In Search of Lost Adulthood

How do we define an adult? This question has surged in the last week, as Megyn Kelly defined fifteen-year-old girls as “barely legal” adults, mere days after online rumor-mongers redefined twenty-eight-year-old Rama Duwaji as a child. We saw this happen five years ago, when columnist Joseph Epstein called First Lady Dr. Jill Biden “kiddo,” just days after Donald Trump called his son Don Jr. “a good kid.” They were seventy and thirty-nine years old, respectively.

This problem recurs in America. Last month, J.D. Vance dismissed vile, racist comments from leading “Young Republicans,” ranging from their middle twenties to early forties, as “kids do stupid things.” But a decade ago, Connecticut schoolteacher David Olio lost his job for letting students read a sexually explicit poem in A.P. English, nominally a college-level course, because his students were “kids” and needed protection from adult sexual expression. Childhood excuses vast repressions in its defense.

Our society keeps moving the boundaries of adulthood further out. America has the world’s oldest legal drinking age, preventing youth from learning how to handle alcohol responsibly until they’re most of the way through college. An increasing number of upwardly mobile jobs require graduate degrees, keeping young adults from commencing their careers until they’re around thirty. The average first home purchase now happens around forty, keeping adults from building equity or developing rudimentary financial independence.

Every few years, Congress suggests adjusting the national retirement age. This probably makes sense to legislators, who are mostly lawyers and financiers, and can work as long as their brains remain active. But manual trades, like construction or manufacturing, erode your joints and tendons, so laborers get old faster than office workers. But for our purposes, keeping laborers working will prevent managers from retiring, keeping rank-and-file workers trapped in entry level positions for literal decades.

Perhaps worst of all, Western society overall no longer has clear adulthood rites. The rituals we Americans witness in travelogues like Roots are inspiring, and of course the mitzvah rituals of Judaism, and similar minority religions, still exist. But in the mainstream, ceremonies like baptism or marriage, or benchmarks like high school graduation, carry little weight anymore. With neither ritual nor financial independence, we no longer have any standards to objectively call someone an adult.

Because of these convergent forces, we see people performing the rituals of childhood well into physical maturity. Sometimes this influence is mainly turned inward. Incels and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate perform peacocking displays of manhood that look like middle-grade boys flexing on the schoolyard. But we’re seeing more outward-facing, harmful displays, too: men like Bill Clinton and President Taco collecting sexual conquests like overgrown fraternity boys, leaving trails of scarred women in their wake.

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes that, in market-driven societies, men achieve adulthood by collecting the most toys. But as it now takes longer for youth to achieve financial independence, hoarding toys becomes prohibitively expensive. Therefore men adjust adulthood rituals to strength, dominion, and conquest. Who do they dominate and conquer? Women. Thus, as Badiou writes, men remain boys well into physical adulthood, while girls, to survive, become women at absurdly early ages. Just ask Megyn Kelly.

America’s shared definition of adulthood has become mushy and subjective because, in a society organized to protect capital, we turn humans into capital. Adulthood becomes contingent on economic productivity, freedom from parental support, and resources enough to have and raise children. Standards that many citizens don’t achieve until they’re approaching forty. To be enforceable, we need a standard age of majority: sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one. But for all practical purposes, these numbers mean nothing.

We’re witnessing a rare moment of bipartisan moral outrage over the continued lack of accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. And we should; very little encourages universal outrage as surely as child exploitation. But economic instability and job loss cause trauma as real as SA, if less visibly offensive. We’ve created a society where nearly everybody, in one way or another, is nursing the psychological scars of long-term trauma, and the people responsible suffer no consequences.

Within my lifetime, America has become a society comprised of traumatized children, trapped in cycles of learned helplessness, desperate for adult guidance. We only disagree about who, exactly, we consider a responsible adult. Does our society need a macho disciplinarian, a nurturing teacher, or some third option? Until we find a useful shared definition of adulthood, we’re all, in different ways, trapped at the level of dependent children, desperate for our lives to finally start.

The Fable of the King Who Would Not Die

Bryan Johnson: Meet the multi-millionaire trying to reverse ageing
—Headline on the BBC News website, 13 August 2023

Bryan Johnson

Once there was a certain king—a stupid ruler of a stupid kingdom, in a nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms and their useless kings. Every king in the nation, and many of the queens, thought themselves very important, because the nation had many town criers willing to ballyhoo the supposed importance of their particular monarch. These kings, and many subjects too, heard the ballyhooed fables so often, they came to believe their own mythology.

Like the myth of the king who ruled the kingdoms of lightning chariots and bluebirds. This king believed himself so important that, one day, he unilaterally declared he had renamed the bluebird kingdom, and henceforth, everyone had to honor his kingdom’s name. But every subject knew it was the kingdom of bluebirds, and called it such, ignoring what their king commanded except when his vast, and easily bruised, ego needed appeased. Which was fairly often.

Likewise, our certain king believed himself terribly important, and when he began hearing creaks from his vertebrae, and snaps from his knees, this king boldly proclaimed: “I shall not die!” The king gathered thirty physicians from throughout his kingdom and began dispensing gold generously, demanding research into diet and exercise, and into whatever alchemical potions the king could consume which would prevent his body from aging, and would keep Death, that eternal unwanted visitor, away.

Meanwhile this king’s subjects—we no longer call them “peasants,” though “peasants” is surely what they were—continued their labors. Some subjects hoed rows so they could plant and harvest wheat. Others smelted iron and brought the metal to the kingdom’s foundries, where blacksmiths forged implements so the field workers could hoe rows. The subjects needed little regular direction from their king, and besides, the king’s goldsmiths signed their pay slips, not the king himself.

Within the castle, the king continued demanding miracles from his physicians. “Make the potions stronger!” he commanded, for surely he saw grey beard hairs in his shaving mirror. His physicians bit their knuckles and wondered what more they could do. Saltpeter in his morning alchemical broth? Magnets on his free weights? Artists painted the king’s portrait with square jaw and bulging chest, but the king was not deceived, and knew he had not stopped age.

Elon Musk

Outside, town criers recounted breathlessly the accomplishments which the king and his physicians made in repelling death. Some subjects believed the stories, and repeated them widely, even unto the kingdom of bluebirds. But other subjects held aloft their iron implements and grumbled: “I care not. If he lives or dies, I must still gather the harvest. And look at this hoe! Barely had it, and already it’s rusty. No quality control in this kingdom anymore.”

Several of the king’s guards, watching from the castle, saw subjects raising their iron implements and grumbling, and this made them worry. The king waved away his guards’ concerns, however; what cared he for discontented peasants, when death still encroached? The captain of the guard wasn’t dissuaded, though, and prudently hired more guards, granting them more armor and more swords, because you cannot be too careful. And the stonemasons made the castle walls slightly higher.

All throughout, the king’s subjects continued improving their skills. The blacksmiths made ever-sharper hoes, which the field workers used to make ever-straighter rows, and thus the kingdom saw ever-increasing yields of bread. Admittedly, nobody had more gold to buy bread, so it rotted uneaten, but the bread existed, and surely that merited some celebration. The king permitted the goldsmiths to sign pay slips worth an extra ducat, or whatever, couldn’t everyone see he was busy?

Eventually the day came, which surely everyone must have expected, when the town criers announced that the king had died. Though they carried portraits of the king as square-jawed and muscular, everyone knew the magnets had made him addled, and the saltpeter had made his pecker drop off. Throughout the kingdom, sad-faced subjects agreed this was a most tragic day, then they turned back to their forges and their fields, because work still needed done.

Throughout our nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms, the death of one king mattered little. Workers still worked, and goldsmiths still banked, and everything carried on much as it had before. And somewhere, in a distant castle, the king of the bluebird kingdom struggled to invent another reason to postpone his cage match against that other weird king, Mark Zuckerberg, who, even in the world of allegory and fable, still looks like a pasty-faced android.

