I’ve been making notes on something I’d like to write. I don’t know if I have the perspective yet. It’s about being old in this time of Covid-19.
The main line thus far is, getting to 84 (which I’ll be two months from yesterday) has been almost invisible. Some body parts don’t work as well as they did, but all of that happened gradually, so it’s like that story (true or not) about the frog in heating water.
I’ve never thought of myself as “old,” thought I know the age number puts me in that category. My few physical issues have been dealt with by doctors prescribing pills or by surgeons who have made them go away. I’ve got three prosthetics: lenses from cataract surgery, a stent in an artery, and several dental implants; I don’t notice any of them. Some other creeping annoyances—need for a handrail or helping hand on long open stairways, essential tremor in my left hand—I deal with, the same way I’ve always dealt with minor things that got in the way of what I was doing.
From in here, I’m the same guy I always was. I have no aches and pains; I don’t feel at all old. The primary markers of upcoming death are three places outside.
One is a difference I’ve noticed in the way some people treat me. Now and again, people say, “Can I help you with that, sir?” Most of the time I think, “No, you needn’t. I can do this perfectly well myself. Why would you ask such a question?” Then I remind myself about the alte cocker they’re looking at and know perfectly well why they’re asking such a question.
Another is at work. I’m a SUNY Distinguished Professor. I’m still teaching my classes, still working with graduate students, still making photographs and writing books. But a recent chair of my university department refused to let me serve on two hiring and promotion committees for which I was more qualified than anyone in the department, because, I think, she thought I was a character from another time. Her responses to me were mostly on the order of, “Well, you’re well-known for this, but, you know. Come to a meeting and say something if you like.”
The third, and by far most important, is the increasing absence of family and dear friends. Parents, long ago and, more recently, pals who have, in Sam Beckett’s phrase, “changed tense”: Bill Kunstler, Warren Bennis, Pete Seeger, Bob Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Leslie Fiedler, Lenny Michaels, Ray Federman, Michel Foucault. I’d like to talk with every one of them in this freaky time. I can’t. I have a few such conversational pals left. But only a few. It is the absence of conversation that marks age most. There are fewer chairs at the table, real or metaphorical.
So that is the getting older part. Everyone my age and this side of the grass has a similar story. We’re the ones here to kvetch about the absence.
But Covid-19 changes the game. Merely because of my age, I’m ten times more likely to die of it than someone who is 43 or 53. It’s the first time in my life I have a target on my back that is not of my own making. It’s not like just being 83, going on 84. It’s not like having enlisted in the Marines when the Korean War was still hot, or driving a Shelby GT350H Cobra 110mph drunk on a hot Texas night or going into a locked room with 18 death row prisoners to argue a point for which they’d got mad at me; it’s not like any of the other foolish things I’ve done. This one is from outside.
I can’t remember how long I’ve been correcting people on misuse of the word “decimate.” Most times I see it, it is used to mean ‘they killed everything in sight.” No: the word means to kill one out of every ten. And now, in part because of Trump’s bloody fucking incompetence, I am in an age cohort with a likely mortality rate from Covid-19 of one in ten. Unless those fools get their shit together, this may decimate my age group. Literally.
I reread Albert Camus’s The Plague this week. He nails many of the behaviors we’ve all seen the past few weeks: the denial (think of those idiot students doing spring swim in Florida), the pettifogging (think of Trump’s claiming this is the best handling of a plague ever, anywhere), and the struggling doctors trying to get some purchase on something they can manage but not control (think of how hard Dr. Anthony Fauci and others have worked to maintain straight faces while Trump bloviated.)
And now, it comes back home: to me, sitting at my desk, a little after three in the morning. A month ago, all I had to fret about was ordinary life and its arc into ordinary death. Now I have to worry about taking a package from the delivery guy. What do I wash first: the package or my hands?
I got an email yesterday from Kate Bennis, my late friend Warren Bennis’s daughter. She told me of a video/Zoom dinner she’d had with some friends, one of whom gave her, “a glimmer of, not hope, but perspective.” Me, too. What the guy told his kids was, she said, something like this:
“You are the next Great Generation. The first GG had the Great Depression and WWII. You have Trump, the rise of the right, climate change, and the first global pandemic. You will overcome this and make something of what is left.”
I quite like that. What’s going on now is, in all regards, horrible. There’s no making nice of it: a lot of people will die because of this who would not have died at this point in time. The Great Depression and World War II were also horrible, and both caused deaths that would not otherwise have occurred at those points in time.
I count on those people like Warren’s children and mine to make something of what is left. I know and trust them well enough to believe that they will.