GROWING UP AND UP AND UP

Let’s go back to childhood for a moment. Children have about as many views of aging as do people of all other ages. They see all around them that things, living things, as well as inanimate objects, such as toys, equipment, and books get old. Computers, papers, crayons wear down and get old. And people: people do get old! This is so obvious to the young that in fact they look at anything over the teenage years as old and anything over 30 or 40 as quite old.

Young people do see living things get old, pets get old, people get old. In fact, many young people consider just about everything that is not within 10 or 15 years of their own ages as already old or in the process of
getting old. At very young ages, children can even think age seven is old, or even age five—kindergarten age, or even any age a little older than a child’s own age.

The concept that “death follows old age” is quite a profound concept for anyone let alone a very young person to assimilate on her or his own, deep within her or himself. Yet even death is everywhere, and young people do see that pets, insects, even people, do die. Death is always there, always out there. Yet, for many young people, this will not be an entirely conceivable reality until many decades later. When is it that we are finally able to understand death? Perhaps never. Still, it looms out there, beyond aging. The sequence—grow up, grow on, grow on and on, grow older, grow old, grow quite old, then just disappear or die—comes into focus as children grow. Slowly, the notion that there is a life span—and that this life span has a beginning, a middle, a later phase, and an end—surfaces. Until then, children tend to think of those children who are growing up (and up) as separate from adults who appear to be doing something else.
Somehow, in the young mind, death can become a reality before aging itself becomes a reality. Still, as we grow, death remains vague, a great unknown. Aging becomes increasingly clear to us. Death does not. We
can see what happens during the aging process, and we cannot see what happens after death. For all the unknowns or uncertainties past the point of actual physical death, the realities of aging are all too fathomable— especially once we realize that we are always aging.
After growing up, and gaining an initial foothold on adulthood, aging may tend to emerge in our minds as something less than wonderful, perhaps even not entirely desirable. Aging eventually leads to growing older,
old, and then very old. As children, what we see of old age is something we may accept in other people but do not want for ourselves. We do not even fathom ourselves as ever being very old. When we are very young, old age is something happening to other people; we rarely if ever actually think about ourselves as ever being old, very old. We see old age as belonging to old people—at most, a vague and distant reality for ourselves.

Yet old age itself is changing right before our eyes. Old defi nitions of “old” are shifting in our times. Even middle age years are changing. Middle age years are extending later and later; and then old age begins later
and later. It is only a matter of years now before people over 65 are a larger population than people 5 and under. This is the fi rst time in the history of the human species that this is taking place. Old age will take on not only new meaning but new proportions.

Yes, old age looks different these days—and lasts longer and longer.

And this does not have to be a bad thing. The possibilities that the even longer periods of time we will be alive and will be enjoying life are growing. Aging is slowly taking on a new face. So while we do grow up and then up and up, we now will be fi nding ourselves growing up and up and up on and on and on . . .