OK Go Boomer Computer

Billie Eilish

Pop singer Billie Eilish’s recent admission that she doesn’t know who Van Halen is, has reignited the generational debate that apparently flares every two weeks anymore. Van Halen’s fan base of older Gen-Xers have to admit they’re officially as old as they once thought their parents were. Since Van Halen never much spoke to me, I wouldn’t much care about this faux controversy, if it didn’t come so soon after the now-obsolete “OK Boomer” joke.

When I was 16, I  desperately wanted to be a Baby Boomer. Looking around, I saw the cultural and political power Baby Boomers possessed, the authority they held over my choices, and the simple ubiquity of their presence. When you're a kid, you have two options when faced with authority: you rebel against it, with the moral incoherence for which teenagers are justly famous, or you emulate it. I chose column B.

While still in elementary school, I remember watching PBS documentaries about the cultural milieu in which Boomers grew up, from the images of wealth they witnessed on shows like Leave It To Beaver and Bewitched, to the socially acceptable rebellion they helped create at Woodstock. Based on the exposure I received in childhood, I believed Boomers won the Civil Rights conflict—although Malcolm X and Dr. King were both born in the 1920s.

We didn’t have that. As a member of Generation X, I struggled with communal identity. We didn’t even have a generational handle until about 1993, nearly thirty years after our generation began; we bounced among “Latchkey Kids,” “the Baby Bust,” “the MTV Generation,” and “Generation 13” before Douglas Coupland’s novel gave us a name. If television documentaries gave me a false impression of Boomer unity, media treatment convinced me that my generation barely even existed.

However, we did exist. We test-marketed the claims many Millennials now use to make bank, including the claim that wages were flat while work was up, meaning we faced the likelihood of a chronically impoverished future; the claim that cultural institutions treated us exclusively as consumers, and demonstrated little patience with us as makers; and the claim that the economy was saddling us with debts we’d never be able to repay. History has vindicated us.

So you understand my frustration when, several weeks ago, New York radio host Bob Lonsberry tweeted that “Boomer is the n-word of ageism.” After forty years of constant saturation with the idea that Boomers were cultural innovators, political liberators, and better musicians than every subsequent generation, somebody purporting to be a Boomer spokesperson claimed Boomers are oppressed equally to African Americans. This takes oppression chic to a new level.

Eddie and Alex Van Halen
(don't ask me which is which)

The “OK Boomer” tag, like every other fad in our media-drenched environment, had a remarkably short lifespan. In November, it pushed people born between 1945 and 1965 to heights of spittle-flinging rage; but it’s already getting used ironically by comedians and basic-cable news commentators. Just like “MeToo” and “Black Lives Matter,” overexposure defanged the monster in its cradle. Yet the reaction it generated speaks volumes about its intended audience.

I have one problem about the Billie Eilish controversy, though: approaching fifty years since the Beatles released their final album, their music still appears timeless and relevant. Van Halen doesn’t. Van Halen’s peak album, 1984, is larded with okay songs like “Jump,” and shitty pieces of self-indulgence like “Hot For Teacher.” As the movie Yesterday recently demonstrated, playing the Beatles moves many generations equally. Van Halen sounds very early-1980s.

People slightly older than me feigning distress that a 17-year-old doesn’t know Van Halen, is like demanding a 17-year-old when 1984 was released, 25 years ago, remember Frankie Laine and Perry Como. I sure didn’t when I was 17. In both cases, the Billie Eilish faux-controversy and the “OK Boomer” outrage, we see people old enough to be parents or grandparents demanding they be treated as permanently, eternally young.

Essentially, we have two generations publicly demanding to act like Peter Pan, and it’s embarrassing. Boomers and their first-generation offspring expect history to freeze, their childhoods to be treated as sacrosanct, and post-Millennials to treat them like peers. They want congratulations for the innovations they nurtured, and then, they want all innovation to stop.

And making a teenage pop singer the embodiment of this desire for nothing new to happen, is the height of irony.

When “OK Boomer” began, I thought we were seeing old people refusing to get old. But clearly my generation is refusing to get middle-aged, too. Here’s hoping we can all stop being narcissistic, and appreciate that the world keeps growing and blooming, even when we’re not in the center of it.

Must the Old Always Get Older?

