identity

I first encountered this phrase of geriatrician Joanne Lynn’s in 2008, andI liked it right off the bat. It’s a straightforward way to bridge the us/them divide, to connect empathically with our future selves. As Simone de Beauvoir put it: “If we do not know who we are going to be, we cannot know who we are: Let us recognize ourselves in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state.”

In the pile of mail awaiting my return was the Fall Fashion issue of New York magazine, with a chic young woman on its cover. Yawn. “When it came time to cast the cover, we decided . . . to embrace a more expansive view of beauty,” writes Amy Larocca. “We came up with four cover subjects: an 81-year-old woman; a 19-year-old man who can pass quite convincingly as a woman; a mother and daughter . .  ; and an old-fashioned yet newfangled muse.” Turned out that my copy just happened to sport the muse, and I stopped yawning.

In his op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, David Brooks points out that conceiving of old people as detached, depressed, and ineducable is not just outdated but wrong. “The research paints a comforting picture,” he writes. Then the editorial runs into trouble, starting with its title, “The Geezers’ Crusade” — and not the geezer part.

My new year’s resolution is to start integrating more personal reflections into the blog. No better place to begin than a BBC News story that came my way last week about a link between youthful looks and longer lives. Studies show younger-looking twins in both Denmark and the UK outliving their siblings. As ever, it’s a dance between genetics and environment. Worn faces probably reflect harder lives, and those subjects also had shorter telomeres (pieces of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes from deteriorating).

On Veterans Day, PBS aired a documentary called "The Way We Get By."  Much of it was shot in Bangor, Maine’s tiny airport, where flights from military bases all over the U.S. and inbound from Iraq and Afghanistan stop to refuel. Filmmaker Aron Gaudet’s mother Joan is one of the Maine Troop Greeters:  a group of older men and women who’ve taken it upon themselves to shake the hands of every soldier passing through.

Angelo Mucci had served in the Army Air Corps and was enrolled in college when he met Rose. “I thought, 'You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to get a job and go to work and get married," he told me. "We had a great big Italian wedding. It was just outstanding. You weren’t there.”

I’m deep into the book proposal, currently wrangling with the chapter on Identity (the fifth Terror of Aging on my list being “I’ll be invisible.")  Late life puts a different spin the link between work and identity, and I really liked Dave Davison’s take on things.  I interviewed the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist in his gracious living room not far from the Stanford University campus.