It is right there on the website: 100% of the people in the world are younger than I am; 0% are older. The French Institute for Demographic Studies told me this. I found it more than a little disconcerting. But could I argue with INED, a public research institute specializing in population studies, working in partnership with national and international academic and research communities?
One teeny reassurance was in the minuscule black tip of the still-alive-and-kicking graph of the world’s population. It looked like there had to be a few remaining others this old. That, plus the fact that I do have an actual friend or two still very much alive in their later 90s.
So I clicked myself over to percentages for the U.S. and lo! the numbers looked a little better: 1% of the people in the U.S. are older, even, than I am. Whew. Do we care if 99% are younger? Nahh, we one-percenters are happy to occupy that tip of the iceberg. At least we, and it, are still clinging to the precipice.
All this came about thanks to my fellow WordPress blogger Neil, who grouses more about being old at 77 than I think should be permissible.
“My status as an ancient has been made crystal clear to me,” Neil wrote, referring to INED’s revelation that 97% of the world’s population is younger than he is. He should grouse? He even admits to being “still nicely functional, still pretty much an ace at stumbling gracefully through life.”
Which brings us back to the whole demographic study business. At no point are the trends going to reverse. However more (or fewer) babies appear in any given 24-hour span, except for those who leave the planet for the hereafter, every one of the rest of us is another day older.
Perhaps the only answer is to ignore wherever we are on the percentage scale and focus on the 24 hours. Aim to do the right things, Neil suggests. Seek justice. Do a little good somewhere. Love your neighbor.
Smile when the sun goes down; it’ll come up tomorrow, whether you and i do . . . or not.
I’ve just finished an obituary of sorts for my friend Laurie, who died yesterday afternoon, slipping quietly into an ever-deeper sleep with those she loved best beside her. We should all, eventually, be so lucky.
The way you know you’re dead, in today’s senior living communities, is that your picture goes up on the hall table. Laurie and I laughed about that just last week, when I was saying I’d work hard at writing something elegant to go beside her photo. From somewhere in the ethersphere I am certain she’s getting the last laugh.
Elegance was easy to come by in this case. A decade ago Laurie had shepherded her physician husband through a descent into dementia, managing to keep him at home in their apartment until his own relatively gentle demise. They had raised two daughters and led a full, good life.
One daughter was extremely close to her mother, as was her wife, a particularly beloved daughter-in-law to Laurie.
So the first thing they did, en route to the Good Death, was to talk frankly and in detail about what exactly Laurie wanted. At 91 — precisely the age of this writer — Laurie enjoyed being with friends and family, walking her San Francisco neighborhood, reading and listening to music. She could still do most of these, but recent illnesses were imposing limitations.
We talked, occasionally, of how she felt her quality of life had diminished. Because of my volunteer work with Medical Aid in Dying, which is legal in our state (and 9 others plus DC,) we talked a good bit about that option — which she said she would choose over any painful & debilitating end.
A few weeks ago an intestinal issue sent Laurie to the hospital. Surgery would be required, the doctors said; and it would be a high-risk procedure.
No thanks, said Laurie, I think I’d rather go home to die in peace.
Which was exactly what she did. With a hospice bed positioned so she could look out at the distant mountains, a TV set she mostly kept turned off and flowers on the windowsills, she made herself comfortable. There was morphine for pain, but she had almost none.
There’s a name for this way to die: Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED.) The intestinal issue had spelled the end of her eating; stopping drink hastens the process. A popsicle-like swab was by her side to prevent any discomfort from thirst.
For a week, friends stopped by. We’d tell her how much she had meant to us; she’d return the sentiment — but nothing faux or flowery: “We really didn’t know each other that well,” she said to one visitor. “But I remember a funny thing you said not long ago . . .”
Sometimes, as the days wore on, she would fall asleep mid-sentence. Nobody cared.
Ten days after her return from the hospital Laurie’s sleep simply deepened and her heart and breathing stopped. Her two beloved daughters were holding her hands.
I was 13 the year my older sister left for her senior year of college, just before World War II came to an end. Unfortunately for my lungs she forgot about a carton of Lucky Strikes on the closet shelf. By the time I was halfway through those ten packs I was hooked.
