I don't want to burst any young person's aging bubble, but the plain truth is that the so-called Golden Years are anything but -- if "golden" is viewed as a blissful retired condition filled with travel, golf, and other pleasant activities that supposedly dominate life of the elderly.
Speaking as a 76 year old who has friends in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, I can confidently say that while growing old has its positive side (such as more free time), doctor visits, aches and pains, chronic medical conditions, and an increasing inability to do activities that used to be much enjoyed are irritants for most of those in my age group.
Simply put, it isn't easy growing old. Bit by bit, your body and mind are on an inexorable slide toward the finality of death. In middle age, it's possible to envision staying happy and healthy for the foreseeable future. In old age, what's foreseeable is a steady descent into ill health and the worries that come with being an increasingly unproductive member of society.
A recent issue of The New Yorker has an article about aging, How "The Golden Girls" Celebrated -- and Distorted -- Old Age. For those too young to have watched The Golden Girls, here's a few paragraphs about the television show.
When “The Golden Girls” débuted, in 1985, one of the lead actors, Rue McClanahan, was in her fifties, and the others—Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Estelle Getty—were in their sixties. Usually, television consigned such women to unflattering supporting roles. Here, they were the stars, with nary a young or male co-star in sight. (A gay live-in cook appeared in the pilot but promptly vanished. Coco, you are not forgotten.) The feminist Betty Friedan praised the show for defying the “universal grayout of older women on network TV.”
It was the right moment. The President, Ronald Reagan, was a septuagenarian who made a show of chopping wood and riding horses. More generally, healthy seniors—the “wellderly”—were on the rise. Popular culture’s usual parade of toothless codgers and crones increasingly seemed obsolete. “The Golden Girls” (1985-92) joined a silver surge of television shows featuring energetic older protagonists, including “Murder, She Wrote” (1984-96), “Matlock” (1986-95), and Susan Harris’s “Empty Nest” (1988-95).
“The Golden Girls” was particularly adored. It ranked among the ten most watched shows for six of its seven seasons. Emmys rained down: three awards for best actress in a comedy, in three consecutive years, for White, McClanahan, and Arthur, and a supporting-actress award for Getty. In ratings and acclaim, “The Golden Girls” blew “Miami Vice” and its speedboats clear out of the water.
Not bad for a show that was almost militantly unglamorous. The Golden Girls had old-lady hair, wore loose clothes, and joked about their faltering bodies. A much loved scene, written by Harris, has the Girls considering the effect of various body positions on the sagging of their faces and breasts. There was a burlesque quality to this but also defiant pride. Here was a senior subculture, with its own fashion, politics, and humor.
I enjoyed The Golden Girls. Of course, in 1985 I was 37 years old, so I looked upon the actresses from the distance of youth, or at least incipient middle age. That was the year my mother died of a stroke at the age of 73, following a life of heavy smoking, alcoholism, liver disease, and breast cancer.
For me her death was a relief, since I knew that my highly intellectual mother wouldn't have wanted to live with a brain/mind limited by a severe stroke. I loved her, but still, in 2011 I needed to speak in a blog post of One Honest Moment.
My mother was an example of a fantasy perpetuated by The Golden Girls.
“The Golden Girls” conjures a fantasy of old age that is not only largely free of children but also largely free of doctors. Chappel notes how often the show expresses animosity toward medical institutions and, instead, solves problems with friendship. An episode about a friend languishing in a state-funded nursing home ends when the Golden Girls finance her move to an upscale facility and then resolve to “take care of each other” to the end. “The show was a celebration of self-care as an alternative to physicians’ care,” Chappel writes.
Self-care works for seniors who are basically healthy. But they aren’t always, not in real life. Estelle Getty started suffering from Lewy body dementia during the show and struggled to memorize scripts. When she flubbed lines, White would turn to the studio audience, point to Getty, and make a “she’s been drinking” gesture. When Getty requested cue cards, McClanahan remembered the cast being “appalled” by the unprofessionalism. Getty’s character, Sophia, was in her eighties yet essentially impervious. Getty herself died at eighty-four, after a long slide into incoherence.
While the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) used to be a potent political force, I don't recall much attention being paid to the elderly in the recent election. Neither Trump nor Harris talked much about my age group, aside from the usual assurances that as president they wouldn't cut Social Security or Medicare.
Yet at the moment congressional Republicans, along with Elon Musk, who has been charged with Trump to head up a Department of Government Efficiency that has entitlement programs in its cost-cutting sights, are indeed making noises about cutting Social Security and Medicare.
But this would be a horrible thing to do, given how many seniors are heavily dependent on these programs. Actually, Medicare needs to be expanded to cover long term care and in-home care, along with dental and vision benefits that go beyond the paltry coverage in MedicareAdvantage programs, which I believe is still better than what traditional Medicare offers.
The New Yorker article makes a great point.
Tom Cruise in his sixties is the face (the otherworldly, well-moisturized face) of an aging society in denial. The effects are spelled out in institutions. Chappel observes that, although the United States boasts “a relatively developed and successful” system for healthy older people, its support for those requiring long-term assistance is “catastrophically underdeveloped.”
Families that don’t qualify for Medicaid pay small fortunes, not infrequently draining their savings, to get professional care. Nursing homes, meanwhile, are understaffed and poorly regulated. Their inadequacies became clear with covid-19. Fourteen states saw more than ten per cent of their nursing-home population die of the virus in the year 2020 alone.
One might expect politicians to do something. They are, after all, quite old themselves. The average age in the Senate is now sixty-seven. Recent Presidents have been older. The baby boom refers to those born within an eighteen-year span, yet there was a twenty-eight-year run of boomer Presidents, broken only by Joe Biden, a pre-boomer. (We will now return to boomers.)
But age has not compelled action, and federal long-term care remains essentially what it was in the sixties, even as the elderly population has ballooned. Politicians seem as afflicted with age denialism as everyone else.
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