A Ceremony of Losses

If Donald Hall’s awards for his books of poetry, children’s books, and nonfiction were arrayed like medals on his chest, he would have as many decorations as the most beribboned five-star general.  A former poet laureate and a National Medal of Arts winner, now 83 years old, he has written a meditation on old age for the January 23^rd New Yorker Magazine.

I teeter when I walk, I no longer drive…Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall…I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven  [as did his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon] or fifty-two  [as did his father]…However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.  It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.  They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae, he writes, as far as the young are concerned.

Whatever the reaction of younger people to old age, it is, he writes, unfailingly condescending, an assertion he supports with several examples, the most egregious of which entails a museum guard who recently asked Hall, after he had emerged from the cafeteria, “did we have a nice din-din?” 

Although Hall’s description of us old timers as possessing green skin, two heads, and antennae is, of course, an exaggeration for effect, in essence it’s true, but only if people notice us at all.  In a gathering of the young, I often feel invisible, irrelevant.  But when I am noticed, I feel that the onlookers see me as other.  When fumbling for change at a checkout counter, for example, I sense that those standing behind me are regarding me as clumsiness incarnate, an old man holding up the line.  When I was young, I viewed slowly paying old people in just that way.  

At my wife’s 50^th college reunion, the late Reverend Professor Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, told us that the undergraduates looked upon my wife’s classmates with amazement that they were still ambulatory.  Later that day, when I joined my class in the procession of alumni who graduated at least 50 years before, we walked through a double line of graduating seniors, who applauded us as we walked.  At the time I didn’t think of their applause as condescending, but now that Hall has pointed out the ubiquity of condescension towards the old, I suspect it was.  The only facts the graduating seniors knew of us, after all, were that we were old and that we could still walk.  I was grateful for having survived but this did not merit applause, since I had little to do with it.  My survival has been a matter of genes, excellent doctors, and good luck, cause for celebration on my part but scarcely cause for applause by the young.   

Hall looks at aging with an unblinking eye, savoring the pleasures that remain and realizing the futility of lamenting his losses.  In this I hope to emulate him.


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