Get Past 60 And You’re Home Free
“People who used to be considered old at 65 are usually still in their prime at that age today,” says Dr. Sanford Finkel, director of the Buehler Center on Aging at Northwestern University. What with beta-blockers and hip replacements, you’re as likely to run into a man of 65 Rollerblading in the park as biking along with his youngest child, enjoying the adolescent boy in himself as well as the recycled father. Yes, the 60s have changed just as dramatically as the earlier stages of middle life.
A profound change in the way we register time accompanies every major passage, but a startling new perspective on time characterizes the passage into this third age.
A 61-year-old man walks into a New York clinic to get the results of an omnibus three-day physical. All the results are good. “Now,” says the doctor, “we have to think about how we’re going to manage the next 20 or 30 years of your life.”
The man is stunned. “Twenty or 30 years?”
“It’s not that unusual,” the doctor says. “You’ve already made it past 60, and you have an 89-year-old mother. … You need to make a body plan, to keep everything up and running smoothly until the last years of your life.”
It’s an AHA! moment. Thirty more years - this throws off all the man’s calculations. He needs a new life plan.
“But suppose I get prostate cancer when I’m 70?” the man challenges his doctor.
“You won’t die of prostate cancer, because when we’re older, our cells don’t divide that fast. You’ll die from something acute, and you probably won’t be chronically ill until the last couple of years.”
According to new calculations from the National Institutes of Health, if men can get through to age 60 without dying of heart disease, they can expect to be stronger and less bothered by chronic ailments than women. Consider: Only 10 percent of Americans 65 and over have a chronic health problem that restricts them from carrying on a major activity.
Not only are today’s retirees far healthier than they have been in the past, but they are also remarkably mobile. Modern Maturity magazine claims from its market research that over-50 retirees are hitting the highways or airports for an average of SEVEN vacations or personal trips around the United States in the space of a year (only 19 percent of their travel is for business). And for each of these pleasure jaunts they are prepared to shell out an average of nearly $1,500.
Societies have not yet caught up with the implications of these phenomenal changes in the predictable life course. The proportion of the U.S. population aged 65 and over will reach 12.7 percent in the year 2000. Italy has already tipped the balance scales in the graying of affluent nations, becoming in 1994 the first country in the world with more people over 65 than under 15.
Not only are people living much longer, but in social welfare societies like America and most of Western Europe, they are also more financially secure than ever. Men 65 and over are the ONLY age group among American males whose money income picture improved over the 18 years from 1974 to 1992. And for women 65 and over, hitting Social Security age has been an economic bonanza, moving them up in median money income by 27 percent. Even getting old doesn’t present nearly the specter of impoverishment it traditionally did. Since the 1960s in the United States, poverty among the elderly has been reduced from an average of 35 percent to 12 percent.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate