Odds are I won’t have to deal with it: the latest thing men are doing wrong according to the (largely female) writers of the Washington Post’s Well+Being: Healthy Living articles.
“It” being the shame of living alone, “a retired, forgotten old man who dithers away the days,” as one retired physician described himself in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society last May.
My wife’s maternal grandmother lived to be 102; her mother to 97. So, chances are she’ll be the one left to mourn me. Apart from her diminished eyesight (macular degeneration), she’s in good health for somebody who is 8. A litany of minor complaints, but Diane has a small army of friends, and she stays busy maintaining her relationships and bickering with her great nemesis, “Siri.”
Me, I make the coffee, pour the wine and serve dinner, tasks she can’t do for herself anymore. I also run a neighborhood-only taxi service, do the grocery shopping and load up all four dogs for their daily outing to the dog park. Martin the cat pretty much takes care of himself. Our older son Gavin drives Diane around on errands outside the neighborhood. I quit driving on the freeway a couple of years ago. Too fast; too many aggressive jerks.
I also quit riding horses. Got dumped, broke three ribs, retired.
I’m also 81, see, and ever mindful of Philip Roth’s observation that “Old age isn’t a battle: old age is a massacre.” We’ve been married since 1967, and if I close my eyes, I can still see her standing there in a little shirtwaist dress at a reception for new graduate students at the University of Virginia. I think it’s imprinted on my retinas. I confess to having had what our spiritual advisers would have called an “impure thought,” and often enough I still do.
I definitely wouldn’t want to have to face life without her. But if I had to, I could. I’m pretty much never bored; along with a houseful of books, Amazon says I have 779 titles on my Kindle.
My own health was perfect until earlier this year, when a bout of COVID-19 left me with a number of tiresome but treatable maladies that had me visiting more physicians over six months than the previous seven decades. Even so, it’s all systems go, and I experience no serious pain. So as the Joe Walsh song goes: “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.”
Now then, from my point of view, what appears to have left the old duffers whom Washington Post columnist Judith Graham describes as bereft and lonely is that they took work too seriously all along.
A physician or marketing executive accustomed to 80-hour work weeks pretty much loses the capacity for entertaining himself away from the job. Being widowed or divorced on top of that leaves them entirely at a loss for things to do and people to talk to. Often, their wives appear to have been their only portals to the outside world.
“He had no friends or hobbies,” reads one profile. “[H]is work as a doctor had been all-consuming. Former colleagues didn’t get in touch, nor did he reach out.”
The same fellow lamented that the deaths of his three dogs left him all alone in the world. So why not adopt a couple more? The shelters are overrun with needy animals eager to be your best friend. They make you get out and about, dogs do. They help start conversations among strangers — turning them into friends.
Also, this is why you should have taken all those “pointless” liberal arts courses in college. Or today. Keep learning. Study French. Or art history. Me, I took it a bit far. Reading storybooks was my childhood pastime, then my profession, and now my principal hobby. One thing I’ve found is that re-reading classic books decades later is to encounter them again for the first time.
Also, watching Boston Red Sox games. If push came to shove, I could make new friends at any bar in New England. Are they really going to let Triston Casas go? How can we stop them?
Not that I could live there. I’m not a fan of Massachusetts winters.
I think it’s broadly true what research psychiatrist Robert Waldinger told the Post columnist. “Men have a harder time being connected and reaching out.” Waldinger directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has studied men’s lives over eight decades.
The men who did worst, he said, “didn’t have friendships and things they were interested in — and couldn’t find them.” For all my smugness, it will be noted that my own major pastimes are largely solitary. (I partly blame living in Arkansas, where I’ve never quite fit in.) But as I say, I’m never bored and remain engaged.
Could I handle it alone? I pray I never have to find out.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”
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