I was sixty-four when I attended my cousin Pete’s seventy-fifth birthday party at his home in Studio City. The place teemed with cousins and their friends, ninety percent of them over seventy, including the members of the Beatles-and-Stones cover band.
When twilight arrived—salmon sky, ninety degrees—dozens of people in their seventies stripped down and leapt into the swimming pool like aging dolphins. They splashed, laughed, floated on their backs, and generally behaved as though the actuarial tables had been suspended for the evening. I remained beneath the canopy in long pants, swatting mosquitoes and sulking.
I sat with a plate of hummus, feta, figs, and baba ghanoush and talked with Jim, my cousin Diane’s husband, a seventy-eight-year-old retired ophthalmologist.
I told him about some of the challenges I was encountering as I entered my mid-sixties: early bedtimes, bladder-draining night patrols, and my growing terror of driving after dark.
Jim leaned toward me, lowered his voice, and delivered a sentence that should probably be etched on my tombstone.
“The hardest part of aging is becoming invisible. You still take up space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture.”
I immediately thought of Dostoevsky—or rather a sentiment I associate with his darkly comic vision of human nature. After a certain age, merely continuing to exist begins to seem vaguely impolite. Forty is acceptable. Fifty is pushing your luck. Seventy-five? Now you’re abusing the hospitality. Mind your manners and die already.
“Exactly my point,” Jim said.
I was joking, but the joke contains an unpleasant truth. Call it The Mortality Courtesy: the tacit social expectation that aging people should manage their decline in ways that minimize discomfort and inconvenience to everyone else.
Stay healthy. Stay attractive. Stay mobile. Stay independent. Don’t complain. Don’t smell strange. Don’t require assistance getting out of the car. Don’t hold up the line while searching for your credit card. Keep your hearing aids charged. Maintain bladder control. And above all, don’t become one of those frightening old people whose visible deterioration reminds everyone else where this carnival ride is heading.
If you absolutely must age and die, please have the decency not to make it awkward.
Tolstoy understood The Mortality Courtesy perfectly. In the wonderfully cruel opening of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, employees at a prominent law court learn that Ivan Ilyich has died. Almost immediately, they begin wondering what promotions and personnel changes his death might make available to them.
Ivan is dead. Someone may be getting a better office.
They are also secretly relieved by the most fundamental fact of the situation: death happened to Ivan and not to them. One person’s catastrophe becomes another person’s reassurance.
Then comes the funeral, which presents its own set of irritations. Death requires scheduling adjustments. There must be displays of grief, solemn expressions, uncomfortable clothing, flowers, condolences, and perhaps an afternoon sacrificed to standing around a coffin when everyone has other things to do.
The dead can be terribly inconsiderate.
But Ivan’s greatest breach of etiquette is more serious. His death reminds everyone that they are fools for living as though they will live forever.
That is the real violation of The Mortality Courtesy.
We spend much of our lives climbing ladders of pleasure, status, acquisition, accomplishment, and recognition, always imagining that happiness waits on the next rung. Better house. Better job. Better body. Better vacation. Better restaurant reservation. Better retirement portfolio. Keep climbing and eventually you will arrive at the radiant platform where everything finally makes sense.
Then some inconsiderate bastard dies.
Suddenly the entire enterprise looks suspicious.
This may explain why visible aging can make younger people uncomfortable. The old person isn’t merely old. He is carrying information. His stooped posture, hearing aids, liver spots, pill organizer, orthopedic shoes, and careful descent down a staircase are little dispatches from the future.
Nobody asked for these updates.
Wouldn’t it be more polite to remain eternally youthful and salubrious? Stay lean. Keep your teeth. Maintain excellent posture. Swim laps at seventy-five. Wear tasteful linen. Post photographs from Tuscany. Inspire everyone with your vitality.
This is the kind of aging society can tolerate because it doesn’t look sufficiently like aging.
Perhaps that is what fascinated me about Pete’s birthday party. The septuagenarians launching themselves into the pool were performing the acceptable version of old age. They were vigorous, social, musical, suntanned, drinking wine, singing Beatles songs, and behaving as though seventy-five were merely fifty with a better retirement account.
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