You're Too Old to Give Up on Life
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Let’s stop romanticizing death, shall we?
Those who, like me, love Denzel Washington, are likely also fans of his Equalizer movies. This past weekend, with my right foot back in a boot and stuck in the house for a few days while we figure out next- hahaha-steps, I watched all three.
It’s the second in the series that I want to quote here. In a heated exchange with young Miles, a Black man who is being recruited to kill by a local gang, Denzel’s character squares off with the kid and screams in his face. Here’s the clip:
We really don’t know what death is.
In so many ways we are immured to the sight of death via our movies, our culture. As a military veteran, I never saw war, but I’ve been around plenty of my peeps who have. Their experiences around death have forever changed them.
They celebrate life, what they have of it, even after loss of limb and far worse. Like me they have PTSD. Each of us learns to live with it and find ways to move through it, despite having stared awfulness right in the face.
They DO know what death is.
For those of us past sixty, we do, too. We’ve begun to see friends die, our parents are likely close to leaving us, perhaps we ourselves have come too close.
I sure have. Because I do adventure travel I’ve come dangerously close. Twice, my parachute didn’t open. Once, my scuba gear failed when I was 130 feet beneath the surface of forty-degree water, surrounded by hammerhead and bull sharks and bleeding out of my right ear.
You can’t make this up.
I’ve been thrown and stomped by horses. I’ve been brutalized repeatedly by men in the military. I’ve looked suicide in the face more times than I can count. But I’m still standing.
The closer I’ve been to losing my life, the more I treasure it.
My brother took his life in 2012, victimizing himself with drugs and alcohol.
I do know what death is.
Drugs and alcohol took two of my family members.
Young people who romanticize it, don’t have a clue.
Like those people who buy a plot of cemetery land with a view of a pretty lake, somehow they honestly believe that they’re going to enjoy the view. They don’t comprehend the finality.
Last year my brilliant friend
expressed deep frustration with the Canadian government when they concocted a plan to allow euthanasia for the mentally ill. That plan has been put on hold (thank god)- to which I have to askWHAT THE F*CK WERE YOU THINKING?
to which I already know the answer.
Life’s conditions are there to teach us, not give us an excuse to check out. If someone is sad because they can’t find a home, or sad because they don’t feel loved, or sad because climate change, do we let them check out entirely because, well, life is just so hard?
Do we show them the door or show them a way forward?
At what point are so-called progressive ideas regressive?
I absolutely, positively agree with doctor-assisted suicide when someone is dealing with terminal illness, unrelenting pain and the like. That’s a mercy.
Perhaps my best example of this is the incredibly brave Cai Emmons of Eugene, my home town, who developed ALS. Emmons, a talented novelist, documented her journey on Medium.com and allowed others to witness her slow, difficult and very brave journey.
I love this quote:
What is a life, after all? It is not a novel. It is not an artifact. It is an energetic enterprise in which atoms cohere for a while before the organism they have been part of dies and decomposes, and the atoms take their energy elsewhere. If I had died suddenly in a car accident and had no time for goodbyes or clearing my inbox, would it make a difference in the life I have led? I doubt it.
Emmons, who took delight in making fun of what ALS was doing to her, planned for a few days away that final January to be with her husband. But her ALS had different plans. She deteriorated so swiftly that even this last wish wasn’t granted. Emmons left this world with a zest and appreciation for the life she’d been given and gratitude for the relief from the pain she was enduring.
It’s a tough read. The day she took her life with the help of a doctor, she submitted her final novel. At 71, in January of 2023, she was gone, smiling and laughing on her way out, on her terms. Her physical pain was immense, the loss of all her abilities inevitable.
That, I support, wholeheartedly.
This, I don’t. Not even:
I read this and wanted to spit.
“That will be my new house.”
What alt-reality is this person inhabiting anyway?
This is a lovely young woman who has love in her life and a great many reasons to live. I experience this as an appalling cop-out.
There are billions of people on earth who have none of what she has. Yet they find reasons to live, even thrive in what most of us would consider horrific circumstances.
The Free Press author Rupa Subramanya writes:
Boer had in mind people like Zoraya ter Beek—who, critics argue, have been tacitly encouraged to kill themselves by laws that destigmatize suicide, a social media culture that glamorizes it, and radical right-to-die activists who insist we should be free to kill ourselves whenever our lives are “complete.”
They have fallen victim, in critics’ eyes, to a kind of suicide contagion.
Statistics suggest these critics have a point.
In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to make euthanasia legal. Since then, the number of people who increasingly choose to die is startling.
It’s bad enough we glamorize the 27 Club. What’s far worse is to not only romanticize early death, but to actually hand people an easy ticket to that every thing.
What on earth are you thinking?
Why would we not want to offer support instead of a boot-kick in the ass out of life for people who are clearly struggling?
My politics are squarely middle of road, socially liberal, but not progressive. In this particular case the desire to be sensitive has made us idiotic.
As someone pointed out to me many years ago, some people have become so sensitive they are insensitive.
These are young people whose ideas, energy, creativity and hope for their own futures are precisely what society needs to fight back against the forces which have brought us here.
