A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

We are people living in a culture which anesthetizes birth and death. We birth our babies just as we die, numbed and hidden away behind closed doors, in places most of us fear to go. We hate hospitals and nursing homes because when we open the door we smell the scent of our own fear. We fear death and we pretend it doesn’t exist. Maybe for other people, not for me. Not yet. And anything which reminds us that we are aging, that’s the stuff we make jokes about. For example, check out the birthday card aisle in your local Hallmark store. We fear becoming the stereotype we ourselves have perpetuated: irrelevant, ineffectual, nodding off at meetings. Not invited to the meeting. A self-fulfilling prophesy, we will feel irrelevant if we have helped to create a belief system which marginalizes old people.

           
It has not always been so. If we lived in a more traditional culture, birth and death would happen in our midst, and would give meaning to the rest of the life which happens in between. Old people, who had grown into their roles of midwives, shamans and healers, would be our guides and companions as we make our journey from one life to the next. Aging and death would simply be part of living.

- Anne Damrosch is a published poet and writer living in Burlington, VT 

OLD

I like the word. Old. I like it far better than “senior citizen”, which sounds polite but reeks of condescension. I could embrace “geezer” or “codger”, except that those words (along with “old fart”) seem a better fit for men.  Crone is too archetypal for every day use. Elder sounds a little stiff and sometimes it implies a comparison, unless we were to drop the “er” and revive the lovely archaic word “eld.” Meanwhile I’m just going with old, a plain word which states the truth.

It’s official now. I’m sixty five, collecting social security, and last year I ended my job working with families in the home-health field, a job which I had mostly loved for twenty three years. I left six months after the agency switched to electronic records. I simply couldn’t endure another computer training.

I suppose it’s natural that since joining the ranks of the eld, I’ve become more sensitive to  ageism. But I’m a little embarrassed to say it wasn’t until last month that I was moved to write my first letter to an editor on the subject. I was prompted by a cartoon in a local paper which normally takes pains to be politically sensitive. They would never publish anything which could be construed as homophobic, sexist, or racist. But there it was: a cartoon depicting the Vermont Citizen Legislature, a panel of six people seated at a table, three of whom were identified by little plaques that read “Retiree.” All three were nodding off or with their heads down on the table, little zzzz’s floating above their white or balding heads.

           

Recently I happened to watch an old video of Jerry Seinfeld on Broadway, filmed when he was forty-four. “I had to go to Florida,” he begins. “I didn’t like it,” he says with a bit of a sneer. “Everybody is old.” The joke is that Jerry is driving his car along the Florida highways and when he looks at the other cars there’s no one behind the wheel. All those invisible, shriveled up little geezers and crones. Creepy.

            
I realize we baby boomers can’t expect a lot of sympathy on this one. We, who once said “Don’t trust anyone over fifty” will forever have to chew on those words while we eat crow. But the pervasiveness of ageism in our culture is worth looking at. So Jerry Seinfeld, now that you’re nearly sixty, would you still tell that joke? And can you tell us what you’re scared of? I suspect if you are someone who makes your living by keeping your finger on the cultural pulse of America you would find a lot to make you nervous. 

-  Anne Damrosch is a published poet and writer living in Vermont.