My wife and I are not expendable. President Donald Trump’s crude remarks about the “cure being worse than the problem” are harmful. The idea that there is some theoretical economic cost that justifies exposing humans to death is the height of narcissistic sociopathy.
I take it particularly personally, as we are smack dab in the middle of the collateral death demographic. Make no mistake — when he and his business friends talk in clinical tones about the trade-offs between health and the economy, they are talking about us. COVID-19 can be life-threatening to others, but any action or inaction that results in a higher death toll will disproportionately kill older folks.
While Trump has changed his tune somewhat in recent days, there continue to be news articles and opinion pieces about the inevitable trade-offs involved in the return to normal economic activity.
As many have expressed, it is a false choice. Minimizing health risk is also the best strategy to restore the economy. It is analogous to the business mistakes of recent decades, where focus on quarterly earnings and quick profit inevitably produces long-term errors.
The unthinkably tragic circumstances in Northern Italy have invited a dark extrapolation to the United States. Grim stories of the elderly choking to death on their own sputum in order to save the slightly less elderly are not instructive. They are anomalous and dangerous.
As my wife and I sit in comfortable isolation I occasionally drift into unimaginable images of her, outside my reach, gasping for a last breath because her life was not worth quite as much as that of someone younger. It is an unlikely scenario because, despite her somewhat greater vulnerability, we have the information and resources to take great care. But the thought of it is infuriating.
There is a conventional wisdom that we older folks would do anything for our children and grandchildren. It’s true, but it is a theoretical moral and love proposition, not a formal or informal social or economic calculation. I would give my life to keep a grandchild alive, but the circumstances would be specific, not a general expression of priority. I would step in front of a bullet, give my wrinkled kidneys, offer myself as a hostage in exchange or give my meager apocalypse food rations to my grandchildren. But this is love expression, not age concession. I would do the same for my adult children and for my wife, as would she for them and me. But that does not suggest expendability. No one, old or young, should be asked to sacrifice a life for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
During my decades as a school leader (paraphrasing the wonderful Jonathan Kozol) I beseeched parents and educators to stop looking at children as raw material to be formed into some future productive use. Children are alive, fully formed and beautiful. Their hopes, dreams, passions and laughter matter now. As Kozol observed about the children in the South Bronx, because of our social indifference to poverty and gun violence they have no guarantee of longevity. Life today is what they have.
And life today is all any of us have. No life is more or less important, meaningful or useful than another. We older adults are alive, fully formed and beautiful too. Our hopes, dreams, passions and laughter matter now too. American society’s subconscious values see children as raw material to be pounded into utility and older folks as worn material to be discarded if necessary. To the contrary, life at the bookends is just as meaningful — perhaps more meaningful — than life in the bustling middle.
Our lives in retirement revolve around our grandchildren. One is distant, in college, so we are in her outer orbit. But the other two, until our isolation, were in our lives nearly every day. It is a primary life purpose. We can’t know and don’t try to assess what impact our presence will have on them. But we know it matters. My wife and I had long professional careers, she as a nurse, administrator and therapist, I as the head of a school among other things. What we are doing now is more important, not less important.
I cannot recall the source, but a wise person once suggested that we calculate age from death to the present instead of from birth to the present. By this measure, a 70 year-old who will die at 90 is younger than a 30 year-old who will die at 40. The corollary to this calculus is that we can’t ever know how old we are with certainty. To make life-or-death decisions based on age is fallacious.
With the clutter of work responsibilities cleared, we older folks have the time and space to be radically kind. We can move through our days with generosity and grace. Human worth should not be calculated or comparative, but if there is a value to be placed on us, our worth is not diminishing with age. Millions of us in our 70s and beyond love our children, grandchildren and neighbors, do good work and add small pieces of beauty to our world. We love others’ children too and we “elderly” folks are kind in ways that won’t appear on anyone’s ledger.
We are as, or more, vibrantly alive now as we have ever been. When the pandemic subsides and our communities and families begin the long process of recovery, we older folks will be right where we were before — supporting and adding to the lives of those we love.
Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@gmail.com.