Salon.com > Lillian B. Rubin

Let’s talk about dying

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

“It’s better than the alternative, isn’t it?” Words spoken repeatedly when, during the course of a research project on aging, I asked people for their thoughts about the new longevity and their own aging. Sometimes it was said with a shrug of resignation, more often as an unquestioning statement – a certainty that living is better than dying. Each time I heard it, I wanted to ask, "Is it?" Often I gave in to the impulse, which almost always begot a confused and startled response: "You mean you think it's better to die?"

I’ve thought about that question many times in the years since then, and my answer today is an even more resonant, “Yes.” It isn't that I'm so eager to die, but I can't help thinking about how destructive our fear of death is -- how it compels us to live, even when "living" may be little more than breathing; how we have made living, just to be alive, the unqualified objective. For me, that’s quite simply not enough. No, that’s not right. It isn’t “simple” at all. But I do have a concrete plan to end my life when I decide it’s time – and the tools to implement it. Will I have the courage to do it?

The hard truth about getting old

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:01:00 +0000

I don't know about you, but the chirpy tales that dominate the public discussion about aging -- you know, the ones that tell us that age is just a state of mind, that "60 is the new 40" and "80 the new 60" -- irritate me. What's next: 100 as the new middle age?

Sure, aging is different than it was a generation or two ago and there are more possibilities now than ever before, if only because we live so much longer. it just seems to me that, whether at 60 or 80, the good news is only half the story. For it's also true that old age -- even now when old age often isn't what it used to be -- is a time of loss, decline and stigma.

Yes, I said stigma. A harsh word, I know, but one that speaks to a truth that's affirmed by social researchers who have consistently found that racial and ethnic stereotypes are likely to give way over time and with contact, but not those about age. And where there are stereotypes, there are prejudice and discrimination -- feelings and behavior that are deeply rooted in our social world and, consequently, make themselves felt in our inner psychological world as well.

Mourning a husband who has not yet passed

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 01:20:00 +0000

I had a life, and now it's gone. No, I'm not writing from the grave. I'm alive, and even reasonably well, but I seem to have lost my life -- you know, the one I've been living for the last five or six decades.

Can anyone really prepare us for the future? Does it really make a difference if someone tells a young girl that one day she'll find blood oozing from her body, or a young boy that he'll wake up with his PJs mucky from a wet dream, or a pregnant woman that birthing her child will be an experience of breathtaking agony, or a middle-aged person that one day she'll notice that her pubic hair has thinned to near baldness, or that we'll all get old and, one way or another, lose our life, even while we're still live.

I lost mine six months ago when I could no longer care for my husband's advancing dementia and sent him into care. Well, maybe I really lost it a couple of years before that, but I didn't know it then. He was here, sleeping in the same bed, eating at the same table, sitting at the same desk -- a living, breathing presence, if not a fully present one. His mind wasn't working so well, but the familiar body was fine, and his heart still tried to be what he had been. Until one day, he couldn't and I couldn't, and we both lost our lives -- only he doesn't know it.