“One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.” – Joseph Campbell, Reflections On The Art Of Living.

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One of my first jobs in journalism was as a police reporter – in Atlantic City, then Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. I had a big red press card I stuck in my car visor, and a police radio in my car, an incredible thrill for a kid the age of 21. There were no cell phones yet, I often beat the police to the scene of an accident. That was a horrifying thing, sometimes, but I got used to it. I was a strange sight, I imagine, an eager kid in my battered old VW bug, often the last human being the poor people saw. Sometimes there were bodies in the road, women, men, children, sometimes they were in their cars.

I have always appreciated the police  and first responders for dealing with the horrible things they see, they are never appreciated enough.  I had to give it up after five or six years, I was getting too comfortable with it. I was drinking too much after work.

It was not unusual for people to die in my arms – this was before high-tech trauma centers –  or with me sitting beside them on the ground, getting their final statements before leaving the world or rushing to a hospital. I remember actually asking people if they had any final thoughts or last words, reporting is like that, even the ghoulish and unimaginable seems normal after awhile. I loved it, God help me.

I remember one elderly man in Philadelphia, his car had collided head-on with a truck.  I knew he was dying, he was in terrible shape, he told me to tell his wife and daughter that he loved them both – I took notes, it was a good story, I wrote with one hand and held his bloody hand with the other. Then he told  me, “hey, kid, do yourself a favor, don’t get old.” And he died.

That was my first experience with what I call “old talk”, now I hear it all the time. I heard it again in my hospice work.  And after my open heart surgery. And on the street. Getting old is not for the faint of heart. At our age. Now that we are getting older. I have to spend the next years taking care of my parents, they’re getting older. We’re not as young as we used to be. How’s your health?

Old talk is not healthy talk, at least not for me. I do not talk about my health with people outside of my family, I don’t talk about my medications, or their side affects – except on the blog, sometimes. I don’t complain about aches and pains, I don’t complain about getting older, not out loud. It is just not how I define myself. I don’t take senior discounts for movies or cups of coffee, there are many younger people needier than me. Thomas Merton wrote about the stage of life where one is beginning to be old. That’s where I am.

Needless to say, I have very few friends my own age. I don’t have much to talk about with them.

Old talk nearly killed me last year, whenever I told anyone I was having trouble breathing while  walking up even a slight incline, the response was always the same: of course you’re having trouble, you’re getting older. My nurse said you’re full of shit, you’re having a heart attack, you’re not too old to walk. And she sent me to the hospital.

The thing is I am getting older. I will be 68 years old in a couple of weeks. For most of my life, if I heard somebody say they were 68, I imagined they were two steps away from the grave.  People that age were spent, in my mind, they were done. They were surely old to me. People tell me that the 60’s are the new 50’s, and the 70’s are the new 60’s. I am a bullshitter myself, don’t imagine I will be any younger dressing reality up like that. Getting old is getting old, there is no new or old way to do it, no matter how much the Boomers would like to change the nature of life.

So I’ve decided to write an occasional journal, I’m calling it Dancing To The Grave: A Journal Of Growing Old To The End. I’ll write it every now and then, like the Recovery Journal, when the mood strikes me. I do not dwell on getting older, but I do think it might be useful to share the experience. And I will share it right up to the end, or the end of my ability to think, type or write. I intend to be long gone before then, my final act of authenticity and identity.

How can I not write about it? It is a part of my life. I will share stories, anecdotes, observations. I will be honest.

What is getting older like for me? Well, it is true that I am not getting any younger, my body brings me the news regularly. Anyone can get sick, but health problems are the sport of the elderly, a major industry.  Just look at the waiting rooms of doctors. Sometimes my feet hurt, other times my back. Gravity is the companion of the aging, Woody Allen was correct when he says the body begins to wear out. Just how fast depends on how well you take care of yourself before hand,  and since the young understandably have no conception about getting old, very few people really do the advance work. I didn’t. I smoked  until my mid-30’s, my cardiologist says that was perhaps the primary reason I needed heart surgery.

I didn’t believe the talk about smoking when I was 30, I thought I was one of the Avengers.

