Headline-harvesting speculative assertions that humans start aging long before many really believe they’re “mature” are not new. But now three researchers from Canada’s Simon Fraser University, two of them doctoral students, plus an associate professor, have published research findings – “Over the Hill at 24” – that they say proves those earlier assertions.
Age 24, however, marks a time when many – certainly many males – privately believe they’ve yet to truly become adults. They may outwardly insist and boast they are “mature” while 1) associating “adulthood” with their parents, and 2) simply want to hang on to carefree adolescent behavior as long as possible. The conduct of young folks and behavioral assessments by social observers for decades have suggested that young people, and much of United States society have created a purposefully prolonged and profitable adolescent culture.
The study also coincides with a recent spate of articles about “inevitable” fatal illnesses and articles brandishing such titles as “Life and Death as a Narrative,” “Life With Death: Apparitions and Late Fictions,” “The Dying of the Light,” “The Weight of the Past.” For millennia death has fascinated an uncountable crowd of religious leaders, philosophers, scientists, and of course writers and scholars. But it generally remains a dark, mysterious threat, something the depths of which remain unknowable even to physicians.
“Over the Hill at 24” is an interesting and perhaps even an accurate warning from a physician’s point of view. But it leaves many of us unfazed. One of my favorite writers who was also a man I admired more than most died April 5 of leukemia at 86. His weather roughened features were those that his life, spent primarily outdoors, had earned him. Author, naturalist, explorer of distant and challenging realms, Peter Matthiessen possessed an adventurer’s face, etched with the scuffs, creases and wens. Matthiessen, who was also an anthropologist of a special kind, was most popularly known as an author. He faced death more times than he would say, never dwelling on such things. There is now an empty trajectory in the world, an absent moveable feast of hands-on exploration, discovery and hard, probing thought and insight. He was a follower of the ancient, rigorous Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism noted for its fierce focus on kenso – sudden enlightenment resulting from long intense meditation. One of his two best books comes out of Zen, “The Snow Leopard,” concerning a mountain journey with field biologist and decidedly non-Buddhist George Schaller in Nepal, seeking to study the bharal, Himalayan blue sheep, and to find the (then) rarely seen snow leopard. His other exceptional novel, set in Latin America, was “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” He is said to have faced his death cooly and “bravely,” no doubt while habitually, silently chanting.We all have such craters in our lives created by the loss of family members, close friends, admired, favored individuals. And they – in particularly most personal and painful ways – will not cease to occur. They will increase as we grow older. Though we may revel in our most “animal” of characteristics – our appetite for food, sex, social involvement, a mostly vicarious appreciation of risk; our need to see, breathe, to exercise all our bodily capabilities – most of us do not care to even passingly contemplate the ultimate event which defines our animal nature: dying.
All religions, schools of thought, philosophers grapple with the end of life. Matthiessen, a Rinzai master, seemed unsurprised by death’s approach. Certainly he was well aware of Gandhi’s last utterance. Coming out of his back yard to give a press conference in 1948, Gandhi was shot four times. Immediately, as he falls, he says “Ram,” the name of god. His life had been threatened many times. As someone later wrote, he had long before become ready to “step off the train.”
For we are born to die. Writer, priest and theologian Richard John Neuhaus explained: “Not that death is our purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already under way.” The instant we’re born we’re on that journey: all mammals are. For farmers and ranchers this concept is something that nature – life – teaches them early on. That makes most rural folks heedful, and makes some reckless, revolting against life’s hard truth. Either way, that kind of living means facing difficult problems and wrenching exhaustion, mixed with unexpected disease and pain and the presence of death.
Those of us of a certain age who were reared on farms and ranches learned about hard living and the fact that every living thing was born to die. Favorite Collie dogs died of rattlesnake bites, pet kittens, rabbits, horses fell away for various reasons. Rural folks killed and butchered cattle, hogs, chickens and turkeys. They hunted bobcats, wolves and coyotes that stalked the livestock. Times could be thin. They cured and sold the hides. And went after deer, antelope, prairie dogs, geese, pheasants, prairie chickens, ducks for food. Plus all predatory birds – eagles, hawks, shrikes – interested in the small livestock they raised. There seemed to be an infinite variety of poisonous snakes. All of this demonstrated that life was quite definitely finite.
Statisticians reported an increase in the life expectancy during that time, yet it seemed that a lot of people were dying. Older women lived long, but a lot of menfolk, once they hit their 50s, didn’t. Banks gave credit (for pieces of mortgaged ranch and farm land) resulting in the purchase of “newfangled” farm machinery. Some poorly educated country folks didn’t get the hang of how to use “contraptions” they’d never seen before. This led to dire injuries and an amazing number of deaths. Sicknesses with strange names took a large toll. Terminally ill people lived out the end of their lives at home. Doctors in hard-used Model A’s paid “home visits” to farms. Most ranches were too far from town for that.
But today though science provides us with many means of ameliorating the effects of illnesses, many forget to pay attention to get regular checkups, accumulations of ailments: growing eye problems, heart anomalies, falling, surges in forgetfulness, persistent dizziness, frozen-feeling limbs.
In contrast, faced with the looming death of a relative, people unfamiliar with pain and death, tell physicians to apply a full complement of “interventions” to prolong life. They want, often for their own reasons, to do “everything possible” to save their relative’s life. This, even when it is clear their “loved one” is being offered up to a series of treatments that have slim, or no chance of success while inducing a siege of unimaginable pain – and the presiding physician warns that another set of lethal illnesses wait eagerly in the wings. That is the time to step off the train.