I remember using the argument that people should not be worried about me—and that I should not be worried either—because I was “on track.”  My wife had died of cancer and I was done with all the busywork associated with a death and now it was just me and getting on with my life.  As I pictured it, it was going to get worse for awhile and then it was going to start getting better.  That was the “track.”  And as long as I was on track, moving—even as things were getting worse—toward the time when things would be getting better, then things were “bad” but not worth worrying about.

I was in my mid-60s then.  I am in my mid-80s now and I am losing abilities I once took for granted.  So what I want to know, as I look at this process, is whether I am on track.  You wouldn’t think, would you, that because life ends in death, there would be a good way to approach it and a bad way, but anyone who lives in a community of old people, as I do, knows that is not the case.

I want to consider here the process by which I experience the loss of my abilities.  The first step is becoming aware of them.  So long as you are performing them well, there is no reason to pay any attention to them at all.  I remember, for instance, that in the late 1970s, I was involved in a project that required running a lot of miles every week.  Because I got behind, I added a daily three-mile run before breakfast.  I never really liked it, but I never wondered whether I could do it.  That was presupposed.

The disappearance of presupposed abilities has been the biggest surprise of getting old.  It is not (yet) the inability to do things—running is the major exception—but the inability to count on those things without thought.  I could give a lot of examples, of course, but it was the sequence of experiences that caught my imagination  today, and the next stage in the sequence is doing it carefully rather than casually.  You can still do it, but you stop and prepare; and then do it more carefully.

And, when you have to stop and think about it, you begin to wonder what will happen when even thoughtful care does not come to your rescue.  I continued running long after a more prudent man would have stopped by running the first two miles 18 steps at a time.  I would start to get a little foggy in about 18 steps, so I would walk for 18 steps and then run for another 18.  I would keep this up until whatever system needed to come on line had arrived and then I ran naturally and without stopping for the rest of the route, whatever that was.

In the next phase, you begin to substitute different activities that provide some of the same benefits.  In my case, that was walking, first, and after a few years, bicycling.  In these substitutions, the distance covered changes a good deal with no significance at all.  It is the benefits to the body and the costs to the body that matter.

That being the case, the phase of careful substitution of one activity for another comes to an end, and we move next into the reduction of the activity.  I do the same things—again, running is the exception—but I do less of them and I do them more slowly.

The drawback to the sequence I have just described is that they all have to do with “activities” as I thought of them when I was young.  But the things you have to begin to think carefully about are not all activities.  There is the matter of staying conscious, for instance.  That meets the standard of assumed competence, just as the activities did.  Who does not start out on an activity, be it as routine as a trip to the supermarket, without presupposing that he can do it without passing out?

On the other hand, if you have had the experience and the inconvenience of passing out now and again, for reasons still unexplained, you begin to scan your body and mind for signs that might be precursors.  You become “sensitive” until it borders on vivid imagination.  You don’t need to know just how they are related to the likelihood of syncope. [1]. The same is true of vertigo.  If the precursors suggest you might have to cope with vertigo, [2] you are thoughtful in the same way and possibly even choose not to try an activity at all.

That brings me to the last phase of the sequence, which is marked by being perpetually cowed and fearful at one end of the spectrum and completely foolhardy and brash at the other.  It is possible to build a way of living life as an old person that is marked by timidity and decline.  These traits are not marked so much by the way they constrict your choices, but by the way you think about them.  If you are foolhardy, you attempt thing you probably ought not try at all and wind up either calling for someone to come and rescue you or having extended conversations with the EMTs who came when someone called them.  Foolhardy in this sense is not good—even beyond the obvious drawback of it’s being expensive.  If, on they other hand, you are cowed and timid, you pass up a lot of things you could otherwise do and you become a weight that everyone else in your group will have to take turns carrying.

I would like to come to the end of this sequence by doing boldly all the things I can still do.  I want to be careful, but I don’t want to be timid.  I want to live in the constrained environment of my declining mind and my declining body by doing boldly all the things I can get away with still doing.  I will not do them, as I once did, thoughtlessly.  I will stop and calculate the costs to myself and to others, but I think I would like to launch out confidently whenever I think I can cover the cost.

I once came across a study of the uses of schools that were not longer needed for the school age population.  I am sure it was a good study.  I borrowed some of the examples for a smaller paper I was working on at the time myself. [3] But I remember it mainly because of the title, which I thought was both descriptive and witty.  It was called “Rising Above Decline.”

I think that is what I want to aim for.

[1]  I have learned a lot of medical terms I earlier had no use for at all.

[2]. The prevailing use of that term among the medical people I see is that it in not the name of an illness; it is the name of a collection of symptoms.  The adjective form “vertiginous” is often convenient.

[3]. With the proper citations, of course.