Raging old men....

We live so long now that we have not one but two crisis in our lives – a mid life crisis at forty and a late life crisis at seventy!

Everyone knows what a mid life crisis is. In 1965, the Canadian psychologist Elliott Jaques coined the term midlife crisis to describe the trauma many individuals in the developed world felt around the age of 40, when they faced the imminence of old age and, eventually, death. In the traditional narrative of the crisis, individuals — mostly men — panic and make extreme compensations for this reality. Everyone also knows that the solution that is common to this crisis varies from a drastic change in lifestyle- a new, young blonde wife or a red racing car.

The late life crisis is different yet similar. At seventy most men have completed a successful career, amassed a modest fortune, built their dream house, married off their children, played enough golf and dandled umpteen grandchildren on their knees. Now as they contemplate the years ahead they ask themselves “Now what?”

This dilemma that afflicts a few in my generation was brought home to me when a friend of five decades dropped by to see me a few days ago. Here he was a technocrat who had had a successful career, made some creative contributions to the country, amassed adequate wealth, lived in an affluent suburb and was quoted often—but now not often enough- by the press as an elder statesman of his profession. He was relatively healthy but of course heir, like most men of his age, to varying afflictions. He had no major problems that I could discern. Yet..

“Honestly”, he confided in me, “some days I get up and ask myself why? What’s left?”

Looking around I found the late life crisis had caught many of my contemporaries by surprise. Yet some had found ways to cope with it. They had found their red racing cars or young blondes too. Of course, they were different at seventy than at forty! One had turned to spirituality and religious learning and now spent time teaching Gita to avid listeners; another had retreated to a bucolic retreat near the sea to a life of contemplation and reflection; one had found a new burst of energy and enthusiasm and now travelled the world helping volunteers teach the young and yet another had immersed himself in political activism and a renewed interest in old hobbies. They all seemed to have weathered this late life crisis.

But there was a common thread running through their lives too. It seemed to me that all of them had refused to go “gentle into the night”! They all refused to give up. Each day still brought new challenges, new ideas, new inspirations. In the past they had looked for results of their efforts, now they simply did what they enjoyed or felt deeply about.

And the advice they followed was what Dylan Thomas addressed to his octogenarian father, whose eyesight and general health were failing, where he urges his father to "burn and rave at close of day"--rather than surrendering meekly to it.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”