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In the coverage, last month, of Joe Bidenâs debate performance, journalists confronted the pitfalls of writing about aging. There was a panoply of attempts: The descriptive. (âHe stammered. He stumbled,â per Politico. âHe stood frozen behind his podium, mouth agape, his eyes wide and unblinking for long stretches of time.â) The sadly passive. (According to NPR, âHe simply couldnât deliver the kinds of happy-warrior blows with that toothy smile audiences have seen from Biden in years past.â) The rhetorically stirring. (Biden appeared, to the New York Times editorial board, as âthe shadow of a great public servantâ who âstruggled to make it to the end of a sentence.â) The disappointed and confused. (âA tongue-tied octogenarian,â Doyle McManus wrote for the Los Angeles Times, âended one tangled explanation of his tax proposals with the puzzling phrase: âIf we finally beat Medicare.ââ) Common adjectives included âdismal,â âbrutal,â and âstunning.â In the days since, the press has made old age its focus, as Bidenâs closest allies call on him to step aside.
Old age is everywhere: by 2029, there will be more than seventy million people in the United States over the age of sixty-five, accounting for around 20 percent of the overall population. It is not invisible, and yet it is not often looked at directly. For all the obsessive coverage of politiciansâ ageâBiden is eighty-one, Trump seventy-eightâthe conditions of being an older person are relatively unplumbed in public discourse. After the debate, I called Christy Hireâa woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who works as a caregiver for her mother, who has Alzheimerâs, and who is also a longtime occupational therapist to older people. âI donât think the media show the real dirty gritty side,â she said. âLetâs show the dirty-gritty, because itâs reality. Oh, look at this graceful aging! I donât like that. That does happen, sometimes, but not real often. Letâs talk about the people who sit on the toilet for an hour and their legs go numb.â She felt sorry for Biden, she saidâdespite not liking his politics or, really, politics at all.
Writing about older people is a minefield, though, because âoldness,â when viewed as a fixed category, immediately begins to dissolve; age looks different from person to person. A popular working definition of aging has something to do with separateness, in the form of retirement, potential debility, perceived out-of-touchness. Beyond that, we are left to look rabidly for signs; we know it when we see it, and yet are hard-pressed (like Justice Potter Stewart) to name the specifics. Perhaps the difficulty arises from our tendency to set such matters aside. According to a KFF survey last year, fewer than half of adults âhave ever had a serious conversation with a loved one about who will take care of them if they need help with daily activities in the future (43%).â Stephen Katz, professor emeritus of sociology at Trent University, in Canada, has long studied âthe aging bodyâ and the social construction of older age; when it comes to the management of aging, he told me recently, âItâs sort of like, well, thatâs kind of the unpleasant stuff. Iâll just move that off.â He added, âItâs almost like the future diminishes. And you no longer really belong to it.â
There is not even a good standard term for people over sixty-five. âDonât use words that may have negative connotations,â the National Institute on Aging advises, including âthe aged,â âelderly,â âsenior,â âsenior citizen,â and âboomer.â (âOlder,â which I have settled on, is also extremely imperfect, as it is clearly relative to some supposedly normative younger group.) Even when trying to get the story right, a journalist can easily tilt toward ageism and ableism. Thereâs also the near-compulsory, optimistic, and profitable âgraceful agingâ paradigm that Barbara Ehrenreich once skewered (âItâs not enough to stay alive; you have to become better than you were in your youthâ). There is a theory of the âthird ageââa post-retirement span of supposed personal fulfillment and activity, as defined by a historian named Peter Laslettâthat helped solidify contemporary ideas around âpositive aging.â As Katz explained it, âYouâre still kind of an active adult, youâre just doing things a little differently or enjoying life in a retired kind of milieu.â But most people donât get a third age; they keep on working, without a pension, until they die. âThose diverse experiences are left out of this imagination of a glorious, golden time,â Katz said. âWhere, then, is the fourth age? What happens in real old age? When does it come? And how do we know that itâs coming? And how do we deal with that part?â