Alex Zhavoronkov, The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy

On page one, Alex Zhavoronkov boldly declares: “We will soon be able to slow the aging process itself.” Period. No qualifiers, maybes, or squeamish half-committed circumlocution. That boldness is initially refreshing in contemporary pop nonfiction, which too often meekly tries to forestall counterclaims. Except it quickly becomes clear why authors use qualifier language, because Zhavoronkov sweepingly excludes important implications arising from his thesis.

Dr. Zhavoronkov, a pathbreaking gerontologist and international éminence grise, details how recent innovations in anti-aging medicine, and breakthroughs expected anon, will change human expectations of old age and retirement. Instead of seniors getting older and more decrepit, their pensions burdening society’s safety net, new science will extend citizens’ productive years. Zhavoronkov predicts five to ten year gains initially, and much greater increases soon thereafter.

Zhavoronkov’s predictions are wholly exciting, especially since they’re backed with robust science. Rather than simple entropy, as many assume, aging proves predicated on complex networks of biological functions nobody suspected just ten years ago. Treatments exist, or will soon exist, for the most common causes of declining productivity, including arthritis, dementia, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Practical application of radical anti-aging treatments may begin imminently.

These predictions, delivered in Zhavoronkov’s scientifically precise but upbeat style, gets the blood pumping. Who wouldn’t rather keep making stuff and paying taxes than commence a leisurely stroll toward morbidity? (That’s rhetorical. Don’t answer that.) Problems arise, though, when Zhavoronkov explains how redefining age will change society. He basically lays a ruler against the upward arc of the last fifty years, draws a line out to infinity, and shouts “Yippee!”

I can’t buy that. Zhavoronkov’s calculus incorporates medicine, neoclassical economics, and nothing else. I’ve read too much physical and social science to accept this narrow forecast. Start with how we’ll power this research, and feed and employ workers remaining productive well into their eighties. (Assume changing birth rates lag behind mortality, which seems likely.) This requires energy, which currently means hydrocarbons. More people working longer will burn more carbon, with tragically predictable long-term consequences.

Zhavoronkov’s predictions will draw natural comparisons to Ben Bova and Ray Kurzweil, who’ve both described their vision for humans’ imminent transcendence of death. But James Howard Kunstler and others criticize these authors’ perspectives as shortsighted, since they implicitly assume nigh-unlimited potential energy for human use, which current science denies. I’d go one step further: all three authors assume we’ll have someplace to put these numberless immortals.

Humans, pursuing their appetites, have muddied the air, clear-cut jungles, silted rivers, acidified seawater, and caused massive species extinction. Society’s status quo already requires unsustainable inputs and discharges revolting waste into our air, water, and soil. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, new technology doesn’t guarantee we’ll use it any better than our old technology. A larger population, living longer, must change its ways or humanity’s terrestrial future looks bleak indeed.

Even Zhavoronkov’s key thesis, that youthful seniors can keep working productively, assumes the economy can absorb them. That’s hardly proven. It could simply compound mass unemployment, or worse. If seasoned workers maintain fresh-faced vigor into their eighties, this will impact actual young workers who, lacking experience, will find doors shut. This could extend adolescent dependency beyond young workers’ peak childbearing years. Zhavoronkov addresses this possibility in one sentence, in parentheses.

I could continue, but it gets nitpicky. Let me name one last risk. New pharmaceuticals generally start out very expensive, and remain so while the market will bear it. Imagine wealthy bosses, banksters, and connected government officials can afford these treatments and bestride the earth for (Zhavoronkov suggests) up to 160 years, while ordinary workers continue to peter out around 65. What prevents that devolving into drug-fueled, age-based peonage?

None of this negates Zhavoronkov’s science. Imagine what humans could accomplish with added decades to learn, dream, and build. If we could manage the Pandora’s Box Zhavoronkov’s science implies, the hypothetical possibilities truly make the heart soar. If we leave St. Augustine out of the discussion, the capacity for what humans could accomplish if we postpone death make everything in prior human history look small, purblind, and cribbed.

