Tithonus

In Greek mythology, Eos, the oversexed Goddess of the Dawn, abducted two beautiful Trojan princes, Ganymede and Tithonus, to be her lovers. When Zeus stole Ganymede from her to be his cup bearer, she asked Zeus for compensation. She asked him to make Tithonus immortal, but she forgot to ask that he be granted everlasting youth. So Tithonus became immortal, growing older and older, feebler and feebler, shriveling away, longing for death but never dying.

Greek myth provides two unsatisfactory endings to this cautionary tale. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Eos shut her endlessly aging lover up in a room, where she laid him down, and “there he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.” In a later version of the myth, Eos transformed Tithonus into a cicada, in which form he lived forever and forever and begged to die.

Gilbert Meilaender mentions this legend in his essay “Thinking about Aging,” which appears in the April issue of First Things and which my son-in-law pointed out to me. We wish for a long life and a complete one, but a complete life, Meilaender argues, implies a complete life cycle, including old age and death. Few of us would wish to reach an old age like that of Tithonus, in which we are reduced to a ghostly simulacrum of ourselves, our faculties so diminished we become unable to care for ourselves or to extract any pleasure from life.

Instead, many of us aim for what Meilaender refers to as “compressed morbidity,” where we live a long time relatively free of symptoms until we die suddenly and quickly. But, Meilaender asks, “if the idea is that we live – almost up till the end - a life that is vigorous and relatively free of disease or disability, why would we want it to end?” The decline of old age, he argues, “is, in a way, a gradual and (at least sometimes) gentle preparation for the cliff toward which we move.”

In any case, Meilaender wonders, is it possible to die suddenly and quickly after a vigorous old age without there being something wrong with us? No one dies from old age but from diseases to which we become increasingly more vulnerable. But if disease is to carry us off, we will have had to become more vulnerable. “We will still have had to age. Bones must still have become brittle, sensory systems needed for vision and hearing must have deteriorated, our immune system must have weakened.” We must, in short, have experienced the debilities of old age.

So, with respect to our aging, what should we hope for? If prolonged senescence is horrible and if a vigorous old age which ends quickly and suddenly is a chimera, perhaps the gradual decline of our faculties can be a good thing, preparing us, as Meilaender argues, for death. Right now, though, when I enjoy life so much, I'm still digging in my heels as I'm dragged inexorably towards that cliff. As my abilities continue to deteriorate, however, I hope that my diminished state will help me to accept the inevitable. I don’t know, of course, if my hope will be realized, but remembering Tithonus and his terrible fate may help.