In recent years, I’ve begun to worry that I should think more about aging. (I know, I know — everyone is aging, but the term only seems to be used for people over 60.) The Beatles wrote “When I’m Sixty-four,” but I am 74—older than a baby boomer—so it’s irresponsible of me to know so little about aging. I should read some books on the subject, or take a course. I was happy to learn recently that Washington D.C.’s Office on Aging offers seven courses on aging, including “Take Charge of Your Aging 101,” “Age Well, Live Well 101,” and “Mindful Living.”
I was about to sign up for one of these courses when I had second thoughts. I said to myself: “You did not take a course called ‘Marrying 101,’ yet you’ve been married to the same woman for 48 years.” It also occurred to me that my wife and I didn’t take “Child-Rearing 101,” yet our two daughters have turned out okay, insofar as they are gainfully employed. Last but not least, we did not take “Financial Planning 101,” yet we still have enough money to spend one week at the beach every year, fly to Los Angeles twice a year to visit our younger daughter, and buy tickets for some cultural event once or twice a month.
I now had an even darker thought: Maybe there is a negative correlation between taking a course on something and doing well at it. I know a handful of people who’ve taken creative writing courses, yet they can’t write worth a damn. A guy I know has taken many tennis lessons, yet his backhand still stinks. If I took a course on aging well, I probably would age poorly. I’d trip on an uneven sidewalk on the way to the classroom and break a hip, or I’d catch pneumonia from one of my aging classmates.
There is something else about these aging courses that bothers me. To put it bluntly, there is no course called “Dying Well 101.” The courses offered by the Office on Aging imply that if you get an A in “Age Well, Live Well 101” you will always be aging well. Yet according to the latest scientific research, this is not true. At some time in the future, you will have to take charge of your dying.
I told a friend that the Office of Aging should offer a course about dying well. He did not agree. “When you go from aging to dying,” he said, “it’s too late for a course. Your education is over. All you need to do is make sure your significant other knows what kind of funeral you want and knows the passwords to your bank accounts. I assume you drew up a will many years ago.”
My friend has a point. It’s not a good idea to think too much about dying. I took out The Oxford Book of Death, a book I dip into now and then, and read a line from Epicurus: “Death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us.” I remember the famous passage from Lucretius, which Dryden translated, that begins: “What has this Bugbear Death to frighten Man?” What about Montaigne, I said to myself: Didn’t he write an essay called “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die”? Later in life, though, Montaigne changed his mind; he decided that it was pointless to think about dying. As the editor of the Penguin edition of Montaigne says, “He now believes that . . . mankind should neither ‘practice’ dying nor ‘meditate’ upon dying.”
Montaigne says of Socrates: “Nor is there anything more striking about Socrates than his finding the time when he was old to learn how to dance and to play instruments.” I told my wife that if the Office of Aging offered a course in “Greek Folk-Dancing 101,” I definitely would sign up, but I was not going to learn how to play an instrument. I had a hard enough time with piano lessons when I was 10.
After giving it much thought, I decided to deal with aging on my own, with a little help from family and friends. So far, I think I’m doing okay. I rarely quarrel with my wife and my beer consumption has remained constant, one or two bottles a day. My wife and I do, in fact, dance. Once a week we do international folk-dancing, but we were doing that long before we were aging.
Moreover, I practice mindful living which, for me, chiefly means making sure that wherever I travel in the United States I will able to have a good cup of coffee. This requires mindfulness to the max, since good coffee is hard to find outside of major cities and college towns. Try finding good coffee in a national park! I hope I can persuade my wife to do without visits to natural parks. My ability to be mindful of mountains and trees and flowers is limited. I agree with Charles Lamb, who said: “I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.”
For me, mindful living means either strolling on a beach or sitting in a sidewalk cafe — watching people while sipping a double espresso.
Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman
to Teju Cole.
