Age Against the Machine

My identity as it has developed in the ever-changing landscape of family has had to undergo such axiomatic transition throughout the course of my life that it’s a wonder I am able to identify with the concept of family at all.

I am, as are many of us, a product of divorce. Today, for once, I won’t go into the nasty details that pertain to my particular situation. I will assume that you can fill in the blanks, if not with your own experience, than with someone close to you in some way.

Being a father now of two myself, and experiencing the dissolution of my own marriage through the now familiar theme of divorce, I am relearning the effects divorce has on a family as it relates to the one role I, in the case of my parents divorce, understood the least: the father.

The reason I am bringing this up is because the sadness that accompanies this process is something unique and something that I never even began to have the slightest comprehension of until now. There are simply things in life that only begin to come clear as we age and get more experience under our belts. To view the elderly with anything close to a full level of comprehension is something only they can do for themselves. Thus, it is a wholly unique position to be in within the hierarchy of our social roles when you reach this part of the aging process.

So again, this is not a post written for the purpose of bringing you into the recesses of my failures in life. This is about the effects of all this change on the way that I perceive the connections we have between us and the ways in which life holds surprises even for a man such as myself, someone who is probably seen as being synonymous with cynicism and misanthropy.

There is a movie out now, a documentary titled Young@Heart, which is about a group of elderly nursing home residents who sing in a choir that performs a repertoire of punk rock, pop, and new wave songs.

Sure, this is a gimme concept if ever there was one, and I am usually the first person in any group to scoff at things like this. Hearing old people, some wheelchair bound, trying their damndest to belt out the Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated is just a little too precious for my taste. But by the same token, hearing the same crowd work out a rendition of Schizophrenia from New York noise-rock rock stars, Sonic Youth, is simply too ridiculous to pass up. Once I heard about that, it was off to the world of YouTube in order to ferret it out for myself.

Clearly, it is easy for me to dismiss this sort of thing simply on principal. I mean I’m not against it. I wouldn’t jump into a debate about it being exploitive or anything like that. But, I would say that in the United States, if not in other places as well, there is a certain perception of the elderly as being something akin to overgrown children. When we actually take the time to address older people, not only do we not tend to treat them as equals, we add insult to injury by handling them almost as if they have been reduced to pathetic shells of the people we think they once were.

Even for most of our best intentions, it is so easy to see older people as being nonthreatening to the point of being cute or comical, as if in their slowed, more fragile state, this somehow meant they were no longer to be taken seriously, even to be seen as something less than human.

Really though, when you think about it, growing older, growing in to the final stage of life, ought to afford you a level of respect and attention that is reserved for no other segment of our society. These are people above all, and beyond that, they are people who have had entire lives worth of experience in order to become whoever it is that they are today. It is a cruel gift to be rewarded after a lifetime of pain and loss and fear and anxiety and stress and all the rest with a decline in motor functions, a higher rate of disease, weaker immune systems, lagging intellectual abilities, and worst of all a rapid decline in sexual ability. Yeah, that’s just rich, isn’t it?

I personally have known almost no elderly people in my life outside of my immediate family, and that might be somewhat peculiar were it not for the fact that I am already a hermit who basically spends time with almost no one.

So the reason I am prattling on about this is because among the YouTube videos of these folks singing and very slowly dancing to songs like Should I Stay or Should I Go, or Walk on the Wild Side, was a solo performance by a man in the choir named Fred Knittle. Knittle had officially left his place in the choir sometime previous due to his failing health (the man breathes with an oxygen tank for starters). In this particular video, Knittle was to sing the duet with another ex-member of the choir, Bob Salvini. Salvini also left the group sometime previous for health reasons. The reunited duet was to take place in the homecoming concert of the group after a tour. The night before the performance, Salvini dies. I know, I know, perfect dramatic timing. But here’s the fucking killer. The song they were to perform? Fix You by British mopey pop stars, Coldplay. Mind you, I fucking can’t stand Coldplay because they play it so safe. But watch the video, and/or Google the lyrics and recognize just how touching those words can be when sung with such tenderness and unaffected honesty. Seriously. Hearing Knittle sing the song as a soloist, his oxygen tank hissing in short rhythmic bursts throughout the performance, without his partner, and to watch the reaction of those in attendance (including Salvini’s family, presumably the ones singing along to the words), got to me a little bit. I won’t lie, it did.

And so this brings me to my point.

Watching Knittle sing what through his voice, eerily reminiscent of Johnny Cash on the Rick Rubin sessions made so close to the end of Cash’ life, hides any sense of the poignancy of the sad sack lyrics in light of the 800 lb gorilla hanging around the stage. And, all I could think about as I watched that video was what it must be like to be a person so aware of their frailty, so aware of the closeness of death, around every corner, waiting for the moment to swoop in and silence the voices of us all. And all I could think about then was how much dignity these people had given the weight that they must bear day in and day out. To know what history they must have within them, and to think of how hard it must be to decline so rapidly not only in body, but in the lives of those around you.

Yeah, life can be as cruel as you want it to be. But it can also reward you if you are only receptive enough to allow it to happen.

I am a genuine cynic. I am also a genuinely self-involved imbecile on most days. But one thing I hope I never am, and that is ignorant to what life could possibly have in store. Because despite all the pain and the fear and the anxiety that I have endured, especially in these last six months, I have also had the pleasure of being reborn into the arms of the person I have always wanted to know. Completely giving in, and simply giving up would never have afforded me that opportunity.

If I am lucky enough, yes lucky, to live as long as those in the Young@Heart choir, I sure hope I have the strength to look back over the course of my life and recognize how beautiful it is to be alive and how nice it is to be able to experience all there is to see and do in this life before whatever will or won’t happen at the end.

I saw more than a little of my own grandfather in that video, my grandfather the barbershop quartet singer, and the gifted harmonica player, the man who taught me the meaning of dignity and respect. His voice shared a similar deep, embracing warmth with the voice of Knittle, utterly devoid of ironic detachment or overly quaint emotive decoration. To hear my grandfather was to simply hear a man in love with singing, expressing himself as honestly as he knew how. He died as he lived, and he was a giant. At this point, I can only dream of having his humility and his strength if I ever reach that age.

Aging is as much a gift as it is a curse. As I guess are most things in life. As I age what I lose with time I can know I have gained in experience. And through it all, my conception of beauty just grows and grows. And in the end, that is the greatest gift of all.