A surprisingly cheerful take on facing the door marked ‘Exit’.
The notorious baby boomers are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. ‘What was that all about?’ they’re asking. ‘Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you’re gone the reputation you leave behind?’
In a series of essays Michael Kinsley offers answers to questions we are all going to have to confront in our sixties, seventies and eighties.
Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide is at once a fresh assessment of a generation and a frequently funny account of one of man’s journey towards the finishing line.
Michael Kinsley is a columnist at Vanity Fair, a contributor to The New Yorker, the founder of Slate and the ex (American) editor of The Economist.
There aren’t a lot of living writers I’m dying to read on their own mortality. It’s not that the subject lacks importance, or that there aren’t lots of great living writers. It’s just that it’s hard to imagine even the best of them making their descent swing on the page. How much left to say can there be? Plus, you know how the story is going to end. Michael Kinsley’s an exception. If it’s Kinsley on the subject of his horrible decline, and inevitable demise, I’m a buyer. I’m pretty sure that I’d think that even if I didn’t know him, or if he hadn’t more or less given me my start in journalism, or let me in on his secret, twenty-five years ago, when he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I’d like to use the few paragraphs I have here to explain why. That is, to explain why, if you’d said to me “Mike Kinsley’s just written a book using his Parkinson’s disease as a window onto age and death,” my mind would have skipped a happy little skip and I’d have said, “I’ll bet it’s funny and great and a perfect birthday gift.”
The first is that Kinsley on any subject is an exception. He’s always thought things no one else has thought, and noticed things that other people do not. To take a small example, he was the first to notice when Al Gore, a new, seemingly vital but self-serious thirty-eight-year-old United States senator, was “an old person’s idea of a young person.” He was the first to notice that when political pundits said that some politician had committed a “gaffe” what they actually meant was far more interesting. “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth,” he wrote, a line now known as Kinsley’s Law. (Margaret Thatcher cited Kinsley’s Law in her memoirs, seriously.) Twenty-five years of Parkinson’s disease has had no discernible effect on Kinsley’s X-ray vision. When he hears that billionaire Larry Ellison has spent almost five hundred million dollars on research that might render him immortal, and then sees Ellison quoted in the newspaper saying “Death has never made any sense to me,” Kinsley doesn’t nod his head like everyone else at the seeming importance of the billionaire’s thought, and move on. He sees through to the absurd self-importance and writes, “The question is not whether death makes sense to Larry Ellison but whether Larry Ellison makes sense to death.”
That’s another reason Kinsley is better suited than anyone I can think of to face, at least on the page, his own death: his lack of self-importance. His awareness of his place in the universe makes the idea that he will one day have no place in it at all far more enjoyable, at least for the reader. Incredibly, he doesn’t seem to be faking it: He seems genuinely to have worked out his own proportions in relation to the world around him. At the same time, he’s wildly ambitious. It’s an odd combination but, for literary purposes, incredibly effective. He basically wants to win at death, by writing a better book about it than anyone else, but doesn’t rate at all highly the importance of his own death—which of course just makes it all the more likely to triumph over other people’s.
Still, there is something here that’s not quite right about this book. I got so much pleasure from it that it took me a while to put my finger on what bothered me about it. Then I realized: I can’t imagine Michael Kinsley dead. I can’t even imagine him with Parkinson’s disease even though I’ve known he’s had it since the early years of the first Clinton administration. He’s too full of life. Too full of surprise. He’s a kind of reverse Al Gore: not an old person pretending to be a young person, but a young person pretending to be an old person. I don’t know that Michael Kinsley is incapable of death, or even of aging. But his book did make me wonder. As it will you.
—Michael Lewis
author of The Big Short
This book is about the baby boom generation—those born between 1946 and 1964—as they enter life’s last chapter. As a reasonably competitive boomer myself, I realized that the second thought of every boomer writer and journalist in the country, if they get the news of a serious or terminal illness, is going to be, I wonder if there’s a book in this? Books about the experience of growing old, of getting cancer, of falling off your bike. I realized that besides the tsunami of dementia heading our way, there is going to be a tsunami of books about health issues by every boomer journalist who has any, which ultimately will be all of them. There is a lot in here about Parkinson’s, because it will dominate my own experience of life’s last chapter, so of course I’ve been giving it plenty of thought since I was diagnosed in 1993, twenty-three years ago. And you are encouraged to buy the book for any reason, including the mistaken impression that it is all about Parkinson’s. The book is supposed to be funny, as well, on a subject that does not lend itself to humor. It only has a couple of outright jokes in its repertoire, neither about Parkinson’s disease per se.
