The 40-something doctor looked down at the silver and blue helmet sitting beside my backpack on the floor of his cramped office and up at my blanched face, “Don’t ride your bicycle home,” he said. “Take a taxi.” I didn’t argue. Although I doubted I would comply, at the moment, I couldn’t separate out the minor inconvenience of having to return for the bicycle on another day and the confusing emotions cursing through my body that suggested a more cautious transportation option. That is the nature of shock. And having just been hit by his Mack Truck of a possible diagnosis, I found little solace in Dr. Fine’s avuncular tone and much cause for irritation.
It was supposed to have been a routine checkup. My trainer who also fashions himself a lifestyle coach—the exact definition of this last term still eludes me—insisted that I see his sports medicine doctor about the lower back pain that had come on rather suddenly over the summer and hobbled me all fall. The initial visit, history taking, and brief physical exam had resulted in an undramatic diagnosis. For a long-distance runner and tennis player in my 30s and 40s, a swimming and biking enthusiast in my 50s and 60s, and a recent convert to weight training, age-related spinal deterioration made sense. At the end, Dr. Fine had suggested immediate physical therapy and scheduled a CAT scan just to make sure nothing else was going on.
Now, six weeks later, it seemed there might indeed be something else. Through a carefully sequenced set of questions about blood abnormalities, questions that made me think my scan had been confused with another’s, I don’t have much of a scientific bent, Dr. Fine finally came to the point—the radiologist’s report concluded that the results were consistent with multiple myeloma, a systemic cancer of the bone marrow and blood cells. I needed to have a complete panel of blood tests and see a hematologist immediately. Having arrived at Dr. Fine’s office prepared to hear about management strategies for the aging body about which I already knew a considerable amount, his words left me reeling, as if I’d been punched in the stomach and would black out from the pain. By the time he had printed out the order for blood work, I was convinced of the rightness of the radiologists report. Despite Dr. Fine’s assertion that the new tests, and ultimately a bone marrow biopsy, were needed to confirm the diagnosis, I was left numb, my world turned upside down.
I take this incident as a starting point to explore my experience of aging , marked as it so often is in Western societies by frequent medical consultations, anxious waits for test results, and therapy appointments of all kinds. How do we remain buoyant in the face of potential threats to our bodily integrity? What does it mean to pursue a productive life and healthy sense of social relevance even as the time behind us lengthens and the time before us suddenly grows short and precious?
While not all the elderly endure the protracted illnesses that my own parents did, caring for them in their last decade made me aware of a central challenge of aging : sustaining a sense of autonomy as our reliance on others increases. Like the parent who balances the desire to support a young child’s independence even as she strikes out on her own, so too I calculated the risks involved when my father, unstable on his feet, insisted on getting out of bed in the middle of the night and my mother, subject to confusion, continued to go shopping on her own during the day. Although our positions had shifted, the space we were negotiating, the space between autonomy and dependence, was familiar both from my own childhood and from my work with children.
On the street later that morning, however, these big questions were far from my mind as I passed by my bicycle chained to its post and headed for a nearby walk-in clinic to have the blood drawn. Light-headed, not wanting to pass out at the clinic, I stopped at a giant CVS drugstore where I bought a quart of orange juice which I drank from the container even before reaching the checkout counter. An hour later the sugar boost was still working and allowed me to reclaim my bicycle and make the 25-minute ride across town without incident. Only when I was safely at home did I feel calm enough to call David, my partner, and ask him to return as soon as he could.
Dr. Fine’s report was especially unsettling because just six months previously, I had celebrated my 70th birthday after a successful year-long campaign to prepare myself for this watershed event that put the inconceivable 80 within spitting distance. All the minor aches and pains of an aging body had in no way prevented me from constructing a life filled with interesting work, good friends, and a loving partner. Suddenly, my hard-won acceptance of becoming a senior citizen and the plans that I had set in motion were thrown into question. Who was I now that the time before me might be far more limited than I had imagined? How should my priorities and notions of present and future shift to accommodate this new reality?
As if only to underline my sense of well-being at 70 and the dagger of a diagnosis that cut into it, just two years previously, David and I had bought a new house. The fruit of several years of fraught conversations about far more than our immediate need for separate workspaces, the house was ultimately a statement about the ways we had learned to accommodate to each other. It was as much, if not more, an emotional commitment as a practical one—a statement about our faith in a future together.