There has been a degree of horror in the coverage around Bidenâs public oldness, reminiscent of what Katz and others have called the âblack holeâ of the âfourth age,â which Biden may be seen to straddle. For a long time now, journalists have reported on his numerous slip-ups, shufflings, gaffes, falls. âSome consider it taboo to ask whether a candidate is too old to serve as president,â Jack Shafer reported for Politico. âNot the press.â Brian Stelter, writing for Vox, observed, âJournalists arenât doctors, and shouldnât pretend to be.â But they should continue to demand answers, he added. âQuestions of age will come up over and over again. Reporters who push past hostile press offices and recalcitrant readers to get to the facts will have met the momentâand delivered to the public what it deserves.â The idea, to Stelter and others, is that younger generations in particular deserve age-focused reportingâand, more largely, a future ruled by a non-gerontocracy.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, the author of Aged by Culture (2004), has noted how the word aging âusually refers to decline.â The facts of aging âhave to be explained over and over,â she said. âNominal aphasiaâtrouble with proper namesâdoes not mean I donât remember everything else about the person I have in mind.â Gulletteâs forthcoming book, American Eldercide, focuses on the experiences of older people during the worst ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, pointing out how âjournalists almost never interviewed residents of nursing homes, at a time when the main story across the country was that they were locked in, without access to friends and relatives, in understaffed buildings, and dying in clusters, prematurely and unnecessarily, alone.â Bidenâs own recent COVID diagnosis, and his campaignâs âIâm sickâ fundraising tweet, sparked disbeliefâand yet the timing seemed all too perfect, after he granted an interview with BET News, saying the one thing that would draw him out of the election would be âif I had some medical condition that emerged.â
Recently, Rachael Bedard, a geriatrician and writer, published a Times op-ed about Bidenâs public experience of oldness. âAs a country, we are not having a complete or accurate discussion of age-related debility,â she wrote; clinical frailty, she argued, is a standard part of a personâs movement from one late stage to the next. âA shifting ratio of good days and bad days is often how clinical frailty appears. The pattern of decline in frailty is a gradual dwindling of a personâs health, a line sloping slowly downward.â (She stopped short of diagnosing Biden.) But most journalists, unlike Bedard, are not also doctors; most assessments of older people come from the outside, as they are not often trusted to narrate their own experiences.
Is there a way to write frankly on older age, from a distance? âHow hard could it be, really?â Ceridwen Dovey asked in The New Yorker, before narrating her own doomed attempt. If there is a needle to thread, it is very skinny: How can a writer describe a politician such as Biden within the framework of âtoo oldâ while also remembering the realities of most older people in this country, who, upon needing specialized treatment, are often ânot going to be able to afford it,â as Hire told me, âunless they have a pretty fat nest egg.â Possibly, they wind up in a care home, if they are on Medicaid. (âYouâll never see Biden in a nursing home,â Hire said.)
This is all to say that the structures around older age in the United States encourage a sense that there is such a thing as âtoo oldâ to be a part of society, on the basis of productivity, disability, and capacity. Biden seems, now, a symbol of oldness; he is giving the âsemiotics of old age,â as Katz put it. What is being signified, of course, remains murky. Old age can be everywhere and nowhere, vivid and background, difficult and graceful, a lucky privilege and an eventuality, a biological reality and a social construct. âThe real elders are the proper judges of the stages of life, since those who are young judge things without being experienced,â wrote Petrarch, in the fourteenth century. Of course, we have all been hearing some version of this idea forever. Perhaps any serious thinkerâs work is not to accept âoldnessâ for the easy meaning it is typically assigned in this country, but to interrogate how it is built, how it is used, and the variations inside it, while also remembering any number of other ways to evaluate a personâs past, present, and future.
Lucy Schiller is a professor of nonfiction writing at Texas Tech. Her first book, on older age in the United States, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books.