Evolution Into Old Age

Evolution Into Old Age (26 May 2026) An Analysis by Lawrence Davidson

Part I: Now For Something Different And Personal

I have been evolving for 81 years. When I realize this, I am amazed how old age appears to creep up on one. Perhaps it is because having relatively good health, at least through my 60s, I missed all the cues. Between the ages of 5 and 67 my health problems were mundane and paralleled my educational process. That is I spent most of my time in crowded classrooms. Classrooms are incubators for all manner of respiratory illness. Except, perhaps, for a matured immune system, it is no added protection being the teacher rather than the student. Nor is it any protection, the higher one goes in the educational process. Thus, being at the head of a university lecture hall is, if anything, a greater risk because you’re facing larger numbers of coughing students than the teacher in a first grade classroom. This is about the only difference when it comes to the threat of illness. Having retired at the age of 67 l instantly experienced three years of better health.

Part II: My 70s and the Back

My 70s soon taught me that respiratory problems associated with educational crowding were not the only source of ill health. There was the near inevitable back problems that appear to plague western civilization in particular. It may have been triggered by an energetic celebration of my 70th birthday. I diligently addressed this new source of misery by trying numerous non-surgical approaches: I went to physical therapy, which quite frankly only made the matter worse. I went to a chiropractor with whom I had friendly conversations about both US domestic politics and the ever disastrous situation in the Middle East—the one caused by the Israelis. He didn’t quite see it my way and, in terms of my back, he too made the matter worse, though not on purpose. Eventually, I developed a series of exercises, which I did quite regularly at home. This made matters better because I did them at my own pace rather than being pushed to do more then I was really ready to do. However, it didn’t cure anything and so over time things did get worse again. Worse, here means pain when I walked, pain when I stood too long, pain when I laid in the wrong position. The situation went way beyond the threat of coughing students. My back was killing me. 

My doctor was aware of this problem and just waiting to see how it would develop. I finally went to him and said I can’t take it anymore so we’re going to have to do something about it, even if it means “going under the knife.“ Having had the requisite MRI twice just to assure that the pictures are up-to-date, and found the appropriate surgeon, I finally entered the hospital. I was now 75.

Part III: The Hospital

You would not think that going into a hospital to get all those aged vertebrae and discs cleaned up would bring forth a jokey sense of humor. Of course, in most cases this would not happen. After all, many of these back operations don’t work. However, I had a very good doctor and he knew of very good neurosurgeon who did back operations with excellent results. So I approached this situation with naive confidence and good humor. Here is how things went:

The anesthetic experience was remarkable. As I was wheeled into the operating theater I lost consciousness. What appeared to be a minute later I gained consciousness and the whole thing was over. It seemed to me that no time at all had passed. The real between of the operation was totally lost to me. This was not an outpatient affair. I was to spend two days in the hospital and so I was wheeled up to a recovery area and put into a bed. It was pretty comfortable and could be positioned in any of a dozen ways. Mine was either to be kept flat or the back could be elevated when I wanted to read or otherwise sit up. The first thing I did was have them turn off the television.

Then there were the nurses. And let me tell you, right here upfront, that the nursing care at this particular hospital was very good. Indeed, if anything they were overly attentive. Well, eventually, I had to go to the bathroom and this of course required getting off the bed. Here comes the surprise: the bed was wired to an alarm system. Unbeknownst to me, I had been designated a “fall risk” because of my age. Well, maybe I was a fall risk under certain circumstances, but I wasn’t given that the bathroom, which was full of hand holds, floor mats, and other safety features, was no more than 10 feet away from the bed. What were the odds? Alas, the hospital staff and their insurance company were paranoid.

You can guess what happened next. I slipped my feet around to the side of the bed and using my arms lifted myself up to a standing position where upon all hell broke loose. An alarm blared, nurses came running in from their station, saying “what are you doing?” I replied, “I’m going to the bathroom, but I think there’s something seriously wrong with your bed.” No, they said “you can’t do that. You can’t go to the bathroom by yourself because you’re risking a fall. You must have one of us accompany you.” I was shocked. I said “you’re accompanying me into the bathroom is countercultural! It’s not done in this culture”— particularly when the designated accompanist is a 17 year-old helping out in the form of an afterschool job. Anyway, a compromise was worked out where the accompanist would wait outside the door while I did my business inside the door—still not the most relaxing situation. After a couple false alarms, where I had just lifted myself a bit off the bed and they had to come in and stop the alarm, I had memorized the code. When I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I would not disturb the nurses. I just put in the code and risked the well lit 10 feet into that super secure bathroom. After two days, they thankfully let me go home and after some recovery time, I was good as new. The operation was a success.

Yet my 70s weren’t through with me and, about a year later, I developed sciatica in my left leg. That had me limping painfully until I found my way, via my primary doctor to a pain specialist. He gave me a little blue and white pill, which then was added to my collection of pills. That cured the sciatica. Maybe cure is the wrong term. What the little pill did was block the nerve endings that were responsible for the pain. That was good enough for me. By the time this issue was resolved, I was 77.

