For the past couple of years, I’ve been flirting with a full-blown midlife crisis precipitated by the rude regularity of birthdays, always stubbornly ascending, combined with glimpses in storefront windows of an older woman wearing my clothes and walking beneath a thought cloud that says, “Surely that’s not me!”
Predictably, I’ve traveled the usual psycho-routes: considered trading my practical dog-and-compost wagon for a sporty roadster; imagined dumping the cluttered family home for a sleek, feng-shui flat; questioned whether vanity isn’t undervalued and cosmetic surgery isn’t really a Zen vehicle for self-realization.
That was all before last weekend when I attended the 80th birthday party of my stepfather, Mauricio, and realized that he at 80 is younger than I am at (bleep). He is proof that age is mostly a function of attitude and, in his case, wholly irrelevant. Beginning his ninth decade, Mauricio is a fully employed practicing psychiatrist, as he has been all his adult life except for two years when he mistakenly thought he should be retired. He was 77. According to American culture, he was supposed to kick back and enjoy the golden years.
There was just one problem. Retirement was boring, the gateway to the great existential vacuum he’d been treating patients for all those years. If you are what you do, what are you if you do nothing?
Maybe that’s not a fair question for people who enjoy leisure activities, but Mauricio’s pleasure has always centered around his work. Even as a young child in Mexico, he followed his father-physician on hospital rounds. By the time Mauricio was 16, he was a medical student. By 21, he had moved to the U.S. on a medical fellowship, and by 30 he was a U.S. citizen and psychiatrist. It isn’t surprising that he found retirement an alienating experience. He could no more be a retired man than he could have been an idle boy.
Nine months ago, he returned to work. His new job is 82 miles away. He drives down on Mondays and home on Fridays. Every other weekend, he stays away as the on-call doctor. How’s it going? “I love it,” he says. “I’ve always been a physician.”
To be sure, not every 80-year-old is up to Mauricio’s rigorous pace. He’s a driven achiever, disciplined mentally and physically. He has always risen before the sun, exercises at the beginning and end of each day, eats lightly, fixes a mean Margarita.
There are bound to be lots of other Mauricios out there, “elderly” Americans whose minds and spirits aren’t yet exhausted, but whose required retirements rob them and us of who knows what wealth. .
Youth, they say, is wasted on the young. Maybe retirement is wasted on the “old.” Our enemy is our assumptions about age. Without the specter of retirement and the cultural message that we’re finished at 65 or so, a midlife crisis is superfluous. As Mauricio has proved, there’s still plenty of time to get the job done.
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Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist based in South Carolina. E-mail: [email protected]