The Loneliness of Extreme Old Age

In the last Times Sunday Review, Louis Begley, a 78-year-old retired lawyer best known for his novels, published an essay entitled “Age and Its Awful Discontents.”   He had nothing good to say about old age, terming its gifts “bitter.”  He attributes his dread of the “ravages and suffering inflicted on the body by age and illness” to his having no role models of successful aging in his family when he was growing up.  Those older relatives who could have provided models for him perished in Poland during the Second World War. 

The chief witness for the ills of aging seems to have been his mother, who died in her 94^th year, a widow for the last 40 of them.  In her final years, her pain, poor hearing, physical disabilities, unwillingness to use a wheelchair, and inability to manage a walker kept her at home, unable to visit museums, attend concerts, or even sit in the park.  Those of her friends who had escaped from Poland and lived in New York had “one by one became homebound or bedridden, lost their minds or died.”  During her last decade, she was, writes Begley, “very lonely.”  It has taken him until now “to feel in full measure the bitterness and anguish of my mother’s solitude - and that of other old people who end their lives without a companion.”

When I read this grim conclusion, I remembered an incident last week in which my wife and I were holding hands as we walked down the street.  A neighbor, who saw us, said it was nice to see us holding hands.  “We’re holding each other up,” said my wife, which raised a laugh from our neighbor and from me.  But as my wife and I continued down the street, the thought struck us both that in truth we were holding each up, not physically of course, not yet anyway, but emotionally.  I count her presence in my life as my chief blessing.  Still, I doubt I would be as lonely as Mr. Begley’s mother in the unlikely event I became a widower.  Our daughter and her family live in the other wing of our building, and my wife and I are making new friends among our neighbors and the younger members of our congregation.  Mr. Begley’s article increases our resolve to strengthen these friendships, because friends of our own age will inevitably drop away, one by one, if we reach extreme old age. 

Louis Begley’s essay reminded me of another essay, Montaigne’s “On the Length of Life,” in which he writes that “dying of old age is a rare death, unique and out of the normal order and therefore less natural than the others.  It is the last, the uttermost way of dying; the farther it is from us, the less we can hope to reach it.”  This was true towards the end of the sixteenth century, when these essays were written, and it remained true until very recently.  But according to the 2000 census, there were more than 50,000 centenarians in the United States, where centenarians comprise the fastest growing age segment of the population, and in 2008 seven-tenths of one per cent of the American population were in their nineties.  The loneliness experienced by Louis Begley’s mother will become an increasing problem. Broadening one’s friendships to include the young may mitigate the loneliness. 

To paraphrase Johnson, while old age has many pains, death has few pleasures.  It behooves us all to broaden our circles, which may reduce the pains of extreme old age, should we attain it.


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