The house was a serendipitous find. We had almost given up hope of agreeing upon something in the booming Toronto real estate market with its scarce supply of older homes when, on a Wednesday morning in the fall, we both biked by it on our way to the university. The For Sale sign had barely been up an hour. We promptly called our agent, arranged a viewing the next morning, fell in love as soon as we stepped inside, and that afternoon made a bully bid with a 24 hour time limit. For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, Friday afternoon at 1 PM the house was ours. We moved in during one of those snowy February days when nothing can be left on the sidewalk without becoming wet, newspapers need to be spread across the floor to prevent slush from being tracked inside, and old possessions newly displaced look especially forlorn and offer little of their usual comfort.
For most of my life I’ve worked at a desk tucked into one corner of a bedroom and I was pleased, at age 68, to find myself in possession of a bookshelf-lined study with a second-floor bay window overlooking a small park. David’s office with its banks of modern windows on three sides looks out over the tops of the cedar trees bordering the back garden below. A large skylight frames his desk. With the exception of the stalwart dog walkers who appeared at all hours, the park below my study window was deserted those first days and for the months to come. Winter enthusiasts in Toronto prefer the slopes at Blue Mountain and Horseshoe Valley or the indoor pleasures of the ice hockey rink set well into the park to which kids of all ages eagerly trooped at all hours of the night and early morning, totting athletic gear bags of unimaginable size and weight while their parents parked the car and trailed behind.
Then, with the first signs of warmer weather, early May in Toronto, the toddler playground directly in front of the house came alive. As children and their caregivers gathered with increasing regularity and numbers, I was drawn to the view from my window.
The playground was not much more than a low wooden climbing structure located inside of a modest-sized sand pit. Haphazardly scattered across the area were a set of well-worn toy kitchen appliances: sink, stove, refrigerator, and three trucks to ride on. Toronto, I was learning, is that kind of town, where families bring no longer needed toys to a public space for others to enjoy.
Unable to hear their conversations, I could nonetheless observe the way that some toddlers ventured forth on their own, returning frequently to touch base with an adult, and others seemed to require substantial coaxing to do any exploration at all. I watched too as some adults rushed to intervene when physical and social crises arose and others held back, allowing the children to resolve them on their own. The play area often attracted older interlopers. During the day, four-, five-, and six-year-olds attempted to engage the toddlers in play. The toddlers resisted these overtures, for while they were interested in watching others, they clearly wanted to be left to their own devices. In the late afternoon, raucous middle schoolers letting off steam, smoking a first cigarette, perhaps reliving their own toddlerhoods, would appear.
At first the view from my window seemed only a distraction from my work about aging . I was trying to describe the difficulties of moving from middle age to young-old age, the phrase that sociologists have adopted to refer to the period between 55 and 75 when we are active, engaged members of society but no longer carrying all the responsibilities of middle adulthood, and sustaining a sense of social relevance (Baltes and Smith 2003; Neugarten 1974; Laslett 1991). With children grown, careers settled, parents often gone, the young old often have the opportunity to move back into the center of their own lives, to remember who they were before the occupations of midlife took over, and to craft a new period of productivity.
In my own case young-old age has meant continuing to edit the Occasional Paper Series for the Bank Street College of Education (https://www.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series/about/) where I had once been a faculty member, to animate the foundation I established in 2002 to preserve the work of my first life partner, the American photographer Robert Giard , and to award fellowships to previously unrecognized photographers (http://robertgiardfoundation.org). In a volunteer capacity, I was spearheading the educational projects of the small synagogue to which I belonged and the school-based initiatives of the Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto where I was a fellow. In short, like many of my peers, I was still trying to make my life count in the larger world even as I turned inward with increasing frequency to review where I had been and how I wanted to use the time remaining to me.
The scene outside my window was compelling and I often became lost in thought, not quite sure where I was, but happy to be there nonetheless. Often too I caught myself thinking about the very young and the old together, about the themes that connect the beginning and ending of life. I first made these associations while caring for my parents as they took a precipitous slide from being elderly and independent to being medically and emotionally fragile, completely reliant on me. Now in my late 60s however the topic had a new salience as I was myself moving from being a caregiver to being one who would, in time, need care himself.
