EVEN SENIOR CITIZENS GET THE BLUES by Richard Forrer [email protected] Senior citizens are coming of age! Literally. Our time is at near as a voting block! Demographers tell us that around the year 2010 or so, senior citizens will outnumber those below fifty-five! That's power, that's clout! The time is near when we will be able more equitably to dictate our futures at the polls. This goes beyond the current fashionable phrase, "the graying of America." We might more suitably say instead of North America, Gray America. The financial pages tell us a large part of the nation's wealth resides with the elderly. Older people are traveling the world over, living in pleasant houses, buying new cars, computers, hot tubs, and swimming pools. Medical reports tell us the aging are not only living longer. They are in better shape today than ever before. We are out everywhere playing around and having a good time doing it. Aging people are shedding all myths about growing old. Frequently people are choosing an early retirement or new careers. Many are breaking with old job models, opting for increased creativity, freedom, and satisfaction in their work rather than stability and repetitiveness. Many over fifty-five and above are carving out new lives and new careers for themselves different from their past lives. They launch themselves on new paths toward new self-discoveries. Aging people are redefining our traditional models of selfhood, whether psychologists like it or not. Soon our youth will have new models of aging to guide them throughout their lives that we never had. We are the generation creating these new models. That is a great distinction to itself. Our aging generation is raising new questions about death. For example, do the elderly, when circumstances justify it, have the rights to self-euthanasia or to assisted suicide? When does the quality of life supersede questions about of the quantity, the longevity, of life? Should we be organ donors so that others might live a better quality of life? Current technology presents the aging with new options about their bodies, both while living and while dead. Equally important is that we are living longer in bodies that increasingly decrease in ability to meet the needs of our basic physical impulses. My mother-in-law has a bad arm from polio, failing kidneys, refuses dialysis, is down to 80 pounds of bones and little flesh, muscle, and ligatures. She can barely walk from her chair to the bathroom. She can little endure a short drive in a car. It exhausts her. Yet her mind, when not fogged by medication, is sharp, spry, and witty. She can make me laugh at the drop of a word. She has lost the will to live. Yet she has a ferocity of spirit that makes her live each day as though she were as healthy as anyone else. She is an amazing prodigy of pride and survival. She is a mental prisoner of a frail, irrecoverably depleted body. She is in constant physical pain and frequently gets the blues. Even senior citizens get the blues. Trapped within a body that requires an extreme act of will to move it, my mother-in-law retreats into reading, watching TV, listening to her favorite jazz music, and briefly attending only a few family functions. She is totally reliant on others to get out of her small, confining apartment. This is a woman who was once very active, well traveled, and fiercely independent. Now everything about her life compels her, against her will, to develop a new self-image. This is painfully groping growth. She frequently gets the blues. Even senior citizens get the blues. Then you get the kind of blues that comes from fighting the blues. These are nasty blues. They curl the fingernails of your soul inward until they become ingrown. The soul is in constant pain. So we get the blues from constant physical pain. We also get the blues from constant mental and spiritual pain. You shrivel up into a frail paper bag shell of skin and your spirit howls at this demeaning disfigurement. Coyotes and wolves howl mournfully. This human spirit howls skreekingly, like chalk screeching across a blackboard. No one else but her hears it. She is alone in her howling while fighting the kind of blues that comes from fighting the blues. In her crinkly, collapsible brown bag of a body, she frequently gets ALL these kinds of blues. Even senior citizens get the blues. Entering many lives is a small snail of death. It crawls them laboriously, tediously through minutes as long as months. Senior citizens are most susceptible to such snail trips through the final years of their lives. The theme song for such senior citizens is Dylan Thomas's "Do Not go Gentle Into That Good Night." This brazen poem that renders old age and death so as finally to have God Himself howl begins this way: Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Yes–and rage, rage against dying by the increase of suffering. Live on, live on, my dear woman into that good night. Here is an aging problem of the first order. Were you placed in such a frail, paper bag body, how would you handle it? Please send me your answers by e-mail.