The Art of Ungraceful Aging

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of dining with my 82 year old mother. We started to talk about aging and she made this profound statement: “when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, I do not recognize the face staring back at me.”

And, that’s where the story begins.

You Should Be Dead Already

In this country we are hyper focused on aging. But, aging is a relatively new phenomenon for us. According to the CDC, the three leading causes of death in the early 1900’s were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea & enteritis. In fact, diarrhea & enteritis, together with diphtheria, caused one third of all deaths. Of these deaths, 40% were among children under age 5.

So if you made it past age 5, you only got another 35 years before you…up & died….as we say in the south. So aging wasn’t really a thing, yet. Nobody got the luxury of time.

In 2020, nearly half of those born will live to celebrate their 100th birthdays. Today we can often live quite well with conditions that would have killed us fifty years ago.

But now that aging is a thing, nobody really wants to do it. Nobody wants to admit that there’s more green grass behind the mower than in front of the mower, even though the process of aging presents tremendous opportunities to learn.