Here, for the record, is the only joke I know about Parkinson’s. I heard it from my friend Margo Howard, who told it to me long before she knew I had the disease: Well, it seems that old Mrs. Goldberg and Mr. Murphy were in the same nursing home, and every evening they would watch TV together while she held his member. Then one day Mr. Murphy announced that he was transferring his affections to old Mrs. Meyers. Why? “She has Parkinson’s disease.”
If you don’t get it, you’ll learn something about Parkinson’s by reading this book after all. Having Parkinson’s is very much like growing old. The two usually arrive together, although occasionally Parkinson’s strikes much earlier, or moves faster. Michael J. Fox was thirty when he learned that he had Parkinson’s. As for the other diagnosis, old age: We don’t need any tests. We can give that diagnosis to you right now: You’ve got it, it’s progressive, and (unlike Parkinson’s) it’s invariably fatal.
This book starts with the assumption that, as age cohorts go, boomers will be remembered for being especially ambitious and competitive. Fair generalization? I’m afraid so. And even if it’s not fair, the boomers are now stuck with it, just as the British Victorians are stuck with theirs. Why? There are all sorts of theories, but it probably has something to do with boomers being the largest age cohort in American history, and the most affluent. As they prepare, inevitably, to lose the game of life, which ambitions do they look back on with the most embarrassment? This book looks at four possible motivations. Which seem most pointless? Without much trouble, I conclude that it’s the competition for things. Two bumper-sticker clichés more or less say it all: HE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS and YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU. The second is profoundly true, making the first profoundly wrong. Toys will do you no good when you’re dead. You’d happily trade them for more time with the grandchildren, wouldn’t you?
So maybe what you really want is longevity. Those extra five years would be an awfully nice gift to yourself even if your Maserati is in the shop the whole time. Or at least they would if you are mentally around to appreciate them. Millions of boomers are watching their parents die in the current American manner and saying, “No way, man. I’m not spending my last few years slobbering in some nursing home, mistaking my granddaughter for old Aunt Mary, who died in 1953.” What counts is how many years you get before losing your marbles, not how many you get while still standing up. What you actually really want, or should want, is long years of good health, not long years simply breathing in and out.
Even before you’re dead, you may want to ask yourself whether this is what you really want. Is being alive all that desirable if you’re alive only in the technical sense? Millions of boomers are watching their parents fade until they are no longer there. As they approach their seventies, they start observing their own peer group losing its collective marbles, one at a time. And they quite reasonably conclude that the real competition should not be about longevity. It should be about cognition. Living long probably loses most of its appeal if you’re one of the millions of boomers who will develop senility of one kind or another. We just don’t know who among us will be the victims. We do know that in scientific studies, people suffering from other neurological conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and (gulp!) Parkinson’s, are more likely to develop dementia than those in what they eerily but accurately call the control group. So the real game is cognition, isn’t it? Who can keep their marbles the longest?
But wait. However well you do in the competition for the greatest toys, longest life, and healthiest brain, the best medical research indicates that eventually you’re going to be dead. And you’re going to stay dead for many years longer than you were alive, and all that will be left of you is people’s memories of you, which is to say, your reputation. So shouldn’t that—reputation—be the real subject of the last boomer competition? Aren’t those who concentrate on polishing their reputations wisest in the end?
Very possibly. If you’re hungry for fame, you have your work cut out for you. Very few people are remembered for long after they’re in the ground. If what you want is really just a good reputation—a reputation for kindness, generosity, high principles—that should be easier to achieve (unless these fine qualities turn you into a prig).
The easiest way to shuffle off to Buffalo with a good reputation is to earn it legitimately. If you want to be remembered as a good person, then try to be a good person. Who knows? It might just work. But start now, because if you’re a boomer, time is running out.
At first I thought I was alone in the pool. It was a sparkling blue gem of a pool, implausibly planted in the skyscraper canyon of downtown Los Angeles, as if David Hockney, heading toward Beverly Hills, had taken the wrong exit on the I-10 freeway. This fine pool was the consolation and only charm of the Soviet-style apartment complex where I lived so that I could walk to work at the Los Angeles Times. I never sleep anymore—an almost universal boomer complaint—so it was early, not even 6 A.M. I had finished my laps and was enjoying the emptiness of the pool, the faint sounds of downtown gearing up for the day, and the drama of the looming office towers. As we learned on September 11, they really can fall down on top of you. But they wouldn’t on that day. I felt healthy and smug.
