Is Age Just a Number?

“The remainder of my days, I shall rather decline, in sense, spirit, and activity. My season for acquiring knowledge is past.” —John Adams at age 35

Photo by benjamin hershey on Unsplash

“Put out that light in center field!” yelled someone sitting on the bleachers ahead of me at a community league softball game. The crowd around him laughed.

I didn’t.

The light he yelled about was the shiny top of my dad’s bald head. He was playing center field.

I wanted to crawl under the bleachers and hide. “Dad needs to act his age. He is much too old to be playing softball,” I thought. “He should be back home in an easy chair.”

I was 12. Dad was 35. (At that same age, John Adams thought he was old.)

Now, at more than double that age, I see 35 as young.

At 50 Dad took up snow skiing, and kept at it until he reached 80. “You are as old as you feel,” he said. Now an adult myself, I took pride in his accomplishment.

He often cited Mrs. W as an object lesson in how not to age. At 60, Mrs. W decided she was old and should spend her days at home. She stopped attending worship services, and she asked her children to get her groceries for her.

When Dad recited the story, he concluded with astonishment each time, “She lived to 90. She wasted 30 years as a shut-in. Thirty years. Can you imagine?”

I’m not sure my father was right about being as old as you feel. For some of us, being older imposes limitations, no matter how old we feel. Some of my peers now struggle with arthritis or are limited by malfunctioning hearts. Feeling is one component of aging. We all carry an inner child within us, but we can’t always follow that child’s feelings.

Limits are not solely for the old, however. Decades ago, I received a magazine assignment to write an article about Joel, a preschooler who had lost the use of his arms and legs in an auto accident. I entered his home, prepared to pity him. I found him playing with toy cars, zooming them around on the table with a mouth stick. When he zoomed them off the table, his mother chuckled, caught them, and put them back. (He eventually learned to type with that mouth stick, as well.) I came prepared with pity, and left amazed by coping and hope.

Joel, at five, was a role model for us at the other end of life. He and his mother focused on “can” instead of “can’t.” At 30-something, he now takes preaching assignments in area churches.

Recently I read an article in which an older adult said, “Age is just a number.” Just as I disagreed with my father, I disagreed with her. “It is not just a number,” I thought. “The older we get, the poorer our health.”

Then I did some research. Over and over again I ran across descriptions of the vast variety in how people age: variety in health, variety in level of independence, variety in employability, etc.

“No two people age at the exact same rate or manner,” said the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). The World Health Organization maintained, “There is no ‘typical’ older person.”

One medical article recommended that physicians classify their patients not just by their age, but also by their stage of health, with Stage A having “independence and minimal chronic illness burden,” and Stage D having “disability and dependence on support of caregivers.”

I thought of the variety in my peers. Some of my peers played pickleball; others walked with canes. Some took no prescription medications; others took them by the fistful.

The FDA added, “The rate of aging may be influenced by genetics, lifestyle, diseases as well as environmental and socioeconomic factors.”

“Hmm,” I thought, “I have no control over my genetics, but I can control my lifestyle. I’ll need to research that.” But that’s a topic for another column!

When my father was 90 and we waited in a concessions-stand line at Orange City, Iowa’s annual Tulip Festival, Dad sat in a chair while the rest of us stood. “I’m getting old,” he said. It was the first time I heard him use the O word to describe himself. None of us knew it then, but he already had the lung cancer that would take his life before the year ended. He finally felt his age. He began to enter Stage D of his life.

But, different from Mrs. W, he had lived nearly 30 full and fruitful years.

I will not be skiing at 80. Osteopenia (porous bones) makes it high risk for me. But I would like to follow my father’s example, living life as fully as I can for as long as I can.

Adapted from Creative Aging by Carol Van Klompenburg, published 2023, available from Amazon.