The corruption of the flesh is a theme of age.

Younger we rolled our eyes at oldsters’ preoccupation with their “aches and pains.” Older, we worry we’ll still have eyes to roll.

It’s not just conclusive sicknesses that spook – not even these principally – but the gradual inevitable irrevocable irreverent corrosion of pretty much every body part, organ, muscle, corpuscle, bone. Teeth, hair, skin, joints, they’re all faltering, failing, according to their own undeclared schedules – “if it’s not one thing, it’s another” – requiring constant supervision and repair, like an old house. (Marketers these days say “vintage” instead of old.)

It’s not solipsism but journalism which conduces to the inevitable “organ recital” that commences our colloquies with coevals. Solipsism is a lifelong character defect, a constant since childhood, which may alter its subjects but never its focus. Once “stuck on oneself”, always stuck, impossible to unglue. From our seventies on we gab about diagnoses, docs, procedures, prospects not from self-absorption but because that’s what we’re busy with, like it or not. This week it’s my eyes and skin in revolt; next week, who knows; vigilance is not optional; doc or die.

This theme sounds more noisily today than in earlier generations thanks to science’s success defying, deferring, though never defeating the assaults of age. I’d have been dead thrice over had I lived when my dad did, slain by cancer, heart disease, and perhaps depression. Medicine, fitness regimes, and therapies keep me (so far) productive and pert. I may not be “the man I used to be” but I’m still a man, capable of perpetrating these paragraphs, which I hope you’ll like; able to walk, eat, exercise, hug my loved ones with delight. My intimates say they’re glad I’m still extant, which I appreciate, true or not. I know no soul luckier. But maintenance is required to protect my luck. I write a thousand words a day, give or take. If I live another thousand days (my dad died age 47), a few of them might be recalled!

The ingenuity of medicine prolonging capability casts a suspenseful and poignant shade over our final phase. Fewer sentences are death sentences. From many diagnoses that once slew we can now, with our physicians’ aid, wriggle free. Prostheses are available for practically every body part. We’re less likely to “take to our bed” or resign ourselves to our extinction. Death has come to seem a mishap – or culpable mistake – instead of a predictable result. This is preposterous, but natural enough. Where there’s life, there’s hope, and our lives fight not to give up the ghost.

Increased longevity entails unintended consequences. The old hang around longer, blocking the ascent of their juniors. (Vide, Trump, Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, our gerontocrats, who in previous epochs would have been long gone.) Tensions escalate between the old and the not-yet-old as elders present more complications and consume more cash. The extended presence of parents may infantilize their progeny, who put off shouldering the responsibilities of maturity. (I benefited, in a way, from my dad dying young.) An increasing percentage of seniors grow mad and/or sad, feeling neglected by their kids – as if our kids owed us for the lives we saddled them with! Meanwhile, thanks largely to the relentless advance of electronics, the old grow less equipped to cope with modernity. (TikTok pro or con? I haven’t a clue.)

Longer life, like any blessing, is mixed. Jane and I rue the endless tortuous hours we spend fussing with our physiologies. We resent the remorseless predations of time. But, o, how much sweeter than the dark!