearing ninety it’s exhausting to pull your nightshirt on. . . . In your eighties you are invisible. Nearing ninety you hope nobody sees you” (5).

Yet despite the emphasis on decrepitude throughout these books, during his old age Hall is writing, as he has throughout his life—his goal four books a year, poetry, a children’s book, essays, memoir: “Days are not boring because I read and write different things, and because writing sustains me. . . . Weeks are not boring, or months” (Essays After Eighty, 120). If accounts of Hall’s writing process bore his readers they can turn to the poetry, wherein lie the real excitement and importance of Hall’s long life.

Doris Grumbach
Grumbach, novelist, critic, and NPR book reviewer, begins Coming Into the End Zone: A Memoir (1991) even more negatively than Hall. She grimly observes that her birth “month at seventy seems disastrous . . . without redeeming moments” (12). She follows her devastating opinion with a list of “things I now actively dislike.” This includes photography: “the photograph replaces what might otherwise have lingered in memory.” Most new books: “ugly type,” “sloppy printing,” “cheap bindings,” “tasteless dust jackets.” Change of seasons: is she resisting “change itself,” “evidence of the passage of time,” or threats of “falling, burning, freezing”? People: “I like very few people I meet, almost none, suspecting their exteriors and disliking what I surmise . . . about their interiors.” Speed: “I move slowly, uphill in an arduous climb . . . . My loathing for speed extends to fast cars, planes, rapid talkers, swift . . . escalators, the computer’s cursor, the publisher of instant books, the producer of ‘new and improved’ products seemingly days after the original was marketed” (20-21).

Although Grumbach mellows somewhat over the course of the year she narrates, readers are obliged to view everything through the negative scrim she has created at the outset. She is learning to appreciate the natural beauty and solitude of Sargentville on Maine’s Penobscot Bay, where she and her partner, bookseller Sybil Pike, have recently moved from Washington D.C. They find a church community. D.C. friends visit, numbers are dying from AIDS. Her aging body is, “on land, always my adversary,” decrepit, unsightly, unreliable, “But in the water: I return to the state of my youth” (80-81). At an outdoor market she encounters Mary McCarthy, formerly a friend, about whom she had published a hostile biography in 1967: “’Hello, Mary,’ I said. ‘Do you remember me?’/Her smile flashed and then, like a worn-out bulb, disappeared instantly./ ‘Unpleasantly,’ she said” (211). Although she tries to conclude with a paean to contentment, her negativity overrides the scene of a tranquil sunset to reflect again on Mary McCarthy, looking grey, ill, and frail (“I regretted that I had not thought of some conciliatory response”) and to end with a diatribe against the “new criminals” she encounters in Maine, squirrels “of whatever size, color, or state of mental health,” raiding her bird feeders (254-56).

Coming Into the End Zone was followed by Extra Innings (1993), Fifty Days of Solitude (1994), Life in a Day (1996), and The Pleasure of Their Company (2000), all variations on End Zone’s themes and topics. Of these works Grumbach says, in “What Old Age Is Really Like,” “In the books I have written since I turned 70, I have displayed a contrary, even dour view. Mine was a dubious, uncelebratory account of that decade.” She continues, claiming to characterize an entire generation, “It is for most a time of slow but inevitable loss, painful because we have grown so accustomed to the confident strides and gains of youth and maturity that when our decline begins, physically, psychically, intellectually, emotionally, we hardly notice. But slowly we stop growing. We diminish. Our reach, characteristic of our best and brightest years, no longer exceeds our weakened grasp. We have lost our grip. . . . Loss is the operative principle for us: teeth, hair, balance, hearing and much of our memory. . . . Our vices . . . become more evident: greed, vanity, envy, selfishness.” Hope disappears and “despair outlasts all.” She concludes, “Despite my dire description, we elderly persist with our canes, in our long-term care and miserable nursing homes and ‘rehabilitation’ centers, and in our seats confronting the idiocies of the tube.”

Judging from the tranquil life Grumbach depicts in her books, full of agency, purpose, and community that Gawande considers so important for aging people to maintain, in this essay she is seriously misrepresenting her own life and that of her peers. Despite her curmudgeonly prejudice against the aged, Grumbach herself lived to be 104, celebrated in a New York Times obituary through her autobiographical works that reveal “a vibrant and perceptive older woman who has lived the fullest of lives and delights in sharing her surprising and meaningful observations.”