Part IV: My 80s and Evolving Into a CCRC

I am now 81. In terms of health, things have been pretty steady for the past four years. Actually, steady isn’t quite the appropriate word. If there has been a problem it’s been with walking and balance (now I’m really a fall risk.) For this there is no apparent cure, only a management program. So, it’s not that I can’t walk. I certainly can. I just can’t walk fast and I can’t walk for a long time (a mile). Also, I cannot safely go up and down on stairs (to say nothing of hills) without something to hold onto. 

It was this sign of a continuing drift into the dicey world of physical question marks that encouraged my wife Janet and I to think about downsizing. That is getting rid of the stairs, the lawn, the heating and cooling system, the two unused upstairs bedrooms, etc. In fact, out of necessity, ditching a long lived-in environment. So, we began investigating what are known as “continuing care retirement communities.”

It is interesting how some of our extended family took to this decision. Some of our three children were initially quite upset. The house we lived in represented a familiar and assumed solid base. They liked coming to see us in this familiar place where we would have annual family gatherings. All of this was transformed into a great big question mark at the prospect of our moving. But, the need was ours and not theirs and so we continued with the search for an acceptable new place to live. When doing so there were two things to consider: money and temperament.

There is not much to say about money. CCRCs are expensive and so they attract mostly elderly white folks (of which more below) with savings to invest in such communities. From this point the white folks divide themselves up according to interest and whether they like to play among other things golf and bingo. So this brings us back to the question of temperament.

My wife Janet set the criterion for our search: 1) a place that would enhance our social life. This particularly applied to me because I tend to be reclusive—just give me a comfortable room and reliable word processor and I won’t go out much. If this is a common characteristic of the western intellectual I must say that my wife, who is very much an intellectual, is an exception. She has a number of hobbies including dancing with our dogs (a competitive international sport which I will leave the interested reader to discover on Youtube). She tends to worry about my lack of outside friends and activities. 2) Intellectually interesting people who express their interests by organizing programs of music, art and lectures amongst other activities (mercifully there is to be no bingo). As far as our investigations showed this was not a common description for many of our area’s CCRCs. But, Janet did manage to find an approximation to this end and ultimately we ended up in a place I shall call the Quad. 

It is at this point one discovers certain discouraging/and or humorous aspects of life in a CCRC. For instance: 1) Almost everyone looks older than you feel. 2) Some of residents are confined to wheelchairs and some of the wheelchairs are motorized. And, of course, there is no speed limit for traveling down relatively narrow halls. It is wise for the walker to approach corners cautiously. It might be noted here that speed is a recently discovered human pleasure. For some it can even be addictive. That is why we have auto races that can occur on and off official tracks. There are horse races, dog races and even fabled competitions between hares and tortoises. Back in the 1930s there were smaller airplane races. In her youth, my wife would occasionally participate in barrel racing on horseback. In any case, those who go along the hallways of our new home on motorized wheelchairs sometimes have a smiles that appear to be proportionate to their speed. 3) For those on foot there seems to be a ubiquitous obsession with steps. Here I refer to the steps that are recorded on high-tech watches. It is as if steps are reliably translatable into your state of health. This might be true in a certain sense but certainly not in the sense that is believed by most of our neighbors. So you have some old person using a cane who has been told by his or her doctor, neighbor, spiritual counselor, whoever, that they should get more exercise. How much? The watch now is transformed into a measuring device for exercise, and the more steps the device registers, the allegedly healthier you become. Actually I find it tiresome to sit down at a dinner table with other people and have the conversation all revolve around steps. 4) Finally, as suggested above, one quickly realizes that almost all the residents are old white folks. Of course this makes sense in a basically segregated society where wealth is concentrated mostly in the hands of aging white people. Most of the staff, however, including waiters, health aids, security personnel, etc. are not white. One has to be careful here because you don’t want to say, oh there should be a more racially diverse staffing. That smacks of a Trumpian argument and you don’t wanna go there. Nonetheless, for anyone who has experienced segregation and its effects on black-white working relations, this place looks to be pre-1964. I am told it is not much different in other CCRCs.

Part V: Conclusion

So, at 81 I am situated here in the Quad, which is capable of at least initially dealing with the range of issues that are typically encountered by those in their 80s and beyond. Here also there are certainly more opportunities to increase my social circle and I will diligently try to do so. As usual, my wife has led the way in this regard, joining committees and generally running around giving good advice. The dogs are confused as hell and tend to bark and howl (like a wolf baying at the moon) if left alone. We have done what we can in the face of our aging. Is it enough? I imagine for most it would be. All you have to do is stop thinking about aging in general and the oddities of communal living, and leave the rest to the capable staff here at the Quad.

And most people do just that. As a consequence, the one thing that you do not want to be is vocally philosophical about the issue of growing old. It would seem that, at least in the minds of some, there is an inconsistency between aged well-being and probing to deeply the issues of time and physical deterioration. Try going around, like a latter-day Socrates, asking questions about the real nature and consequences of aging, and you are likely to be labelled a gadfly and face isolation (a modern substitute for hemlock). But what does such reluctance have to do with the truth that things really do fall apart? Here is another way of seeing it: a state of good health cannot be had consistently—inevitably there is deterioration, sometimes slowly, almost invisibly, other times quickly, catastrophically. Most of us tend not to see it coming because we behave as if time and deterioration are less real than the ubiquitous present. That is why old age creeps up on us. 

Is this a story worth a sequel? I should live that long.