In my defense — or by way of explanation — chain-smokers were more common than non-smokers in the 1940s, and in small-town America the sight of young kids smoking on school steps would have raised few eyebrows, if any. (The eyebrows of my parents would have been another matter altogether, but my sisters and I were sneaky enough to conceal these habits for years.)
The above is why my own eyebrows went up over this beginning line of a Quora story that just crossed my screen:
“If you’re a daily or heavy smoker it takes about 7 years for your lungs to clear themselves.” That sent me straight over to the website of my friends at the Cleveland Clinic where they said “if you can stop smoking for several years, your risk of cancer and other health conditions reduces or even returns to the same level as someone who doesn’t smoke.”
This is not to say everything will just be hunky-dory from then on. Read on for what the Cleveland Clinic says, or check with the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association . . . we know a lot more about nicotine today than in the days when cigarettes were glamorous and chic and omnipresent.
But I can’t help looking back on those days, and telling the story of my poor, once-innocent lungs.
Well into the 1960s, when I was balancing ashtrays while feeding my first two infants, smoking was generally accepted — okay, nobody said it was good for you, but you weren’t labeled a Bad Mom. Gradually, in the 1960s, smoking lost its cool. (Related factoid: for years, bad colds had simply forced me to switch from Marlboros to Kools.) By 1971, when ads were banned and smoke-free areas began to edge smokers out of the way, the reality of nicotine’s multiple harms to the body also began to break through and into the public consciousness.
In 1964, pregnant with my last child, I was so sick that for the first time in my addictive history I could not even manage a smoke. After she arrived I had a moment of clarity: I knew it would be impossible to quit, but since I had temporarily suspended the habit maybe I could manage not to restart. Sixty years later I am still managing not to restart.
You can do this math: I am now sailing into my 90s, still of sound mind and walking three or four miles on most days — so I’m living proof that a history of chain smoking doesn’t always shorten one’s lifespan. Here, though, are a few details within which the devil nicotine may lurk:
Macular degeneration? Maybe I wouldn’t be getting that periodic shot in the eye had I not accumulated 17 long-ago years of chain smoking.
This raspy voice finally curtailing the public speaking I’ve done in behalf of several causes for decades? Vocal therapists have helpfully offered exercises that take 20 minutes three times a day — when I can’t find five extra minutes to finish a blog post. I should never have dropped out of the church choir.
How about that breast cancer I had back at age 72? Virtually every day another link between smoking and cancer is established.
Or unexpected issues with altitude? Without my nicotine-infused history I might still be tackling historic enclosed spiral staircases or visiting Machu Picchu. As is, my daughter brings along a can of oxygen when she meets my plane in Bozeman, MT.
But the cruelest blow of all is when, puffed with pride over a history of sixty years cigarette-free, I wind up a routine exam with the ENT doc to the sound of his muttering voice from behind the X-ray screen:
I didn’t want to embarrass my generation by opposing Progress. Or to expose my geezerhood by questioning the unqualified wonderfulness of Artificial Intelligence.
Even when “generative AI” started getting exuberantly talked about as the newest wonderful potential of this wonderful new thing — I smiled and listened to the limitless lists of tasks opening up. Even while knowing that “generative” is defined in my old-fashioned Merriam-Webster dictionary as “having the power or function of generating, originating, producing, or reproducing” something.
Such as writing a far better blog titled “On Getting Too Old for Artificial Intelligence” than the one you’re reading.
All these years I have kept — well, mostly — quiet about my reflexive antipathy to the whole AI business.
I have repeatedly told my grandchildren: I know how much great good AI is doing. Medical miracles. Scientific advances. Industrial shortcuts. The tool — which was, we try to remember, invented by human beings — is working wonders. Plus, it’s here to stay.
But this is about words. Once AI takes over the writing of PhD theses, college application essays, SATs, term papers and elementary school homework assignments — it’s happening — whose words are going to be used for it all?
Yours and mine and Tolstoy’s and everybody on the New York Times bestseller list. Tolstoy doesn’t care any more, but on his behalf I do.