Rather, Zhavoronkov needs a Freeman Dyson or a Harlan Ellison to co-author his social vision, helping imagine ramifications beyond his areas of expertise. Zhavoronkov’s prose brims with potential, but he just ignores entire scientific and humanistic disciplines in crafting his rosy future. We must anticipate all potential outcomes, and read his words in context. Because we’ll either face the future we plan and build, or the future that finds us despite our denial.


Coda: After reading this review, Zhavoronkov sent me the following e-mail:

Hi Kevin,

I would like to thank you for posting a comprehensive and objective review of the Ageless Generation. It is a great pleasure to "meet" a high–level intellectual and well-versed in a variety of disciplines these days. Let me know if I can ever be of assistance.

Regards,
Alex

I want to publicly acknowledge Dr. Zhavoronkov for this message. After recent conflicts with authors who couldn't take criticism, it's refreshing to hear from an author confident enough to receive a review like this with grace and aplomb. Alex Zhavoronkov is a gentleman and a scientist, in the truest sense of those words, and while I cannot overlook his omissions, I find his science, and the man himself, solid enough to recommend both for curious, intellectually engaged readers.

Thank you, Dr. Zhavoronkov. Writers like you make reviewing a truly rewarding avocation.

Slow Death as the Son Becomes the Father

Jonathan Gillman, My Father, Humming

Jonathan Gillman’s father, an acclaimed mathematician and pianist, suffered a long, slow, humiliating death as dementia incrementally consumed everything that made him unique. Gillman, an educator and dramatist, struggled with the ambiguous feelings: this was his father, sure, but this was the man who also made him feel the greatest shame and most persistent frustration. So, like any good teacher, he turned to writing.

Gillman’s verse chronicle of his father’s decline quickly becomes an autobiography: his father’s struggles with Beethoven colored how father and son communicated, and when that communication stops, Gillman must decide who he is separately. The answer proves harder than he anticipates. How do you stay angry, Gillman asks, at someone progressively losing everything? He must decide what a life full of music means when the music stops,

the silence emptier
for what it used to hold.

We never learn the father’s name. Gillman paints a world in which principles loom larger than personalities. Bach and Beethoven recur, presences so vast that they become like Gillman’s surrogate parents, as Dad spends decades trying to perfect the “Moonlight Sonata.” Dad is a man proud of his active and questing mind, too aware to miss his own slow decline:

All that
and your mind went too,
your pride and joy
that you lorded it over
everyone with,
correcting
how people spoke,
even your wife,
as if English was logical...

Gillman is not a poet’s poet. He avoids techniques that garner acclaim from Pulitzer committees, and his poems are light on metaphor, enjambment, and other tools taught in MFA programs. Gillman prefers to focus his linguistic ability on capturing moments that define his father’s struggles. Rather than “pure language” favored by self-conscious poets, Gillman crafts snapshots of moments that merge into an arc.

Not that Gillman’s verse is facile or that he writes something anybody could write. Nobody, not poets nor curious audiences, likes prose chopped haphazardly into lines. Rather, Gillman uses poetry to expunge everything unnecessary from his father’s story, exposing a taut, sinewy progress through his father’s disintegration. He has no patience for generalities and bromides, favoring the episodes that real people must experience:

My father’s going
downstairs to bed,
my mother helping.
It looks like a disaster
waiting to happen—
tied together by a rope
running from waist to waist—
like the invisible tether
which has bound them for so long...

Moments like these, mother helping father downstairs, mother changing father’s diaper, mother helping father eat soup—anyone who’s ever eased a loved one through dementia will recognize these moments. But Gillman keeps them personal. This isn’t about some woman helping some man; these are two people who, stripped of burdens like names, exist purely in each other’s light, becoming whole in how they relate to each other.

As his father’s learned identity progressively falls away, Gillman comes to acknowledge, as much to himself as us, that this stops being his father’s struggle. He must, he realizes, contend with the legacy his father has bequeathed him, a battle we will all face eventually if we live long enough. Fathers, like any other influences, want us to become whole, mature people, but they have strong ideas about what this means:

I’m at my father’s piano,
playing a piece
he used to play,
but not the way
he played it,
not, he’s sure, the way
Herr Beethoven intended.
He’s hearing it,
not sleeping as he often is,
and he’s not happy with it.
Before, he would have
yelled out “Stop!”
or booed, or yowled,
“You’re trying to kill me!”
He’s not playing much these days...

as I go on, I hear,
so faint at first
I’m not sure what I’m hearing:
mmm mmmm, mmm mmmm—
he’s humming, tunelessly,
along with me,
the way he used to
when he was playing.