Then, what I had thought was a ripple in the water turned out to be—no, not a shark with John Williams music hectoring from a boom box in its stomach. It was a tiny old man in a tiny black bathing suit. He was slowly, slowly completing a lap in the next lane. When, finally, he reached the side where I was resting and watching, he came up for air. He saw me, beamed, and said, “I’m ninety years old.” It was clearly a boast, not a lament, so I followed his script and said, “Well, isn’t that marvelous” and “You certainly don’t look it” and on in that vein. He beamed some more, I beamed, and briefly we both were happy—two nearly naked strangers sharing the first little dishonesties and self-deceptions of a beautiful day in Southern California.
Perhaps sensing, correctly, some condescension in my praise, the old man then stuck out his chest and declared, “I used to be a judge.” And I started to resent this intruder in my morning and my pool. Did I now have to tell him how marvelous it was that he used to be a judge? What was so fucking marvelous about it? What was his point? But even as he said this about having been a judge, a panicky realization of its absurd irrelevance seemed to pass across his face, and then a realization of its pathos. When he was a judge—if indeed he had been a judge—he had not felt the need to accost strangers and tell them that he was a judge. And then he seemed to realize that he had overplayed his hand. He had left this stranger in the pool thinking the very thought he had wanted to dispel: The old fool is past it. And finally (I imagined, observing his face) came sadness: He had bungled a simple social interchange. So it must be true: He was past it.
A few weeks after The New Yorker published a short article I wrote based on this anecdote about the old man in the pool—or should I man up and say two old men in the pool?—the magazine ran a response in its correspondence section that may be of some interest to people who are nicer than I am:
The unnamed gentleman whom Michael Kinsley describes in the first paragraphs of his article on longevity was my grandfather.…Every day at 5:30 A.M., he swam in the pool at the “Soviet-style complex” in downtown Los Angeles where Kinsley encountered him one morning. My grandfather, Richard Ibañez, was in his nineties, as he told Kinsley, at that time, and had served for twenty years as a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. If my grandfather had seen Kinsley’s article, he would have pointed out that longevity is the wrong metric by which to judge one’s life. It is not the length of life that is the “only competition that matters”; rather, it is the manner in which one lives that should properly be used to judge one’s worth. My grandfather lived every day to the fullest because he loved his fellow-men for all their shortcomings as well as for their great creations. He took pride in the length of his life not merely because of its length but because he was passionate about life and desired to teach others about the value of their own lives. For his sake, I am glad that Kinsley is still in the “competition.” Sadly, my grandfather is not. He died last November—but he swam in that pool every morning until the last week of his life.
If you’re going to get a serious disease—and unless you’d prefer to die violently and young, you’re probably going to—Parkinson’s is not your worst choice. It is progressive and, at the moment, incurable. But like its victims, it tends to move slowly. It is not generally considered fatal—meaning that there’s enough time for something else to get you first. This gives the neurologist who first diagnoses you something positive to say. “You still have to floss” is how mine put it. The obituaries, if you qualify for one, tend to be evasive, saying that the person died “after a long illness” or of “complications of Parkinson’s disease.” There is also enough time for a cure to come along. And Parkinson’s is fashionable these days. It’s a hot disease, thanks to celebrity sufferers like the late pope John Paul II, Billy Graham, Janet Reno, Muhammad Ali, and of course Michael J. Fox. Boomers have reached the age when they are almost certain to know someone who’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Many neurologists believe that even Hitler was a Parkinsonian (a grotesque term that makes this disease sound like a British public school or a London club).
I might not have chosen to join this old people’s club at age forty-three, although you must admit it’s a pretty good joke on someone who used to like being thought of as precocious. If life is a race to the finish line, I’m years ahead now. In the course of our lives, most of us will get news like this one day. And every day you don’t get this kind of bad news increases the chance that you’ll get it tomorrow. So get ready.
There are three ways to deal with news like this: acceptance, confrontation, or denial. Acceptance is an aspiration, not a strategy. Confrontation means putting the disease at the center of your life: learning as much as you can about it, vigorously exploring alternative therapies, campaigning for more research funds, perhaps organizing a fun run in your community. Denial, on the other hand, means letting the disease affect your day-to-day life as little as possible. In fact, it means pretending as best you can that you don’t even have it.
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