I’m sorry to admit this, as I am generally pro-LinkedIn, but it was LinkedIn that did me in. LinkedIn sent me a note headlined “Data for Generative AI Improvement.” A headline guaranteed to get my attention, if not my enthusiasm. Beneath the headline was this question:
Can LinkedIn and its affiliates use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn to train generative AI models that create content?
Excuse me?
I said no. But do you think the AI-generated bots that are already creating enough generative AI content to destroy six democratic nations tomorrow need my extraordinary “content” anyway?
Since the next one will be in 2045, and — at 90 — I have no plans to be around then, I guess I’ll finish life on this planet without having witnessed this extraordinary phenomenon. Which is OK. I’ll watch it on TV, in real time, and that’ll be special.
But being there would be spectacular. It’s the business of how to separate the special from the spectacular, and make rational choices between the two, that gets harder as we humanoids get older.
This is my recent lesson in making such a choice.
It started with an invitation to join a trip arranged by a favorite San Francisco-based organization, the Commonwealth Club , for which I’ve long been (and still am) a volunteer. Small group, brief time, expensive but not break-the-bank expensive, and this would be a once-in-a lifetime event. Another Club member was even looking for a roommate so I’d avoid the single-supplement cost.
The trip was to a south Texas ranch directly in the path of the solar eclipse, pick-up in Dallas on Sunday afternoon, return to DFW Tuesday morning. As just about anyone in the country knows by now, the eclipse will cross the U.S. — its ‘path of totality’ extending from south Texas to Maine — on Monday. I paid the fee and called my travel agent.
Lesson one: Find out travel costs in advance.
SFO to Dallas, how hard could that be? Well, as it turned out the airlines thought about this eclipse, and its path of totality, long before the rest of us did, and adjusted their prices accordingly. Nonstop from SFO to DFW would be roughly an arm and a leg. I gave up flying on anything that stopped between home and destination about the time I turned 70. But after my fearless travel agent ran through the nonstop options and their prices we went quickly, nonstop, to Plan B: find something connecting through weird travel patterns and invoke the Little Old Lady privilege of being met by a wheelchair to make changes in unfamiliar airports.
The LOL wheelchair option is onerous to me. I mean. I walk three or four miles a day, San Francisco hills included, and despite the wrinkled and rumpled appearance validated by my ID I detest being treated as Old Person. But we do what we need to do. Fearless travel agent found flights to DFW through Chicago (Chicago? Yes) returning through Denver, on the same airline for which I had mileage to cover the costs.
This, of course, now made it ridiculous to try going from home to Texas ranch in one day, so I opted to book a hotel at DFW for Saturday night. More added cost, but at least the excursion is less stressful.
Photo by fellow Cloud Appreciation Society Member Bob Osborn
Lesson two: Look at the bigger picture. Seriously. Not just the trip but the peripheral costs, the time involved, other commitments, everything else.
I’d known all along that I had a long-planned trip to the east coast in March. But the eclipse is in April! I’ve traveled for ages to different sites in consecutive months. I’ve been known to take back-to-back trips, often a weekend visit with friends followed by a longer trip just a few days later for a board meeting downstate.
But I’ve also never been 90 before. At some point, the body would like a little time to readjust from timezone changes, crowded airports, strange cities and the stress of it all no matter how much fun it was. The bottom line here was that I got home from the (nonstop) flight, DC to SFO, late Sunday night and the flight out was scheduled for early morning on Saturday. The same week.
By Tuesday, dragging a little, I was scrambling to meet deadlines that had piled up during the east coast trip, and I was beginning to have second thoughts about the eclipse.
Lesson three: Remember that the world doesn’t stop while you’re on vacation.
There was a time — say, back in my 70s or 80s — when I could catch up with the commitments of daily life within a day or two. Something seems to have shifted with that. The brain moves quickly into story deadlines, but the body is still on east coast time and wants a nap. It’s possible to avoid major calamity — postpone stuff that’s not on hard deadline, cancel lunches with friends to gain a little time — but Vacation Recovery is simply not as instantaneous as it was in younger years.
