Many people talk about the stages of life and they divide a lifespan from being very young to being very old. A lot of people seem to divide life into four stages or "ages" of life. I think they assume a lifespan of 100 years and each stage/age is 25 years. They may comment, "Oh, he is entered his third stage of life," when referring to someone between 50 and 75. You never hear someone say "he is in his fourth quarter of life." Probably because most people die in their "third quarter" or it is not appropriate to refer to someone in his last stage of life. Sometimes the fourth quarter is the hereafter, after death.
I mention the fourth stage of life because I think of Thomas Cole's painting "The Voyages of life." I have always been impressed by those paintings ever since I saw them at the National Art Museum in Washington DC almost 50 years ago. If you have not seen them I have a link at the end that takes you to a write-up on this work. Cole portrays The Voyage of Life in four paintings titled "Childhood," "Youth," "Manhood," and Old Age." He painted them in the 1840s. Unfortunately, his depiction of the Voyage of Life does not fit today's environment. Life expectancy in 1850 was 41.1 years, whereas today it's 79.1 years. These days, there is one more stage between "Manhood" and "Old Age," If I could paint, I would paint one and I would call it "Retirement."
As I begin my 76th year of age, I finally realize that aging is a privilege. I have always taken it for granted, but with the onset of heart problems, cancer, pre-diabetes, reduced bone density and muscle tone, thinning hair and other creeping body ailments and loss of certain capabilities, getting into the "Retirement" stage of life can be a real challenge. To some extent, it is a privilege to enter the battle for survival in the last years of life. Many people don't get that chance.
This new stage in the "New Voyage of Life" takes place at the end of one's career, after Cole's "Manhood" stage, and before Cole's "Old Age" stage. To some people, "Retirement" is the stage of freedom, a stage to do what you "really" want, a stage of having no responsibilities, and a chance to explore doing things that you never had a chance to do before. But, for other people it is a frightening time, a nebulous stage of life where your purpose is not defined, a stage of life when you feel are no longer needed, a stage where you live in fear of financial uncertainty, a stage where you become isolated from friends, family and coworkers either by social and physical distance or by death. But for the majority of people, it is a stage of life where you enter a constant battle for survival against enemies that you never knew you had.
Extrapolating from Cole's description, this scene would be a man older than the man in his "Manhood" scene, still fairly healthy with a sword in hand fighting off the enemies trying to bring him down. There would be three main enemies represented by dragons, gruesome beasts, and brain-eating Zombies. These enemies I call Health, Economics and Isolation.
Health - The Dragon Enemy
The battle for health is against, the most formidable of enemies because it is not only attacking the state of your body directly, but this enemy is also the resistance and barriers you have to overcome to obtain health care. To some extent, health care is controlled by insurance companies and you have to fight through their web of policies to obtain the care you need.
Sometime around 60 years of age you begin a normal decrease in the efficiency of your body. Although not everybody suffers from this problem, in general there is an onset of health issues including: Heart problems, pre-diabetes begins to show its ugly head, the reproduction of cells begins to fail and cancer becomes a more real possibility. Bone density becomes an issue and muscle tone withers and there is a higher danger of damage to ligaments, muscles and bones. Atrophy in muscle tone and reduction in bone density also leads to muscle and bone pain that limits your movements. Some of us also see the effects of arthritis. And, of course. there is the ugly monster lurking in the aging shadows, Dementia and Alzheimer's.
In this battle against deteriorating health, you are supposed to have strong allies in the form of doctors and health insurance companies. But in their objective to maximize profit, your health is secondary and you are constantly fighting to have treatment procedures authorized, and woe to the person that misses an insurance payment. One of the true advances in the evolution of modern society is Social Security and Medicare programs. It is the lifeline for most people in the "Retirement" stage on the New Voyages of Life.
The concept of a doctor having your health as his number one priority is fiction. All doctors are now workers in a health corporation and that corporation's main objective is maximizing profit. They have 15 minutes for a patient. During that short time, you have to be your own advocate and you better have done your research on your condition and be ready to help guide the direction of treatment.
Instead of making a diagnosis based on medical expertise, doctors, nowadays, protect themselves in at least two ways: 1) Prescribing endless tests to form a diagnosis, as opposed to applying common sense and guided testing based on experience to reach a diagnosis. This, of course, is to maximize profit, pay for expensive equipment and staffing, and maximize protection against potential legal action against them. 2) A second way they protect themselves, and maximize profit, is by specialization. Except for general practitioners, all doctors have a specialty. General practitioners are gatekeepers and their sole function seems to be to dispense pills and be the channel for specialist referrals. There seems to be a specialty for every component of your body and no decisions can be made until every specialist is consulted. A person in a "Retirement" stage of life is the access to the medical "Cash Cow" - Medicare and the Supplemental Insurance Companies. You are only as important to a doctor as the value of your ailment to be paid by Medicare and Insurance Companies. If you don't have a clear and profitable treatment, you enter a loop of endless doctor visits that result in endless prescriptions to treat identified symptoms but never to identify or treat the real medical problem.
