Introducing a New Sunday Series: Ancient Wisdom

Every six months for the last few years, I’ve been getting an MRI scan of my brain. There is a little dot in my left frontal lobe—”subcortical white matter,” my chart says, that “may represent a chronic microhemorrhage perennial.” Which, I admit, sounds pretty bad.

The dot was discovered after I had an incident in which I blacked out while walking home from lunch one day. It was later diagnosed as a simple partial seizure, which also sounds pretty bad. My doctors—and at age 73, I have plenty of them—aren’t 100 percent sure that the dot is connected to the seizure, but they think it might be. Whether it is or not, they want to keep track of the thing, to see if it has moved or grown or done any other bad thing. So far, I’m happy to report, it hasn’t.

You’d think I’d be grateful to have these six-month checkups, and theoretically I am. But from the moment I get to the hospital to the moment I leave, I turn into a grumpy old man, kvetching as I put on the hospital gown, complaining as I’m rolled into the machine, and thoroughly ungrateful when the nurse, tired of hearing me say I need to get back to work, tells me that my health should come first. She doesn’t add that because of my age, I’ll hasten my death if I don’t take care of myself. But I know that’s what she means.

Being old, it turns out, is just not something I'm very good at. At a time in life when most of my peers have relieved themselves of the burden of ambition, I still burn with it. I don’t FaceTime with my grandkids nearly as much as I should. I refuse to concede that I no longer have the stamina to stay up til 3:00 a.m. to edit a story that is due the next day—and curse myself when I wake up the next morning slumped over my desk, the story unfinished. (The Free Press does indulge my need for an afternoon nap, for which I’m thankful.) I eat the same bad-for-you food I ate when I was a teenager: cheesesteaks, salami heroes, sausage McMuffins. My wife would like me to care more about my appearance, but I don’t. I don’t always take my pills, or exercise, or do the various activities that would make me healthier. (Unless Ozempic counts.) And because I pissed away my 401(k) years ago, I couldn’t retire even if I wanted to.

But I know people who are good at getting old, people who, yes, saved their money, ate right, and went to the gym regularly. It’s more than that, though. The oldsters I’m talking about still view life as an adventure. They manage the difficulties of old age with aplomb. From where I’m sitting, they have adjusted to senior citizenship in a fashion that seems effortless.

And I thought that I—and our readers, young and old alike—might learn from them.

For the next few months, we’ll be publishing an essay every Sunday written by someone 70 years old or older. We’re calling this series, with tongue only slightly in cheek, “Ancient Wisdom.” For the essays, I’ve turned to writers I know who are aging particularly gracefully. People who, for example, don’t grumble when they go to the doctors. Who know how to be a good grandparent. Who recover after losing a spouse or surviving a brush with cancer—and build a life again. Who have even come to terms with the inevitability of that universal deadline, death. I figured it’s as good a time as any, before I get any older, to tap into their advice and maybe even try and take some.

“There comes a time,” writes Stephen Harrigan in this wonderful opening essay, “when we all have to accept embarrassment and decrepitude, when we realize that the past can’t be recaptured and that there are destinations we’re no longer capable of reaching.” Acceptance. That’s the essence of it, isn’t it? That’s what I’ll aim for when I go in for my next MRI, or when I’m at a loss for how to handle one of my children’s toddlers.

Wish me luck—and welcome to “Ancient Wisdom.”

— Joe Nocera