Aging teaches me acceptance. I nap more frequently, I don’t get on ladders, or pick up too many bales of hay.  I don’t want to ride a horse, it’s too big of a fall. People open doors for me, offer me seats on the subway, offer me discounts. Sometimes, bending over requires a strategy, so does kneeling down to take a photograph. It is easy enough to get down, not so easy to get up. Teenaged cashiers call me sir, they look right through me. Sometimes if I need something upstairs, I ask Maria to get it for me. My knees appreciate it.

My trips to the gym are humbling. I was proud of myself for doing 45 minutes on the treadmill until I watched the kids jogging in place at 30 miles an hour

The big lie about aging is that you have to stop living. Loving. Having sex. Having dreams. Changing your life. None of that is true, I can swear to it. My life began at age 61, it is changing and expanding and growing all of the time. To some extent, aging is a physical process beyond my individual control. That is the thing to accept. The fear culture in our society treats aging like a dread and mournful disease, it is easy enough to believe. It is not true, it is only a small part of the truth.

At some point, it is a mental and spiritual process very much under my control. That is my territory, my sweet zone, my discovery.

Old talk is poison, so is old thinking. At some point, as we get older, we become invisible, we vanish from the popular culture, we are not in movies, on TV, in books, except as dying or doddering and drooling and sexless old fools.  Usually in these portrayals, we have lost our minds, we are sad and ridiculous caricatures,  great burdens to everyone, including society. We are robbing the young with our many ailments, bankrupting the future. They want us to go away, but they don’t dare to kill us, so they warehouse in corporate aging facilities and make a lot of money off of our failing bodies and minds. We are valuable, but mostly for giving more money to pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

We can’t stop these characterizations of us, we can only live beyond them. The aging are the last free target for the insensitive and bigoted – we have little major buying power time left, the corporations can’t sell us anything but medicine and long-term health insurance, which most of  us can’t afford – but nobody is going to define me that way either. It is true what prisoners of war say, the one thing nobody can take from you is your dignity.

Here’s the odd truth about my life as I approach my 68th birthday. I am healthier than ever. I am having sex more than ever. More people are reading my work than ever before, and in more mediums. I am writing better than ever, and more frequently. I am taking more good photos than ever. I am taking better care of myself than ever. I have more friends than ever. I am wiser than ever, some days I actually think I have learned some things worth knowing about myself and the world around me. I believe a lot of the bad genes, especially in men, die out when we get older.

People don’t generally listen to the wisdom of old people in our culture, we are not on any cable talk shows or magazine covers, but I have found a way around that: my blog. Hundreds of thousands of people read my blog every day, many of them have no idea how old I am or am not, and it doesn’t seem to matter. I have nearly as many young readers as old ones, a reality that would send the corporate marketers into shock.

So I will write about the process of growing older and try to bring some perspective to it. It is neither good nor bad, it is life. Joseph Campbell was correct, I think, the older I get the more I live in the moment. There is something wonderful about that.

Getting older is simply another chapter in life, one of the few places we shall all go. It is not one thing or another, it is many things. I still get to define myself. I know where I am, I know who I am, I have no need for denial. Getting older can be liberating, I am enjoying my life as much or more than ever. I found love at 61, no one can tell anybody else when they are done with love, and when I thought I was done with love, I was nearly dead. Love saved my life.

So I’m going to keep this journal going, hopefully to the very end. This blog is, after all, my living memoir, my great work. I don’t know of too many creative works that cover so much ground, and in real time. Kind of memoir, reality show, sitcom, I think. I don’t want to mislead you, my doctors tell me I should be around for a good long while.

I don’t want to raise false expectations.

Robert Frost wrote that the afternoon knows what the morning never suspected. It is a wonderful thing that the young do not know what we know, for which they must always be forgiven. If they did, they would be just as cautious and fearful and resigned as most of their elders are. If we often forget what it was like to be young, the young never get to learn what it is like to be old, not until they are not young any longer.

This is perhaps the real wisdom of Mother Nature. I plan to dance all the way to the grave, singing my song. Maria may have to help.

What kind of memoir leaves out the end of the story? Not mine.