USA: Role models for getting old

. PITTSFIELD, MA / Berkshire Eagle / February 13, 2009 Letter from New York Role models for getting old By Leonard Quart NEW YORK: I happened recently to read both an appreciation and an obituary in the New York Times for Sir John Mortimer, who died in January at 85 after a very full and productive life. Mortimer, a British barrister, writer (the "Rumpole of the Bailey" books and television series), raconteur, and womanizer, was quoted as writing in his memoir "The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully" that "dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual and gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous." Well, I'm 69, relatively healthy, and at least in my own eyes not yet ridiculous. But I find something admirable about a frail, wheelchair-bound Mortimer continuing to attend cocktail parties into his 80s (he also persisted in being a prolific writer), despite his sense of embarrassment that he was reduced to a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests. In great pain, and hardly able to see, he even appeared in his slippers at the Windsor and Henley literary festivals, a few months before his death, to recount courtroom tales. Though his biographer notes that by then, if he deviated from his anecdotes, he would become silent, melancholy, and forgetful, saying, "it's all so long ago." Still, Mortimer was a man who refused to passively acquiesce to aging, wanting to fill even his last failing years with activity, never allowing his body's decline to dominate his life. Despite my struggling hard not to contemplate what will inescapably happen within the next decade or so, Mortimer is for me one model for handling getting old and fragile. I discovered another in Diane Athill's (a top British book editor of such writers as V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, and Jean Rhys) very frank, coolly and lucidly written prize-winning memoir, Somewhere Towards the End (W. W. Norton). Athill, who is now over 90, in her 60s felt she was "in hailing distance of middle age," and it was only when she turned 70, that she began to realize she was "old." Her memoir is unsentimental and free of self-pity, rejecting the solace of religion, and taking a reasonable attitude towards death. She claims (and I believe her) to worry little about mortality, but a great deal about "living with the body's failures." Though she mentions her dwindling energy, deafness, and difficulty walking, the tone is free of complaint. Of course, a prime English maxim is "mustn't grumble," where you inform people everything is fine, and keep hidden, behind a cheery or stoical carapace, your physical ills and moments of despair. But that's not who Athill is. She hides little, writes revealingly about her sex life, the people she has loved, and her lack of a maternal instinct, without ever becoming mawkish or losing her composure. She also has a gift for conciseness, so when writing about her passions/escapes — gardening, drawing, and reading and writing books — she finds, for example, gardening an "absorbing occupation" where "you become what you are doing, and are given a wonderful release from consciousness of self." Athill sees her recent writing as no longer fueled by emotional need, as it was in the past, but by an interest in the subject, finding it on completion, "not just gratifying, but absolutely delicious." As an academic turned writer, I just love the sound of that last word. I fully understand her feelings of satisfaction about her writing. Athill is without illusions about aging: "There's no denying that moving through advanced old age is a downhill journey." But she is not a woman to let angst take over, and though there is no way she feels one can end a book about aging with "a bang," she stresses she doesn't have to conclude it with a "whimper." She views most lives as a matter of ups and downs, of shifts of mood and fortune, but she herself has now returned to the "comfortable warmth" of her early years. I love the honesty and unpretentious intelligence of Athill's memoir. There is something so English about her refusal to whine about what age does to the body, and her willingness to confront the imminence of death, ostensibly without fear. It's not my mode, and it's an approach that few people I know can live up to. My friends are younger than she is, but almost all have physical complaints ranging from constipation, insomnia, and high cholesterol to prostate and heart problems. We all take our temperature too often. I become angry with myself when I find myself in yet another elongated discussion of symptoms with a friend. I know I will never be able to treat getting old as John Mortimer or Diane Athill do. Our temperaments are too different. But I would love to be able to age with some semblance of their grace, and remain actively engaged with life until consciousness dims. Leonard Quart cinwrit@aol.com © Copyright 2008 Media News group