Looking forward on the 73rd Birthday

by Lionel Wijesiri

So they gave me a very simple party on my 73rd birthday last week. There were a few cards, few emails, a couple of gifts, even a cake with, for some reason, one candle. Have I gone back to earliest childhood or have they reminded me that this was my last birthday?

I do not believe in parties for simple events like birthdays but, of course, if I manage to reach 80, I wouldn't mind having a grand party.

The 80-year-old is entering a new stage of life - the last act - so let me undergo a proper (what French people call) 'rite de passage', meaning celebrating a big transition in a person's life.

In Sri Lanka, an octogenarian will join an exclusive minority that includes 1.3 per cent of the population. My chances of reaching that minorityis slim, since CIA World Factbook says current life expectancy in Sri Lanka is 72.85 years for males, add 2 years plus or minus.

New Experience

As a respite from such prediction, I recently turned to my contact list containing over 100 senior friends from school, my workplaces and society. I managed to extract 14 survivors who are more than 80 years old. At my request they contributed notes about themselves.

The general impression I gathered from those notes was of moderate cheerfulness in accepting handicaps.

"My doctors," said one, "have forbidden me from chasing women-unless they are going downhill."The most cheerful are those who have celebrated a golden wedding, attended by children and grandchildren.

It was refreshing to learn that many of those friends had not really retired. Some have started new businesses: semi-commercial gardening, consultancy work and travel agents.

Do you want to know what you will find in that country of 80+ people? I have prepared my report based on what my 14 friends (and others known to me) said.

The octogenarian feels as strong as ever when he is sitting back in a comfortable chair. He ruminates, he dreams, he remembers. He thinks that old age is only a costume assumed for others, not him. In a moment or two he feels like going for a 3-kilometre walk in the club park and meet few friends over a drink. Then he creaks to his feet, bending forward to keep his balance, and realises that he will do nothing of the sort. The body has a message for him -'You are old' - and he receives it frequently.

The special vices of over-80s, I've discovered, are avarice, untidiness and vanity. Why do so many old persons insist on hoarding money when they have no prospect of using it? It may be that there is comfort in watching it accumulate while other powers are dwindling away.

But why do many over-80s also become untidy, accumulating junk in dismaying fashion? Their bureau drawers are full of it, their tables piled high with it, and their closet rods bend under the weight of clothes not worn for years. I suppose it is partly from lethargy and partly from the feeling that everything once useful should be preserved.

The vanity of over 80s is simpler to explain. With less to look forward to, they long for recognition of what they have been - the athlete, the scholar. The ladies have the hardest time of it; sometimes they make themselves monstrous by their efforts to simulate former charms. This search for praise is an innocent passion.

My Plan

For me, still at early 70s, there are other pleasures of old age. One is simply sitting still, like a snake on a sun-warmed stone, with a delicious feeling of lazinessthat was seldom enjoyed in earlier years. At such times I may become a part of nature - and a living part. The future does not exist for me. I think that for younger persons, life is still a battle royal, of each against each, while I have nothing more to gain or lose. Here on the side-lines, I can watch the battles, can hear the shrieks of jubilance, the moans of the gravely wounded, and meanwhile feel secure. Nobody will attack me from ambush.

Yet the men and women I envy most are those who accept old age as a series of challenges.

For them, each new feebleness is an enemy to be overcome by force of will. Sometimes they win a major success. Sometimes they fail.

Looking forward to the future, the major issue that haunts me is what to do with the rest of my life. I turn to books and find not so much realistic advice as I had hoped for. Very old people have written comparatively little about the problems of ageing. The bookswritten by men and women in their late 50s or early 60s, wanted to paint a bright prospect of their years to come.

I now believe every old person needs a work project to keep himself more alive. The project should he big enough to demand one's best efforts, yet not so big as to dishearten.One project that tempts me is trying to find a pattern in my past. For however much my life seems a random series of incidents, they are something else besides. I believe each of them had a plot, often concealed under the piled-up rubbish of the years. Can I clear the rubbish away and distinguish the plot, its acts and intermissions?

I may never find the answer but I plan to take some steps in the search, fitting together memories and remembering bits and pieces of incidents. All this may lead to a book of absolutely candid memoirs. I have nothing to lose by telling the truth. At least I can say to the world, or to myself if nobody else will listen, "I really was"- or even, with greater self-confidence, "I was this."