By Wednesday, exhausted, I was having so many second thoughts they were adding up too fast to follow. I began looking at weather reports. Storms and thunderstorms in the south and southwest. A CNN reporter, doing a segment on the eclipse Wednesday night, mentioned weather effects and (I promise, you can’t make this stuff up) ended his piece with a throw-away comment, “Just don’t go to South Texas.”
That did it. Thursday at 3 AM I am wide awake, doing the debate thing in my head: Should I do this thing, or should I not? All that money. But maybe it won’t even be visible. What about stuff I’ve not yet done: cancel the newspapers (yes, I’m a print edition person;) water the plants, buy some bug spray, find the sun hat, confirm the flights, pack another suitcase forheavenssakes.
Lesson four: When you’ve lived this long you’re entitled to change your mind.
Thursday morning I began to think it through. Having no trip insurance — actually, as far as I know there’s no insurance that covers ‘changing your mind’ — I would lose a large chunk of dollars. But travel agent friend assured me she could get back all those United miles, and I still had time to cancel the Saturday night airport hotel.
And the tipping point: If I canceled out I would have four Secret Days. A Secret Day, something that increases in value with every birthday, is one in which everyone thinks you’re gone so you can leave the phone on answering machine and do whatever the heck you want.
I wimped out. Left the carry-on on the shelf where I’d stashed it on Monday, emailed the trip people, apologized to my erstwhile roommate, called the hotel, thanked the travel agent, began to fiddle around with some stories, like this one.
A REFLECTION ON BEING A WIDOW . . . WHO ONCE MARRIED A WIDOWER . . .
Google photo from several realtor sites
I had a tenuous relationship at best with the woman whose widower I happily married.
Judith Clancy was a hard act to follow. Before she died, of pancreatic cancer at just 56, she had been an artist’s model for Moses Soyer and other noted New York painters, briefly a ballet dancer, an illustrator for The New Yorker and for Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence. A celebrated artist in her own right, with exhibitions in San Francisco and Paris.
She was tall and glamorous, a gourmet cook, widely admired teacher and raconteur. Fluent in several languages. Mensa, forheavenssakes. What can I say?
My beloved Bud had been her beloved for nearly two decades and her caregiver throughout an agonizing two years of relentless cancer. He was also her sole survivor and artistic executor, and the man redefined loyalty. Judith (whom I never met in real life) and I were born the same year. Had she not died young, I would never have reconnected with my long-ago romance and enjoyed an extraordinary, life-changing 26-year marriage. You’d think I could have been gracious about it all.
I was not. Moving to San Francisco where I knew exactly one person and he was in-house, I resisted, with a tight smile, the urge to punch out the lovely new friends who barely (though warmly!) greeted me before launching into a story about “our dear Judith.”
Despite the fact that I got exactly the same amount of loyalty Bud steadfastly gave her — plus daily assurances that I was the most wonderful gorgeous extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him — I gritted my teeth at every “Judith-and-I” that slipped into conversations with dinner guests and random daily discourse. In short, I did not love my predecessor. But we managed to cohabit: Bud & I & the ghost of Judith Clancy.
In my defense, I eventually grew supportive to some teeny tiny degree. I threw parties for posthumous exhibitions of her work at galleries and museums. I pitched in with the monumental task of cataloguing her work. I sought out (and came to love) the two nieces who had been her only, and distant kin. At one point I read through stacks of her sketchbook/diaries before they were exhibited at the Fine Arts Museums of SF and became part of their archives. It was both enlightening and therapeutic; I learned she had been human after all.
After more than a decade of tumultuous coexistence Judith and I reached a sort of peace. It followed several intense conversations at the oak-shaded gravesite where I would later spread half of our husband’s ashes. The book I wrote about it all remains unpublished, though I did have a story or two about the marrying-a-widower thing in national magazines.
The time arrived, some years ago, that we needed to sell the lovely old Victorian that Bud had bought before their marriage, and resettle in a senior-living condo. Whether all three of us would make the move was an open question.