This stark and sudden reversal, this upheaval of roles, underpins Gillman’s entire book. Even when Gillman thinks he’s standing fast against his father’s disapproval, Dad’s influence remains pervasive. This becomes the lesson Gillman must learn, at great personal expense: he only becomes his true adult self, only becomes who he was meant to be, when he stops battling that influence, and acknowledges, embraces it.

Gillman has also recorded this book, available on CD or audio download. Read in the author’s sandy, subdued timbre, it gains a valuable added dimension, becoming a one-man verse drama of the struggles one man undertakes as his role stops being “son.” Though not necessary to enjoy the book, Gilman has crafted a touching multimedia introspection.

White-Knuckle Widow and the Open Road Serenade

Linda Crill, Blind Curves: One Woman's Unusual Journey to Reinvent Herself and Answer: What Now?

For the first two years of widowhood, Linda Crill followed all the standard advice: eat well, sleep plenty, keep up with friends and work. Blah blah blah. When nothing worked, and the grief still kept her sidelined, everybody gave her the same suggestions. Then, in a moment of anger, she declared her intent to learn to ride a motorcycle. That impulsive decision proved the turning point in reclaiming her identity.

Everybody who lives long enough experiences the moment of looking in the morning mirror and realizing: I don’t like the person I’ve become. Workaday compromises, social pressure, and the tendency to repeat past successes, conspire to turn us into ghosts of our former vibrant potential. We used to call this “growing up.” But Linda Crill, like an increasing number of Baby Boomers, no longer accepts decrepitude as inevitable with maturity.

As a suburban DC-area management consultant, Crill spent years coaching corporations out of indecision, stagnation, and walking death. But when it closed upon her, she admits, she enacted the same behaviors that doom corporations. She rationalized, she temporized, she clung to the familiar. And she maintained these behaviors right up to the moment she couldn’t anymore. Then, she did something dramatic to upset the fatiguing status quo.

John Lennon sang: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Crill admits that describes her perfectly. She thought she’d never work for big corporations, until she did. She thought she’d never marry a square-suited establishmentarian and become a mommy, until she did. And when widowhood caught her unprepared, this former greenie bicyclist learned to ride a chopper and joined a team descending the entire West Coast.

Crill’s spirited, surprisingly funny memoir unpacks the process by which most of us inescapably settle into vestigial lives. She never sought a beige corporate life, yet she found herself trapped by the façade she created. Suddenly single at an age when many women gear down for retirement, she could no longer sustain the person she’d become; but change is always painful, even when it’s necessary.

Then, in moments when she’s persuaded to quit the entire enterprise, Crill surprises herself with how much she has going on inside. She believes she’ll fail the road test, right until the moment she receives a perfect score. She assumes a fifty-something businesswoman will get hooted out of the bikers’ store, until she emerges from the fitting room in her new leathers and catches dozens of staring at her.

Perhaps her most daunting challenge was the “imposter syndrome.” I remember this from my teaching days: the feeling that you don’t really belong here, that everybody else has credentials you don’t share, that something will happen in the next moment to expose you as a fraud. This syndrome can be paralyzing. It’s impossible to realize, until you face it, that everybody has this same fear, sometimes, too.

At every turn, Crill’s head warns: “I can’t.” But her heart exults: “I just did.” She’s accepted the smallness of her life for so long that, when she repeatedly discovers the stronger, craftier, more adventurous woman waiting inside, her brain deflects the evidence. Time after time, she prepares herself to accept “good enough.” Then every time, the real Linda rears up and demands the world take notice.

