How to Live Beyond 80

My Problem with Aging

Friends,

Let me be very candid with you. I’ll be 80 in June.

Eighty!

When I was a boy, my grandmother had a friend named Jack who was 80. He was the oldest person I’d ever met. I was amazed he was still standing. And still able to walk and talk. I thought he was Methuselah. I regarded him as a fossil from a different time.

Now I’m about to become a fossil from a different time.

Trump will reach 80 ten days before me, but that’s small comfort. He’s not just a fossil. He’s a neanderthal with a reptilian brain. I’m embarrassed he and I are of the same generation.

But there are a lot of us, all hitting 80 this year. More babies were born in 1946 than in any other year in American history up until that time: 3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before.

This postwar baby boom is about to hit an actuarial wall. We’re going to croak. Over the next dozen years or so, the boom will go bust.

Some of us are aging gracefully, with gratitude for how long we’ve lasted and compassion for ourselves. I wish I could say I was one of them.

I’m getting grumpy. When he first came on the political scene, Trump made me angry. Now he makes me want to puke.

And I have less patience than ever with other people, perhaps because of an unconscious “use by” timer that’s now clicking away. Increasingly I wonder why I’m wasting time with this or that buffoon. I’m less tolerant of long waiting lines, automated phone menus, and Republicans.

At my 50th college reunion (in 2018, already eight years ago!) my classmates and I were asked if we wanted to march at commencement behind the soon-to-be graduates of the class of 2018. It had been something of a tradition — the 50-year age gap eliciting laughter and applause from the audience.

I was eager to march until my mind wandered back to my own graduation in 1968 and I remembered the surviving members of the class of 1918 hobbling along behind us with hunched backs and canes, barely able to hear the applause or raise their arms to wave in acknowledgment. And they were only in their early 70s at the time!

Well, of course I marched behind the soon-to-be graduates in 2018, but the memory of the last march of the class of 1918 made it feel less like a celebration than a dirge.

Yes, I know, medical science has come a long way since then. Instead of canes, we now have artificial hips. We hear through high-tech hearing aids. Our failing memories are supplemented by artificial intelligence accessible through our iPhones. Some of us have facelifts, botox injections, colored hair, and buff exteriors.

But we’re still falling apart, like old cars or washing machines whose parts can be replaced only so many times before they give out.

When I get together with old friends, our first ritual is often an “organ recital” — How’s your back? Knee? Heart? Hip? Shoulder? Eyesight? Hearing? Prostate? Hemorrhoids? Digestion? The recital can run (and ruin) an entire lunch.

The question we jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in college — “getting much?” — now refers not to sex but to sleep.

I don’t know anyone my age who sleeps through the night. When he was president, Bill Clinton prided himself on getting only about four hours. But he was in his 40s then. (I also recall Cabinet meetings where he dozed off.)

How many years do I have left? It’s now thought a bit disappointing if a person dies before 85. Three score and 10 is the number of years set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma have added about a decade.

The average lifespan in the U.S. is now 81.4 years for females and 76.5 for males. Why do women get almost five more years than we stupid, fragile, pot-bellied, gun-toting, cigarette-smoking, couch-potatoed, drunken, stressed-out men?

“After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say. But how to get on the gravy train? Is there a formula for prolonging the remaining years and living them with more energy than ache?

I find myself reading the obituary pages with ever greater curiosity about how long people lasted and what brought them down. I remember a New Yorker cartoon in which an older reader of the obituaries sees headlines that read only “Older Than Me” or “Younger Than Me.”

They say you need to exercise, eat well, avoid cigarettes and alcohol, have good friends. But I’ve known health fanatics who croaked in their 60s, and someone with so many friends he was the life of every party but keeled over at 55 (maybe too much partying?)

Who the hell knows? My doctor, who’s young enough to be my granddaughter, tells me that longevity after 80 mostly depends on your genes. She smiles and nods when I tell her that I’m hoping for the best, genetically speaking. My mother passed at 86; my father, two weeks before his 102nd birthday.

But my lovely young smiling doc has no idea what it’s like to be on the cusp of 80.

When the nonagenarian actor and director Clint Eastwood was asked about his secret to longevity, he said: “Every day when I wake up, I don’t let the old man in. My secret has been the same since 1959: staying busy.”

Well, if that’s the secret, I may be here for quite a while yet. Writing to you every day is keeping me busy as hell. Thank you!