In fact, in the sole paragraph of “What Old Age Is Really Like” that acknowledges the antithesis to this miserable existence, Grumbach says: “A happy few escape this general condition. There are those who, through some genetic miracle, do not experience ill health of any sort. A tiny number write or paint or are creative or helpful in some way. A few elderly people (but surely not many) do their best work in those years. A small minority maintain their vigor of mind without the assault of affliction or deterioration . . . .” Here Grumbach is identifying SuperAgers, people 80 and older, who stay mentally sharp, and continue to challenge themselves mentally. SuperAgers behave and think like people 20-30 years younger than themselves. They have strong social connections, and lead active and purposeful lives. Although Grumbach overstates the case by asserting they “do not experience ill health of any sort,” SuperAgers are generally resilient, healthy, and enjoying life—eating well whether or not they exercise or drink (Capos, Healthbeat, Chandhok). Notable among SuperAger authors in substance, spirit, and style are Gloria Steinem and Oliver Sacks. For them, life is a series of peaks--experiences involving new challenges, new solutions, and new satisfactions--rather than valleys of despair and desolation. It’s hard to imagine either of them in the same universe as Grumbach and Hall.

Gloria Steinem
Steinem’s tart reply to a reporter’s observation on her fortieth birthday that “You don’t look forty”—“This is what forty looks like”—has become a familiar mantra. The same attitude permeates Doing Sixty & Seventy, Steinem’s sixty-page exhortation—a political rallying cry with autobiographical overtones—urging women to live fully in the moment. Rejecting the ageist view that women’s “social value ended at fifty or so when our youth-related powers of sexuality, childbearing, and hard work came to an end,” Steinem—aglow with “postmenopausal zest”—sees the “last third of life” as creating “a new freedom to be ourselves.” Thus she encourages women to “rise up from invisibility” and form an inclusive world that is “a collective source of self-esteem, shared knowledge, and support” (4-8).

Steinem opines that seventy is unlike turning fifty or sixty “because it has a ring of mortality—so it has a big message of stop wasting time” (60-61, book jacket). “Life past sixty or seventy or eighty is as much an adventure as it ever was, perhaps more so for women, since we are especially likely to find new territory once the long plateau of the ‘feminine’ role is over” (46). Radical feminists have mapped this territory, serving as non-traditional role models well into their 80s, including American labor organizer Esther Peterson and Indian freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay.

Steinem, now “trading moderation for excess, defiance for openness,” encourages readers to enjoy “the pleasures of being a nothing-to-lose, take-no shit older woman, of looking at what once seemed to be outer limits but turned out to be just road signs.” “The blessing of what I think of as the last third of life (since I plan to reach a hundred),” she says (as I write this she is 91) is the realization that “there is only the full, glorious, alive-in-the-moment, don’t-give-a-damn-yet-caring-for-everything sense of the right now. . . . There’s no second [in time] like this one” (60-61).

Oliver Sacks
For Sacks, a neurologist, identified by the New York Times as “the poet laureate of contemporary medicine,” the glass is always full even as he is dealing with his own major medical difficulties and death. In “The Aging Brain,” Sacks asserts that the essence of brain health is to “remain active, wondering, playing, and experimenting right to the end.” The “incessantly active” brain categorizes and recategorizes “its activities throughout life, constructing interpretations and meanings at ever higher levels” (153)--illustrated throughout the fifty-year cascade of books, research papers, and essays emerging from Sacks’ own brain. In “The Joy of Old Age,” written when he was 80, Sacks says, “I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know. I thought I would die at 41, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude—gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude, too, that I had been able to give something back. . . .”

“At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems,” including melanoma which blinded one eye when he was 74, and intermittently crippling sciatica, “none disabling, I feel glad to be alive—‘I’m glad I’m not dead!’ sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. . . . I am grateful that I have experienced many things—some wonderful, some horrible—and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers”—the Times obituary estimates about 10,000 a year—“and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called ‘an intercourse with the world.’”

Sacks does not dwell on his medical impairments. Without complaint or lamentation, as a physician, he used himself as a case study for his own books, as indicated in his commentary above, A Leg to Stand On and The Mind’s Eye. And at 77, after 35 years of celibacy, Sacks had fallen passionately in love with distinguished writer-photographer Bill Hayes (then 49), and had come out as gay. He died six years later, after the ocular cancer had metastasized in his liver. Yet during this time he experienced a euphoric period of freedom and fulfillment, later commemorated in Hayes’ memorial Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me (2017), and briefly in Sacks’s On the Move: “Did being in love itself flood the body with opioids, or cannabinoids, or whatever?” (381).

Sacks concludes “Joy of Old Age” in the spirit of Steinem, with the observation that embracing old age has brought “not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective . . . . I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure. . . but as a time of leisure and freedom . . . to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”

Sacks’s final essay, “My Own Life,” published six months before he died at 82, reinforces these ideas: “I must live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can . . . . I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends . . . . I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Surprises of SuperAgers

Sacks, like Steinem, has articulated a powerful strategy for everyone, young or old, at every stage of life: keep moving, always be engaged in the worlds of love and work, activity and community. As a SuperAger, he was able to remain fully involved in a life of meaning, pleasure, and gratitude right to the end. In the spirit of Steinem and Sacks, before I retired at 80 from an endowed creative writing professorship, I would rush into the class I’d invented, “Disability in American Literature and Culture,” with hair wet from my daily swim. Although my undergraduates usually exempted people they knew, such as their own grandparents, from negative interpretations, their prevailing stereotypes of the elderly could have been written by Hall or Grumbach. As an energetic optimist, I wanted to make the point—simply by being there—that old age is neither a disease nor a disability.

In Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande, MD, addresses issues of ideal and less than ideal ways for people to spend their last years. “The battle of being mortal is to maintain the integrity of one’s life,” for the ultimate goal is “not a good death but a good life—all the way to the very end. “We have a deep need to identify purposes outside ourselves that make living meaningful and worthwhile,” membership in something greater than ourselves: “a family, a community, a society.” Agency is paramount: “All we ask is to be allowed to remain writers of our own story. That story is ever changing . . . . but whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our characters and loyalties.” Gawande observes that an increasing number of professionals—health care and otherwise—now “believe their job is not to confine people’s choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life” “to make choices and sustain connections to others according to their own priorities” (jacket, 127, 140-41, 147).

At 82, Martin and I moved from rural Connecticut, where we taught at the University of Connecticut, to North Hill, a 500-person CCRC in Needham MA. Although the residents’ average age is 82, this life-enhancing community epitomizes Gawande’s ideals of autonomy—“Live life on your own terms”—and “Purposefull living” through countless ways of promoting mental and physical health. It is also—not by accident–within walking distance of the home of our son Laird, a research biologist, and his family–invaluable proximity.

To live here, explains resident Alan Henrikson, Lee E. Dirks Professor of Diplomatic History Emeritus at Tufts, is “an unexpected further education,” not only through formal programs and lectures, but by means of “the enlightenment of informal conversations” that pervade North Hill, enhancing “our mental and moral life with the constant stimulus of shared thinking, humor, and accumulated wisdom.” So it should not be surprising that in this dynamic milieu many of us don’t think or behave much differently than we did in our 60s and 70s. Once an activist, always an activist is, as Steinem and Sacks demonstrate, a perspective determined by conviction, not age. The same is true of intellectual curiosity, altruism, commitment to worthwhile causes, public service, and more. (See also Science Friday, “How ‘Super Agers’ Stay Sharp And Active Longer Than Their Peers.")

Passion—which as a much younger person I thought expired at 50—prevails. This engagement, although certainly not true of everybody, is pervasive and inspiring. If we’ve had lives, careers, relationships that we’ve loved, why stop the fun when we retire? I participate as fully as I can, despite walking more slowly because of scoliosis, taking care not to fall. I’m enrolled—so far, as a control—in three Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s studies, one of which will get my brain; and in MIT’s AgeLab 85+ Lifestyle Leaders program, Zoom discussions of issues affecting the elderly—doesn’t everything?

And of course I lead a creative writing workshop. Having written as soon as I could pick up a pencil, I intend to continue to write as long as I have new and good ideas. I was 85 when Bard developed glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor invariably fatal. As a lifeline, I wrote Recipe–about the secret life of recipes, vowing it would contain not a scintilla of grief; Bard lived to see it published. Writing helps me to remain resolutely upbeat—in public, anyway, despite the fact that the loss of my husband and son is woven as a bright red ribbon through the fabric of everyday life.
In this milieu, it’s surprisingly easy to make friends of compatible passions and perspectives—and quickly, because there’s no luxury of extended time. Because we continue to lose friends, to Alzheimer’s as well as to death, these friendships are particularly sustaining and significant, bolstered by new, younger residents. Some people fall in love. We laugh a lot, hang out together, go places, have lots more fun than I’d have expected, given that no one’s life is problem free. Small gifts abound: an insulated cup, colorful socks, a dishtowel graced by a mermaid in full swim. As do courtesies: grocery store rides, a hand to hold during medical procedures, expert advice on replacing the diamond that disappeared from my engagement ring after 68 sparkling years. It’s the friendships, plus closeness to my family, that have created the powerful network of belonging, comfort, and some refuge from today’s cataclysmic politics, that constitute a sense of being truly at home.

I’m astonished by how happy it’s possible to be, despite personal losses and the grievous state of the world. A nasty surprise on my recent 91st birthday—pneumonia with sepsis—sent me to the hospital and rehab for three sometimes scary weeks; knowing that my life continues to matter has helped to extend it. Indeed, my own survival has inspired an outburst of frivolity. I’ve just ordered two new bathing suits—on sale, of course.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

For Lynn Z. Bloom, Emerita Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut, aging—like life in general—is full of surprises, particularly those that contradict the stereotypes and roles that women, children, and old people are expected to play. Fortunately, in redefining new roles surprises often defy or reject the old, as demonstrated in her numerous publications ranging from Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical (1972) to The Seven Deadly Virtues (2008), and articulated explicitly in “Teaching College English as a Woman” (1992).

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