As a business consultant, Crill has observed and described several common behaviors that stymie corporate movement. She talks, for instance, about “The Decision Pendulum,” by which leaders accept a good idea, but talk themselves out of it, then back in, then back out. Or the principle that “Failures Facilitate Change,” the reality that leaders won’t accept needed process revisions during good times. Only disaster overwhelms executive inertia.

She knew all this, yes, the way you know something you read in a book. But stepping outside her box, learning something new and dangerous, then flying cross-country to attempt a journey unprecedented in her life... That’s when she became the Linda she always dreamed about. She learned to apply her principles. And she learned that a widow pushing sixty isn’t preparing for death. Life happens because you take it.

Everybody, every day, accepts compromises that leave us living small lives. Too often, only personal catastrophe interrupts the “good enough” life we’ve come to accept. Linda Crill reminds us that we don’t have to just accept life. Like her, we have the power to choose. We never know how the journey will end, but we have the power to commence, if only, like Crill, we take it.

Billy Graham's Guide to Aging in God's Grace

Famed evangelist Billy Graham once led month-long revivals noted for aerobic sermons. Now in his nineties and widowed, he can’t get out of his chair unaided. Many people might consider that as sign that the ministry has ended; not Graham.  In Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well, he exposes the great gifts the aged still have to give for the Kingdom, and the lessons the aged still have to learn from the young.

Graham admits he never thought he’d live this long. The grueling paces he put himself through in his younger days often left him exhausted. Yet the Lord has another purpose for him. He might not get to lead his citywide “crusades” any longer, but his years of accumulated wisdom make him an invaluable resource for those who have inherited his ministry. He may lack the stamina to sermonize, but he has the experience to guide and uplift.

He does not claim this position for himself alone. He makes plain that, like the man who built his house on the rock, a family or society that trusts in the wisdom of the aged—the wisdom of the ages—will withstand the shifting struggles of the moment. Of course this means the aged have a responsibility to take stock of their wisdom. For Graham, as for countless evangelists before him, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10).

But he doesn’t limit himself to considering the aged as mere fonts for others to draw on. Those who live long enough have a new ministry. Whether they help guide coming generations, or use years of professional experience to defend the oppressed and uphold the discouraged, or just provide a good model of how to age well and face death secure in God, the elderly never stop offering something profound to this world.

Graham also speaks to the young, from multiple angles. Adult children of the aged have something to learn from their parents, and they have something to give as well. The young deserve the lessons of the aged, but they also have the privilege of offering their clear-eyed vigor to those who need assistance. The partnership of the young and the old, often attested in Scripture but too rare today, is dear to Graham’s heart.

Billy Graham

In Chapter 7, Graham approaches something profound. At one time, multi-generational homes were common, and children sat down to dinner with their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Their partnership kept farms and cities both flush with shared heritage and full of the energy to uphold our best angels. Homes were places of learning, sharing, and growth, for the old as much as the young, who constantly prodded each other productively.

I wish Graham would take that even further. Today we hardly know members of other generations. We hide the aged in nursing homes, and the young in schools, creating a society of people only in their middle years. Our culture exists only in the present tense, without past or future, without wisdom or energy, without tradition or rebellion. Should we act surprised, then, that depression, drugs, and workoholism have rushed in to fill the void?

Graham’s recommendations include the spiritual, as we’d expect from a lifelong evangelist. But he also looks at practical considerations. Have the aged kept their affairs and medical directives current? What can the young do to look after their parents without lapsing into patronizing? How should the elderly respond, in our strange and complicated society, when called on to fulfill roles we never previously expected of them, like raising their grandchildren?

In raising these questions, Graham rejects the temptation to seek pat answers. He guides our attention to our own experience, our shared heritage, and Scripture. The answers to life’s questions, for Graham, always lead to the Kingdom, where we all hope to live when this life is over. To the faithful, this world is not our home. We will all die to this world, and then we will live forever where God always intended. Everything serves that goal.

Some of Graham’s intended readers are already aged. Most of the rest hope to live long enough to get old, too. Whether we reach that goal, or have already, we need hope of how we can age well, and use our age to serve God’s calling. Graham’s clear, thoughtful approach offers great hope while remaining graciously free of stifling dogmatism. He offers real hope for the aged, and those of us who look forward to age.