I am 72 years old. Now, that is not exactly old (though I suspect my young grandchildren would say otherwise), but I am certainly among the aging. Lately I have been following several conversations about how to address my segment of the population, the aging segment. (When you get there, you tend to notice things like that.)
What is a graceful, non-offensive way to address us, we who are aging? There are a lot of cutesy things people say, all of which are somewhere between patronizing and offensive. Support groups (and what segment of the population cannot benefit from a support group?) get called things like Raging and Aging (I’m aging but I’m not raging—and least not about aging), Gracefully Aging (some of us are aging rather less than gracefully), The Wisdom Set (some of us have a deal of wisdom, others not so much), The Elders (“Elder” seems to me an honorific that needs to be earned…and some of us haven’t), and so on.
It seems to me that all of these are nothing but euphemisms designed to help us forget the truth that we are all aging and moving inexorably toward our deaths. It’s as if death is something we can all avoid if we just don’t talk about it, think about it, and, especially, mention it (shudder!). It’s a form of name magic that doesn’t work. The reality is that each of us who lives long enough will become one of the aging, and even one of the aged. And as far as I can tell, that certainly beats the hell out of the alternative. Nope. It’s time to leave all that nonsense behind and come out into the open: We who are more or less my age are who we are, and we are aging.
We actually do have names for the various stages of adult life. We leave our Youth, which is a transformational age, at about the age of 18 to become Young Adults. And by the time Young Adults reach about 35 or 40 we become Middle Aged Adults. We stay in Middle Age for rather a while until somewhere around 65 more or less we transform into Aging Adults, which another transformational age. And what do we Aging Adults transform into at about the age of 80 or there abouts? Aged (or Elderly) Adults.
How do you know when you’ve moved from Middle Aged Adulthood to Aging Adulthood? Each of us has to figure that out for ourselves, of course, but there are a few signs that many to most of us exhibit. Here are a few:
- Decreasing strength and/or stamina
- Increase in time needed to heal from injury or disease
- BPH (men only!)
- Decreasing night vision acuity
- Decreasing hearing acuity
- Decreasing libido
- Sagging skin and connective tissue
- Osteoarthritis
- And that will do for a start.
You may be surprised at some of the things that I have left out, like thinning of hair density and the whitening of our hair. That’s because these things seem to me to be highly idiosyncratic and occur at vastly different ages, if they occur at all. (My hair started turning white and dropping out in my mid-30s.) But however it may happen to you, you will know it. Even if you deny its reality, you will know it. And you know what? I truly do hope each person reading this manages to live long enough to join the aging crowd.
Back the title question, then. “What should we call you?” Well, if “you” means this individual who is writing this blog, “Ken” will do nicely. But if “you” is this group of whom I am now a part, how about calling us by our true name: Aging Adults.
The Colliery 