Time for the over-80s to make way for the next generation.

Andrew Sullivan

Apr 14, 2023

I have seen the future and I do not want it. It’s a sunlit vista of the over-80s — too healthy to die, too old to fully live. They are the experiential bookend to all those “deaths of despair” among the young and middle-aged that plague America in the era of the poppy, the reason our life expectancy isn’t in free fall. Pharmaceuticals — miraculous, ever-improving, ever-more innovative — make it all possible, and the result is a healthier life in our prime but, as we age, an endless, crepuscular twilight zone of the undead.

Maybe it’s visiting my 87-year-old mother in the nursing home she finally had to resort to, but the ravages of old age, once ended by death in your seventies or earlier, terrify me. You walk past room after room and see the empty stares into space, the slumped husks of bodies propped up in bed, and the frail wanderers who know neither who they are nor where they are going. I try to imagine my dad there, and simply cannot. He was far too active, headstrong and independent to allow himself to be reduced to this. His sudden death, however dreadful, nonetheless spared him. It’s the one consolation.

And my own mother, with whom I have been closer than anyone on earth, whose intense, abiding love has long been a still, white-hot thread connecting every part of my own life, is now drifting away in her final home, dementia gradually robbing her of memory, and of coherence. She seems happier, actually, than I can ever remember her, which isn’t saying a huge amount, but it’s definitely better than the agonies she once endured with bipolar disorder. But how do I really know?

An ocean away, I find it almost impossible to talk to her on the phone anymore, because it rips me up, as she resorts to repeated pleasantries because she can no longer muster much else. I can’t get through anymore — to the essence of her. I can’t engage like I did. And a mere series of “love you”s somehow seems to betray the honesty and sharpness of our relationship. When I’m there, in her room, our bodies can comfort each other; so far away, the grief just kind of swallows me up.

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