Aging went from being a mystery to a problem to be solved
Age becomes irrelevant when you connect and engage with individuals, not concepts or labels
Thomas R. Cole, McGovern Chair in Medical Humanities and Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Texas, and author
On a quiet Tuesday night, while I was sipping my herbal tea, Thomas R. Cole and I had a conversation sparked by his books. With a career as a gerontologist and medical humanist, Thomas is McGovern Chair in Medical Humanities and the Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Texas. He is the author of The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging, The Oxford Book of Aging, and Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging, and more recently, Old Man Country: My Search for Meaning Among the Elders.
This latest work, which will land in the bookstores in December 2019, echoes the Oscar-winning movie directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. But contrary to the film, it invites us to celebrate vital elders. In Old Man Country: My Search for Meaning Among the Elders, Thomas chronicles his personal journey as he embarked in a series of intimate conversations with a dozen distinguished Americans over 80. He talked with the likes of Paul Volker, the former head of the US Federal Reserve and heart surgeon Denton Cooley, to bring wisdom home.
Thomas Cole recognizes that he’s been working hard to become an author and while I listened to his voice, which is crisp and energetic and calm, I noticed a subtle change. His words roll effortlessly, and following the thread of his thoughts, I pen them down, small letters, perfectly traced along regular lines. In a fraction of a second, I’m aware that we’re tapping into something precious and then the conversation rolls on. Here’s what we talked about.
Where does your interest for aging come from?
Like many people, I have been influenced by my grandparents. Because my father committed suicide when I was four years old, they gave me a stable background, they made me feel loved and grounded. With time, my interest became more academic and it turned to what it means to become old. Now that I’m in my seventies, it’s a very personal interest, too, because I went from writing about it, to doing it.
How does it feel?
Someone once asked an old person if he felt old at the age of 75 and he replied: “No, I feel like a contemporary.” I have a personal anecdote along this line. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up one of my grandchildren and took him for lunch. He asked me what I was doing and I said I was writing about ageism and explained to him that it’s a form of prejudice based on age. I asked him if he thought I was old and he said, “No, we do so many things together.” Age, in other words, becomes irrelevant when you connect and engage with individuals, not concepts or labels.
Your book The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America explores the main ideas we have adopted from the past six hundred years about aging. What is the main takeaway that shapes how we approach this time in our lives today?
Since the Middle Ages, there has been a slow but steady transition from spirituality and mystery to a scientific point of view on aging. When aging was considered a mystery, it required a larger, existential frame to perceive its meaning. In the late 1920s, the birth of gerontology and geriatrics marked the shift from a world shaped by religion to one shaped by science, without any appeal to transcendence. Age went from being a mystery to a problem and what do you do with problems? You try to solve them, to fix them.
Historically, death was much closer to people of all ages. The progress of medicine changed this fact and now death pertains more to the realm of older people. Does this closeness to death contribute to our grim view of aging?
That’s right. When people lived in three-generation households and 30 percent of the children died before the age of one, the more vulnerable population was the one at the extremities. But now it’s true that the association of death is more related to the people who live longer.
What is the most disruptive author/concept of aging you have encountered while writing your books?
I would quote the British epidemiologists Richard Doll and Richard Peto: there’s no such thing as aging. The abstraction of aging disappears when we consider all the other variables of the social discourse, like cultural, biological, economic and geographic components.
What would a philosophy of aging look like?
Others colleagues talked about the importance of inter-human connections and individual experiences in relationship. Because aging is considered a problem to solve, we are not brought up to search for its meaning. That’s why it’s up to us to answer the question related to a philosophy of aging. I think that introducing the concept of authenticity in the discourse is a very powerful way of thinking.
What have you learned about aging from your grandparents?
They looked after me; they gave me a family. I remember the loyalty, the stability, and our relationships. I paid attention to how they aged. One day, I was in the study room of my Grandpa Jack and I noticed he was reading a book entitled A Date with Death. I was around sixteen at the time, and I realized he was paying attention. He wanted to learn.
Talking about your latest book, why did you feel the need to write it and what does it add to the previous ones?
I’ve been studying aging for forty years and now I’m doing it with my own aging. I wanted to talk to people who were already ahead of me and to discover what they were finding along the way. I have always loved to talk to older people, but in this specific situation I wanted to learn from individuals who can be exemplary. People are different, they make sense in different ways, and I asked them four basic questions: Am I still a man? Do I still matter? What’s the meaning of my life? Am I still loved?
What have you learned from their answers?
Some of them experience growing old as a threat to their masculinity. But being old is not a thing, it’s a script: the society tells you how to live. Unfortunately, we are brought up to thinking that aging equals decline. But I received some unexpected answers, like from the psychiatrist and scholar George Vaillant. When I asked him about his masculinity, he said: “What matters to me is creativity.”
Daniel Callahan, co-founder of The Hastings Center, the world’s first bioethics research institute, observed: “I’ve never thought about that.” Others took the old fashioned idea that, because they identified masculinity as the traditional intercourse, they felt diminished. Some people laughed at the question, especially Denton Cooley, the surgeon who performed the first implantation of an artificial heart: “That question has been answered by my life itself.”
How would you answer the questions you posed?
I know there might be changes as I become more fragile, but I agree with Daniel Callahan: the first question is already answered by the way I live my life. I am aware that I am still loved: this is the most important variable. As the saying goes: “Happiness is in the cart, love is in the horse.” If one has cultivated and committed to loving relationships, the other questions fall into place.
What is the meaning you are perceiving in your aging journey?
I’m getting ready to retire in a couple of years. It’s a tough moment. I plan to take up a new role, to become a spiritual advisor and help other people to lead meaningful lives. My own aging is kind of slipping through my fingers as I am dedicating a lot of time and energy to my mum’s care who has a form of dementia. I work even harder to become a writer. I’m training myself to pay attention to things that appeal to the senses, to remember.
How would you describe your philosophy of aging, now?
There’s an old Jewish fable. When every person is born, an angel appears and slaps the butt and whispers: “Grow.” The problem is that most of us stop listening.