Downszing was not easy: four floors of wall-to-wall art and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves had to be condensed into 1600 square feet. You’ve heard those horror stories? They are true. I wound up with shingles.
But our new apartment, filled with the familiar art and books and Stuff, quickly felt like home. Interestingly, though a few of her drawings are on the new walls and copies of her books made the move, I didn’t feel Judith had followed me into this new home.
Then — a week or so after Bud and I had resettled — more or less — into the new place I had an early morning phone call from my former across-the-street neighbor.
“You need to call your realtor,” she said. “Last night we noticed that all the lights in the house were on. It looks like they still are.”
I called my realtor. She had not yet put a lockbox on the door. She hadn’t been to the house in over a week. The last of the ‘staging’ contractors had long since finished up and moved on. I drove back to the house.
Every light was blazing. Those early-20th-century homes featured single bulbs in closets, and a few stray lights in weird spots like basement corners. They were all on. Two ceiling fixtures I would’ve sworn had long since burned out were proudly aglow.
I made my way carefully from the basement to the top floor and back down the stairs, my fingers tracing the carved wooden banister railings one last time. Sunlight now was streaming through the stained-glass panels that framed the sturdy front door, lending a warm familiarity to the transitioning interior.
Slowly I flipped the last switch, and closed the door of the stately old Victorian. Behind me I thought I heard a whispered goodbye.
# # #
Thanks to Medium writer Double Rainbow for the inspiration for this remembrance
The hands in question (Photo by friend, used with abandon)
I have sunk to a new low.
This report is in the hope of some sort of absolution, some tiny relief of guilt, or at least the promise that you won’t tell the ghost of my mother.
My mother, Helen Hardy Moreland, was a woman of her time. Which was 1897–1967. The last half-dozen of those years were eaten away with a series of small strokes, and may she rest in well-earned peace. I am living proof that a somewhat easier, if less righteous, life might have given her another three decades or so, but probably my real secret was being born in an easier century.
Despite a graduate degree and (usually) enough money to pay the bills, my mother was constitutionally unable to pay someone to do anything she could do herself. She tried really hard to instill this philosophy in her daughters. Being A Lady was of paramount importance, but if the toilet malfunctioned you went for the plunger yourself.
Helen Hardy Moreland, circa 1940 (Author photo)
When my mother was not cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, writing, teaching, gardening, canning, hostessing, ironing, baking or functioning as a personal enabler of her husband’s distinguished career in academia she was sewing. I mean, how else to clothe four daughters? Sewing included darning, mending, tatting, or crocheting when called for and in all circumstances fixing everything yourself.
It is this last that just did me in.
I needed to add a snap fastener to a newly purchased garment. (Which itself my mother would have stitched up between tea and dinner.)
In my defense, I actually own a sewing basket. I inherited it from my mother-in-law, another woman of the same time and disposition as my mother. She actually used all this stuff:
Isabel’s sewing basket (Author Photo)
Hidden deep within this nifty basket are some snap fasteners. I got one out. I went so far as to mark the spots where its two pieces needed to go.
Then my fingers mutinied. My opposable thumbs absolutely opposed any participation in holding the tiny snap in place, let alone getting the threaded needle (I deserve points, at least, for getting the #$^%+@# thing threaded) through its tiny hole. As if my hands were given voice to shout, with indignation, “Oh good grief! We type your stupid stories!! What more do you want?” It was a battle of frustration; the mutineers were unmoving.
Vanessa’s alterations corner at Lily’s Cleaners (Author Photo)
I caved. Took the damned thing to my friend Vanessa at Lily’s Cleaners on Pine Street. She said, with a gentle smile, that plenty of people bring in small jobs; she’ll have it ready tomorrow.
“You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you . .”
We wish.
Czeslaw Milosz’ “Awakened” is a poem about death, but it speaks also to life. Especially today, when there are enough things to worry about — globally, locally and in between — to make calming poetry a necessity at 3 AM and a respite tool any other time of day.
So I keep “Awakened” handy, whether awake or asleep or in between. If peace on earth seems an elusive possibility, maybe doing what’s assigned is enough for today.
