Completing a Life: Thoughts on Oliver Sacks' Joy of Old Age

In the New York Times Sunday Review, Oliver Sacks writes of his upcoming 80th birthday.  The piece is called "The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.)"

Sacks is looking forward to his next decade. For me, just beginning my retirement, such a zestful statement offers encouragement for the decades to come.

In this culture, which promotes youth and hides the aged, celebrating aging sparks an inquiry. What has the aging individual to anticipate with zest, a younger mind might ask?  And Sacks answers that he's glad to be alive (or happy not to be dead, its pessimistic alternative). If that's the best that can be said, it's barely reassuring.

1.  Waiting for the End

My father's father, a grandfather I could not have known since he died before my birth, succumbed suddenly from a heart attack at age 45.  When the  decade of his own forties commenced, my father expected to die the way one waits for a visitor, almost impatiently wondering at what hour she would arrive.  From time to time, he would complain plaintively, like a child, that no one would care if he was gone.  Of course the longed-for denials ensued, but he was not comforted.  It took a change of scenery--to that mecca of the retired, Florida--before he abandoned his vigil for the grim reaper, and took up his life once again, regaining his youthful tennis prowess, with the trophies to prove it, well into his late sixties.

Rediscovering the passions of youth could be one way to move zestfully through our aging. Isn't that how retirement communities are sold?

10 Ways You Get Smarter as You Get Older

Do we get smarter as we age?  Apparently so!

"It's true that as you get older, your brain's processing speed begins to slow, and your memory may occasionally short out, says Margaret Gatz, PhD, professor of psychology, gerontology, and preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. But researchers have recently made some surprising discoveries about what's really happening in our heads as we age: "We are identifying ways in which older minds hold their own against younger ones and even surpass them," Gatz says. Here, 10 ways you get smarter as you go."  Read more here.