Rabbi ben Ezra

When I turned forty-five, I knew I wasn’t old, but I knew I was no longer young; I realized that day that I had somewhere along the way, I had arrived at middle-age. All my life I had had older people tell me that I was not old enough to [do. . . ], not old enough to remember . . . , not old enough for . . .. On my forty-fifth birthday, I decided, determined for myself, that from this point on, I was old enough.

In just a few months, I will celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday. Youth was used up and abandoned long ago. If I am still middle-aged, then I can expect to live to become a centenarian. Which I doubt. The only option left for me is old age. Not a ripe old age, not “old and full of years,” as Abraham was, but old nonetheless. I am the genuine article, an old man. And glad of it.

Youth is ignorance that knows it all. Middle age is too busy making a living, earning a reputation, and raising a family to get a handle on what it is all about. Yes, it’s true that youth doesn’t know and old age can’t do, but age compensates understanding–and, occasionally, wisdom–for the loss of vigor, excitement and adventure. Old age wins in this tradeoff.

Browning, in his “Rabbi ben Ezra,” understood about “the last of life for which the first was made.” I agree with the old rabbi that the prime purpose for the first half of life is to prepare us for the last half, that youth is good, that every day is a day that the Lord hath made, so we should rejoice and be glad in it, but that life is a whole and wholeness comes only after youth’s partial has done its part and left the field to maturity.

To understand this is to better understand the singular sadness and grief that follow upon the untimely death of the young. Their life may have been outstanding, their contributions major, their happiness complete, but their promise never saw fulfilment, their accomplishments never completed.

Sadness of a different sort surrounds the life of those who survive well into the second half, but is characterized by regret, emptiness, or misery, because the first half was ill-used: the future ignored, health abused, meaning and purpose never discovered, a life developed beyond the workplace, relationships not cultivated and nourished. For too many of us, old age is an awakening that is too late in coming; our youth is seen as a travesty of life.

I know a lady in her mid-seventies, who, not many days ago, was diagnosed with terminal cancer–told she had less than a week to live. The first half of her well-lived years were terminated in 1967 when her husband was shot while piloting a helicopter rescue mission over Laos. I met her more than twenty years later. For her, the last of life was the completion, alone, of what had been a well-spent first half.

Those of us who learned of her impending death knew that her living had not been in vain. When the family gathered as she prepared for the end, they were comforted, as was she, knowing that this was a time of realized fulfilment. Now as it happened, after two or three days, she found it within herself to challenge the death notice, and learned that she had been misdiagnosed.

Amazing everyone with her resilience, for two weeks, she has been back at the work of human service that she so enjoys. She is stronger, more vibrant and enthusiastic than ever before. I went to see her a couple of days ago, and as I left, I asked for a special invitation to her eightieth birthday party. We both laughed.

Old age can be, is meant to be “the best of life,” not something to be dreaded and then endured.