Note to my readers: though old age is plenty traumatic, I’m broadening the focus of this blog to sometimes include aspects of trauma less directly associated with the theory of trauma, more with its experience, including my own.
Suddenly I’m Old and Death Approaches
I’m seventy-nine years old, soon to be 80. Old age has snuck up on me, though it should have been no surprise. I live in what used to be called an old age home, though hardly anyone calls it that. I have my own apartment, am served one meal a day, and have discovered love in late life. As I become frailer or begin to lose my mind (an almost universal progression among the old, unless they just drop dead), I will move or be moved first to assisted living, then to a nursing home unit, or to “memory care.” All under one roof, all for one rather large fee. For now, I live a normal life, am in reasonably good health for my age, take vacations, and continue with my academic work, albeit on a more modest scale. I will likely write no more books.
My environment is one of concentrated morbidity and mortality. It’s called a continuing care retirement community (CCRC). It’s small, almost 200 people, and just about every week someone who I know dies, has a serious fall, a stroke, or shows signs of rapid onset dementia. Parkinson’s is a plague, especially among men. In other words, I live amidst death and dying.
Almost everyone says they are not afraid of death. All are afraid of a protracted period of dying, and the pain, fear, and indignity that go with it.
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Among those who have thought seriously about getting old, Erik Erikson is well known for having developed the eight stages of psychosocial growth. Focusing not just on psychosexual development in early childhood, as Freud did, Erikson extended development throughout the life cycle, from infancy to old age. Erikson argues that if one has successfully navigated the previous stages, the death that faces us all can be accepted rather than feared.
A less well-known, but hardly obscure author is Ernest Becker, who wrote Denial of Death, for which he posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize. Becker too began with Freud, transforming the young boy’s fear of castration into a more general fear of death. Fear of death is the basis of civilization, which deals with death terror by means of the vital lie— almost any activity that helps us deny our mortality, and the meaninglessness of life that it imposes on us. Sometimes Becker sounds like Ecclesiastes. All is vanity.
Placed beside Becker, Erikson’s acceptance of death is just one more lie. Or would be if Becker had not elaborated in an interview given in hospital shortly before his death. Here Becker goes beyond the “immortality-ideologies” he refers to in Denial (p 354), referring instead to the true aim of transcendence, which he now all but calls God. In my opinion, a version of the vital lie that seeks transcendence in God can no longer be called a lie. It may not be objectively true (whatever that would mean), but it is not merely an ideological defense against death. It is what most people call belief. What’s the difference? We shall see?
I draw on these two authors not to compare and contrast them for intellectual purposes, though that is my training, but to help make sense of my experience living among the old as I face my own death. Not now, but soon.