Economics - The Beast Enemy
The second enemy that a "Retirement" man, in the "New Voyage of Life" has to fight is the Beast of Economics. For most people in this stage of life means they have to live on a fixed income. The resources that you need to live a comfortable life one day before retirement are about the same as the resources needed to live a comfortable life one day after you retire. Yet, one's income immediately gets reduced without the flexibility to supplement it. Yet everybody expects you to have a "carefree" life doing "all" the things you always wanted to do with a greatly reduced and restricted income. When working, one has limited time to do things, but adequate revenue. But the minute you retire, you have adequate time to do things but very limited and restricted revenue.
Inflation restricts your flexibility even more. It is like being boxed into a corner and the box is getting smaller and smaller by the day. The cost of medical care begins to increase exponentially, the cost of food limits what you can eat, transportation costs become prohibited and you are not only boxed in, you are isolated more and more every day. Going out to dinner used to cost about $15 per meal, but now is at least doubled, but one's income has not increased to cover these new costs. In general, since my retirement, we have seen a cumulative price increase of over 30%! That means it is costing us 30% more to live the lifestyle we had when I retired. However, my retirement plan included a 50% reduction in revenue. An income that would allow me to have a family lifestyle, although restrictive, but close to the lifestyle I had before retirement. The 30% price increase since retirement, after being partially compensated with minor increases in the Social Security payments, means that I now have over a 70% reduction in revenue from the time before retirement. Probably closer to a 75% reduction! In simple terms, there is no way we can maintain the decent style of living we had before retirement on what seems to be 25% of the revenue. Next time you see elderly people working in grocery store checkout counters, as greeters at Wall Mart, or as clerks at Mcdonalds' and other fast food restaurants, you know why.
Isolation - The Zombie Enemy
The other monster one fights in this Retirement stage in The New Voyage of Life is isolation. The monster here is a combination of distance and immobility due to limited finances, illnesses of your peer group, and the death of people of your generation. For some of us, whose jobs took us to different parts of the country, our family and friends are scattered in far-away places in a distance that is hard to breach. The cost of airfares and the cost of vehicles, fuel, and maintenance has doubled. With limited finances, one can no longer just get on a plane or drive your car to visit friends and family even if you have all the time in the world.
Isolation begins to creep upon you. First, a friend may die one day, you may not notice it or realize it, but your network of relations begins to be reduced. A few months or years later, more and more family and friends begin to die. Or, some of your friends become incapacitated or they might get dementia and can no longer communicate with you or they simply forget about you. Others friends or family might get too ill to care about conversations and you simply might not have the resources to travel to see them, or in most cases, you are too busy with doctor appointments in taking care of your own health needs to make time to travel and visit them. Your friends and family members and peers that are your age and that you rely on to socialize and communicate and discuss your interests, your fears, your desires, and your needs dwindle. And still, you don't realize there is an "Isolation Zombie" sucking away your social life.
As the network of same-age peers begins to disappear, another thing begins to happen, you begin to receive fewer and fewer invitations to family functions. It could be because they perceive you as being ill and immobile, It could be because you are becoming "invisible" to the younger generation, or it could be because they simply forgot or they don't care. Maybe they simply consider you too old and out of touch with their lives. On the other hand, you may have become less mobile and wonder less and less outside your house. You are trapped in a situation where the generation before you, aunts and uncles, are now all dead, The friends and family in your generation are reduced considerably and those still alive are less or non-communicative and the generations after you are beginning to put distance between you and them. This is what I would consider the attack of the "Isolation Zombie."
You know you are in the last stages in the "Retirement" stage of the "New Voyage of Life" and entered what Thomas Cole considered "Old Age" when you begin to be bombarded with mail from funeral homes offering discount services, mail from hearing aid companies and mail for elderly services from your community organizations like for Meals on Wheels, Community Transportation for the Elderly, brochures on Senior Housing and Retirement Homes.
By the time you reach 80 years of age, most of the people that you shared your life with are gone. The Health and Economics enemies have knocked you down and the Isolation enemy has sucked the social and family life out of you. Your children may remember to call you once in a while, and may and sometimes visit you once a year. On rare occasions, grandchildren may come and visit of their own accord, but not often. This is the time when you pass from the new stage in the Voyage of Life, "Retirement" into Cole's original last stage of Life, "Old Age."
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