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What to Call People Who Used to Be Old

By: Dudley Clendinen
The New York Daily News, July 2, 2000

In a plane to Florida this year, I sat with a woman of 60, on her way to her winter home. Her latest boyfriend, a businessman of almost 70, had acquired a certain cachet in his peer group when sued by a young woman employee for sexual harassment. That did not bother my planemate so much because she believed him when he said the woman came after him, and so did the jury at the trial. But it troubled her mother, who is 85, and who found out about it when her fifth husband, who is 91, saw notice of it in a business journal he gets at his office.

I thought that story said a lot about the advancing vitality of old age in America. In Florida again recently, I shared it at dinner with two friends. She is 72 and works full time, which she started doing after getting a master's degree in her 40's, when her children were grown. He is 76 and volunteers full time, which he started doing when he retired from his position as a corporate officer at 63. They were just back from a weekend visiting their mothers. Hers, at 96, has grown depressed and withdrawn. His, at 104, still keeps her checkbook and goes out shopping.

Thinking about that on the treadmill in a gym in Tampa, I looked around one afternoon. The youngest people straining among the weights were high school boys. The others, men and women taking time out from their day, ranged from twenty- to seventysomethings. The oldest was a woman I know of 84, who played doubles tennis until last year and just gave up selling real estate. Her own mother visited friends in nursing homes until she was 102. She stopped because she got tired of trying to make conversation with people who kept falling asleep. Everyone has stories like that to tell now. At least, everyone in Florida does. At a conference on aging at the University of South Florida not long ago, Senator Bob Graham of Florida told about the picnic for 45 centenarians in Tallahassee that had to be postponed because half of them could not make it. They were away on vacation.

The question is: At what point does the change in lives and habits require us to redefine what we mean by old age? The answer is now. The physical extension of life, as the Nobel laureate Gary Becker suggested earlier this year, may be the greatest single achievement of the 20th century, and could well prove to be the greatest single influence on the century just begun. But redefinitions do not come easily. For all the daily evidence of an aging culture -- and for all the popular excitement about the map of the human genome -- the work of reconceiving old age, and of recrafting the language of longevity, is just beginning to find its way.

A recent Harris Poll conducted for the National Council on Aging found that almost half the people between 65 and 69 now consider themselves middle-aged. So do one-third of people in their 70's. Eighty-four percent of the respondents said they would be happy to live to 90. Many, in fact, seem pretty happy right now. Only about half the number of people over 65 who called poor health a very serious problem in 1974 say it is today. Only 4 percent think loneliness is a very serious problem. By contrast, three times as many people between 18 and 24 feel lonely. Those are the responses of people who feel younger, healthier and less isolated than their parents did at the same age 25 years ago. They also retire earlier, although there are signs that trend may be ending. Only 38 percent of people over 55 are still in the work force today, as opposed to 57 percent in 1965. Seventy percent of recipients draw Social Security before they reach 65. There have been reams of stories about all this. But what to call this new, longer, more leisured and apparently enjoyable late stage of life? These older people who do not feel old? The term that has migrated from Britain is "the third age," but at a conference in Washington last month, Dr. Elliott Jaques made a try at a new phrase. It was Dr. Jaques who began to speak and write of "midlife crisis" when he was 38, a psychologist seeing middle-aged patients who had begun to agonize that they might have reached the peak of life. Now, at 83, with "23 to 25 years tacked onto my life by two heart valve replacements," he thinks a lot about what he declines to call old age.

He suggested a new name, "third stage adulthood," the first being 18 to 40, the second 40 to 62, and the third 62 to 85. It doesn't exactly capture the moment the way "midlife crisis" did. But then the moment is still expanding. "We don't know whether we are pushing up against the limit of real life expectancy, or pushing life expectancy farther out," Dr. Robert L. Kahn said, after listening to Dr. Jaques. A professor emeritus of psychology and public health at the University of Michigan, with a shock of white hair, he is the co-author of "Successful Aging," published last year and based on the MacArthur Foundation's study of aging in America. His own mother died of hypertension at 51, his grandmother at 59. Dr. Kahn takes medication, goes to the gym three times a week, and is trim and quick at 81. He is, in a way, at the top of his game, and he expects to attend a lot more conferences before a new language for (old) age falls in place.