Two or three days ago I got a note from someone who had just finished reading Helping Yourself Grow Old. She wrote: “What you said about dealing with old age, works too in dealing with a pandemic.”
Really? I guess I hadn’t thought of that. But it’s reasonable, because old age is definitely a pandemic. A huge percentage of the population is going to get it.
In fact, people aspire to it in a ridiculous way. They want the condition but without the symptoms.
They want to be seventy-five and still playing basketball. They want 900 living friends whose birthdays they remember. They want to be energetic and entertaining, but they are allergic to expressions like “spry.” In other words, they would prefer an old age like the corona virus, without the fever or shortness of breath.
But. . .careful, Frances, you are about to step on shaky ground. There is no comparison between this dreadful infection and old age. I’m sure my reading fan was not thinking about being ill. She was thinking about limitations, inconvenience, isolation, fear, ways that the situation affects us all. She was noticing that ordinary living skills are useful in all situations. And the same faith that fires us to live with purpose sustains us when our goals fail and we are powerless to protect those we love.
Speaking for myself, the emphasis of life has changed in the past two weeks. For a few days I was feeling the loss of some nice opportunities on my agenda. I expected to meet people, find new readers, sell a lot of books, and it just didn’t happen.
In the middle of my small pity party, an infant, a twelve-year-old boy, a twenty eight-year- old nurse and a bunch of elderly folks in a care facility all died, along with a rising wave of numbers, thousands, all representing people somebody loved. A hoard of others lost their jobs and incomes.
Feeling appropriately insignificant, I tried to declare my continued existence by getting counted in the census, but my identification code didn’t work. I wondered why it mattered.
Thus life reminds us, as it has so many times before, of our small role in the sweeping human drama, leaving us wiser, stronger, braver, along with older.