Today’s problems need today’s youth, not “solutions” which effectively kill off the very resources society so badly needs.
From the article:
Typically, when we think of people who are considering assisted suicide, we think of people facing terminal illness. But this new group is suffering from other syndromes—depression or anxiety exacerbated, they say, by economic uncertainty, the climate, social media, and a seemingly limitless array of fears and disappointments.
“I’m seeing euthanasia as some sort of acceptable option brought to the table by physicians, by psychiatrists, when previously it was the ultimate last resort,” Stef Groenewoud, a healthcare ethicist at Theological University Kampen, in the Netherlands, told me. “I see the phenomenon especially in people with psychiatric diseases, and especially young people with psychiatric disorders, where the healthcare professional seems to give up on them more easily than before.”
Oh. Okay. So now it’s too damned hard for the very professionals who are supposed to be trained to help people work through these issues.
When did we reach that happy benchmark?
When a patient is too challenging, give them a one-way ticket out. NEXT.
Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture?
You and I are WAY Too Old to just give up- and worse, we are WAY WAY Too Old to give up on others who are struggling.
I was shocked and horrified when this fabulously talented, capable, high-achieving and flat out gorgeous Black woman took her life.
We failed Cheslie Kryst. As a society we failed her.
We are already losing way too many resources, older folks who are shuffled away and put aside because we love our youth.
Oh, wait, we love them unless they need too much from us, at which point, here, off yourself. WHAT?
We fail them, and now as a society we are hastening their departure because it’s just too hard to help others learn how to cope?
From that article:
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate for men over 75 was about twice as high as for men between 15-24. Men 85 and older had the highest rate of all ages.
and
And we should find ways to honor our elderly that don’t feel condescending, forced or pathetic. To do that, we have to believe in our hearts that growing old is a gift, and that our senior years are something to aspire to, not avoid.
Mel Brooks had it right. It’s will to live that will keep you going. But the “doctor” has to be inside us, and his prescription has to be hope. We would all rally to save the lives of our youngest citizens. Why shouldn’t we do the same for our oldest?
One of the primary reasons I write this Too Old newsletter is that I see hope. Hope that is earned by effort, hope that is earned through bearing what life puts on our shoulders, hope that is earned by walking away from isolation back into community.
Life’s hard balls are gifts. Life’s vicissitudes are gifts. Life’s shit sandwiches are gifts. The only way we get through them is with each other’s help.
Each one of us has a piece of this. There is no excuse whatsoever for a society to make suicide easy for young people, especially when bullying is at an all-time high. You can see what’s likely to happen.
Society bullies the elderly, and as Mitch Albom writes in his Detroit Free Press article about male suicide, the “old white man” trope is now hate speech.
I’ve been guilty of it myself. I won’t say it again.
There is no excuse whatsoever for a society to bully the elderly to the point where they forfeit the last of the years they bloody well EARNED during their lifetimes.
Returning to the Free Press article:
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced the MAiD legislation that year, he said his government was “focused very much on respecting Canadians’ rights” and “defending their choices.” In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD was in effect, 2,838 people chose to die by assisted suicide. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064, accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada. In 2022, it was 13,241.
It’s a long, difficult read.
You don’t see assisted suicide in Bangladesh, the article points out. Not in India. Not in African nations.
I’ve been to many of those places. I find happy people. Joyful people, people who love life despite what life has handed them. People who were poor, yet they heaped peanuts- their only source of protein- into my hands as a gift for visiting them.
We’re seeing these assisted suicide trends in First World countries. Here we are with all our comforts (please see the comfy grey couch were the subject of The Free Press article is going to off herself) and we just can’t effing DEAL.
We don’t know what death is.
We need to teach and model resilience, not resignation. As folks over forty, fifty and beyond, where are we in all this? How are we showing up?
I wish this were an April Fool’s joke. Perhaps it is. Perhaps the joke is on us in First World countries, that we work so very hard to have all that, to be all that, to own all that, to be so comfortable…..that we can’t handle it anymore.
That is a cosmic joke indeed.
My buddy Nurit lives in Haifa. As a coach, as a fitness trainer at nearly 76, Nurit continues to support others who often have been through more than one war. They come to her studio to be reminded that life is its own reason.
Life is its own reason. You and I deserve to live all the years we can, the best we can.
It is our greatest gift. Let’s not squander it.
To that I say, with a tip of my hat to Nurit,
To life!
This was hard to write. At 71 my life doesn’t have a long road ahead. That said, I try to fill it with as much joy as I can, and humor at those things which hurt. My hope is to inspire all of us to get more engaged with each other because community heals us.
These are complex issues, but we are up to it. If this was valuable to you, please consider
Above all, if you know someone who is struggling, be there for them. We all struggle, and we need not struggle alone. A word, a gesture, time spent can save a life. Be that person. Please.
Thank you.
I can imagine how hard this was to write. But it blazes with clarifying flame.
Oops, see above… you are given medication to end your life. Oregon reports that most people never use the pill. It’s the ability to feel in control of your life.