Sunday morning, January 4, 2021. It’s the time that Franny and I sit down to the New York Times and the Boston Globe and immerse ourselves in politics and culture. We sit side by side sipping coffee, commenting, reading little bits of information to one another, cluck-clucking at the idiocy of it all, touched by the pathos all around. Franny especially loves the obituaries. I love the sports section. It has been this way for 45 years. No matter the news, a deep comfort.
But not this morning. The first article I read was about starving children. The second about the raging pandemic, and the almost failure of the American people to distribute the vaccine or to discipline themselves sufficiently to slow the march of Covid-19. The third, with a picture of Ted Cruz in the lead, featuring Republican senators, ready to challenge legitimate election outcomes, ready to abandon the peaceful transfer of leadership, eager to trade democracy, once sacred in our land, for raw power.
Both Franny and I left the living room sooner than usual. She has been sorting through years of financial and medical records, gathering most of them for the shredder, preparing, or so it seems to me, to move with less encumbrance into a future that will require much more mental and emotional agility than all the decades in the past.
I shifted to my study, stunned and dulled, turning first to a few hands of solitaire, and then to my journal, trying to make sense of the world. I’ve been thinking about the decline of American society and whether it is possible to repair its institutions and restore its spirit. An absurd contrast to Franny’s more immediate pursuits. Ah, men and women.
The converging medical, political, economic, and spiritual crises come at a time when I am physically in decline. My joints hurt, and I wonder if it is too late to have knee replacement surgery. Heartburn is my constant companion but I dare not use too much Prilosec, for fear that it will drain the strength of my bones . My physical stamina is at a low point. By the end of an hour’s slow walking, I’m usually ready to be done. And I’m increasingly absent-minded.
I wonder what kind of future awaits me. While others will, I assume, leap in jubilation as Covid-19 and its mutations finally come under control, I’m not sure how I’ll feel. These are the years that Franny and I intended to travel the world. I can’t say what my appetite and capacities will be a year from now, the year that I turn 80.
I had anticipated an old age marked primarily by relaxation and by some satisfaction in a life well lived, by long hours of peaceful, meditative contemplation. A quiet life. Time with family, time with friends, time to admire the sky and the forests. Time with books. Long walks and long talks. And appreciating the younger generations.
I had anticipated the physical losses of old age but not the social carnage as the context in which it seems we’ll be living. It brings to mind Cormac McCarthy’s novel (The Road, 2006) about a father and his young son as they travel over a devastated landscape, in search of food and water, alone and barely hoping to find friendly travelers to join. In those days, the apocalyptic landscape that we imagined had come about through nuclear war. Lately, comparable visions have emerged from the imagination of environmentalists, screaming to the heavens about our almost inevitable future.
I grew up with visions like this, encouraged by the drills we performed in kindergarten and first grade, diving under our desks, as though that would protect us from hydrogen bombs. But, with time and distance from Hiroshima—and from Nazi Germany—the world grew safer. We thought less about looming catastrophes so far beyond our control. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, through whatever difficulties we faced, it felt like we could take control. We were not helpless. We were never victims. In junior high school, we recited William Ernest Henley’s Invictus, like an anthem to our own sense of agency and to a world that lent itself to that feeling.
“I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
And that sense of agency persisted throughout my life. Even when I felt overwhelmed by the immensity of the world’s problems, I readily rebounded, believing that I could make at least a little difference. In so many ways this feeling guided my life. If I wanted a family, even after youthful uncertainty and missteps, I could form one. If I wanted to be a therapist, I’d become one. If I wanted to form an institute—around family therapy or around nonprofit leadership—I could form one.
It’s impossible to tell whether it’s old age—or my difficulty in accepting its strictures—or the age we live in, but my faith in my own and our own agency has waned. Yet I yearn for its return, and I know I can’t bring it back by myself. As I did whenever I wanted to achieve something good, or lasting, I will need a great deal of help from my family and friends.
Barry Dym 