Young children had been my focus through a decade of teaching nursery school in the 1970s and then during the following three and a half decades spent as a teacher educator, researcher, and educational consultant. But from thinking primarily about how we begin life, I was now more often reflecting on how we conclude it. As the children in the playground demonstrated, it’s challenging to learn how to enter into ongoing conversations and, my age-mates and I are finding, it’s equally difficult to gracefully withdraw from conversations once we’ve been active participants.
While my parents’ decline and my own aging body were obvious prompts to connecting the beginnings and endings of life, I would suggest that early childhood educators are naturally engaged with questions of life span development. And who, spending time with children, hasn’t speculated about the kind of adults they might become. Will Sarah be more assertive and less hesitant, John more focused or less scattered, Adam less impulsive and more thoughtful, Rachel more socially skilled and less a loner? As educators make plans and design programs, they think about outcomes in an increasingly intentional way. Early childhood teachers also consider how to support the other adults with whom they interact—their students’ caregivers and the novice teachers who apprentice in the classroom. Given my history in the field, perhaps the musings as I watched the playground activity outside my window should not have been surprising or unexpected after all.
What was unexpected: Growing old in a spacious brick Edwardian in the middle of the biggest city in Canada. Most of my adult life was spent in Amagansett , a small town on Eastern Long Island and a ten-minute walk to deep white sand beaches protected by the Atlantic Double Dunes Preserve. Bob and I moved there in 1974. Two years previously we had been introduced by a mutual friend in New York City who thought we would get on because we were both teaching in small, progressive, independent schools. The friend, who took pride in his matchmaking skills, was, much to our chagrin, right. And after Bob artfully transitioned out of two long-term romantic commitments, he never wanted to sever ties to people he valued and loved, we set up housekeeping in a small turn-of-the-century shingle house. There, unlike the Toronto house, every room had double use—the bedroom also a study, the living room also a dining room and work space, the tiny kitchen also an adjunct darkroom—and the dozen windows that pierced every wall, although none as grand as the Toronto bay, streamed sunlight in all seasons and chill drafts throughout the fall and winter.
We lived together in Amagansett for nearly three decades until Bob’s sudden, completely unexpected, death in the summer of 2002.
A call in the middle of the night from police detectives in a faraway city brought the news. At first they didn’t want to say anything unless they could speak with Bob’s wife or parents. Increasingly frightened by the suspicions of foul play to which gay men of a certain age so immediately give themselves over, I demanded directness: “if you have anything to say, say it to me and say it now. I am Bob Giard’s life partner.” Confronted with my assertion of emotional authority, their legal defenses gave way.
Bob was dead. A “cardiovascular event” while traveling on a photo assignment between Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Chicago had killed him. No one on the public bus had noticed anything strange but the driver was unable to rouse him once they reached the terminal. He had died without a sound, without a motion, and without anyone’s knowledge.
Despite the authority I summoned that night, there were many conversations over the succeeding weeks in which I felt completely powerless. My right to make decisions was questioned at every turn. After all, there had been no wedding, no commitment ceremony, and no public celebration of any kind to commemorate our relationship. We could not even remember the exact date we met, some time in the fall of 1971 we reckoned when asked.
It’s true that over time we had amassed the kind of documents that had become increasingly possible—a shared mortgage, bank account, wills, health insurance, domestic partnership agreement. Our diligence in these matters reflected the sense of personal vulnerability that came with living through the worst of the AIDS crises when so many friends died with contested estates and so many lovers were prevented from making medical decisions for their partners. Ultimately none of our own preparations would prove sufficient to allow me to sign for the cremation that Bob wanted, nor to sign for what I learned to call the “cremains,” an unfortunate, dare I say, ugly word that is part of the funeral business in America.
A 60s activist, I didn’t give in easily. I rallied a lawyer, an Illinois Department of Health official, and the funeral homes in two cities to a conference call. Ultimately I was left with the decision to spend weeks in court or allow my partner’s sister to sign the papers that would finally allow for the cremation and the ashes to come home.
Although we did not have the documents tha...