Well, it never was. I can't think of a single epoch in history when getting old was a cakewalk. Nowadays we are living longer than ever and you wouldn't believe how many famous people who weren't rock stars are croaking now in their nineties. Even a couple of generations ago this was incredibly rare. And with our longer lifespans come longer problems. A lot of us still begin to fail and deteriorate in our sixties and now we have an extra fifteen years to avenge ourselves on our horrible children by living long enough to be a problem for them.
We no longer have to be dependent on our kids for our care. Even those of us who never had kids and have no money can at least look forward to our senior finishing school in government care facilities. The diseases of age never really change but perhaps they are more bearable for us, if more prolonged. For many of us our hips and knees are still going to give out on us, but now we have fabulous joint replacement surgeries and treatments. Arthritis will likely never be cured but there are medical procedures that never existed before the last century. Our bodies will still become more fragile but advances in knowledge about self-care and good nutrition will do wonders to slow the deterioration. We also have a variety of treatments and surgical interventions to restore vision and prevent blindness.
I am thinking of the man who asked the gods for the gift of immortality. He was granted his wish. He unfortunately forgot to ask them to throw eternal youth into the package. He was doomed to an eternal life marked by eternal deterioration and he became an immortal living death.
We also enjoy all kinds of cosmetic surgical and treatment procedures to grant superficial youth to those who can afford it. Has anyone bothered to notice how many movie stars, women especially, look almost creepily great for eighty-four? How about that picture of Carrie Fisher with her famous mom Debbie Reynolds, taken just a year before both their recent deaths. One could not tell who was older and who was younger. Carrie didn`t appear to have much, if any work done on her. Her mom? I would swear that she must have had a very beautiful relationship with her plastic surgeon!
I for one am saddened by this hyper-allergic fear that many in our culture have about aging and death. They are, after all, inevitable, and what does it say about the character of someone who wants to spend her old age looking like a dumb blonde? A very creepy, artificially-enhanced dumb blonde.
We really seem to hate the idea of no longer being young and desirable and too many of us have forgotten just how turbulent, troubling and confusing it was for us to be young. Prettiness of face replaces beauty of soul.
When I was twenty-three, my twenty-two year old friend and I were having a good-natured competition to see who would start to age sooner. She was a radical lesbian feminist and, like me, was already disgusted by the shallow vanity of people our age. Then I was looking at the picture of an elderly First Nations woman. Not one single wrinkle or flaw was edited out of her ancient wizened face. I commented to some friends that this is the beauty of old age, and the lines and wrinkles like rivers, roads and international boundaries to guide us through the wonder of the woman`s long and well-lived life.
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