Learning how to age is difficult

The Wall Street Journal, which does a fine job keeping me abreast of how the other half lives, recently published an enlightening report suggesting that not all is sublime in the paradise inhabited by the nation’s aging moneyed class.

If you didn’t see the story, published in the Weekend Journal, it tells of the travails of a growing portion of the country’s wealthier citizenry who are having a difficult time finding personal fulfillment in their senior years and in reconciling this whole ugly aging business. While the rest of us might have muddled through our own midlife crises, emerging, if we were lucky, with enough common sense or wisdom to at least accept the inevitability of aging, many rich folks are suffering full-blown second midlife crises that are hauntingly familiar to their first.

They may not be able to stop the aging process, the thinking goes, but they can damn well marshal their considerable financial resources in an effort to make believe it’s not actually happening to them. As one 60-ish woman lamented in the article, “I didn’t anticipate I’d be so aware of getting older.”

Among the well-to-do, the article says, age denial is causing seniors to seek fulfillment in the most unlikely ways. An increasing number of grandparents are roaming Europe on rail passes like twentysomething Bedouins and ridding themselves of spouses who represent the unsatisfying “Is this all there is?” lives they long to escape.

For one woman in the story, who is “trying to figure out what to do with my life” at the age of 72, a recent inheritance has allowed her to indulge her youthful fantasies and hold the appearance of age at bay. She booked a vacation at Club Med and an appointment with a plastic surgeon, who will inject fat into her lips to improve her chances of getting dates.

Not content to rock away their sunset years at lakeside cottages or to ramble humbly around the country in an RV, affluent 60- and 70-year-olds are jumping onto Harleys in record numbers these days and seeking the meaning of life out on the open road – “Easy Rider” for the disenfranchised geriatric set. The Journal, citing the American Academy for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, reported that people 65 and older now account for one in seven face-lifts. Rod Stewart’s record company is even trying to get the 59-year-old rocker on the cover of AARP magazine, but the aging minstrel reportedly is “in denial” about finally acknowledging his graying audience.

As I read this intriguing account of our nation’s age-defying seniors, though, I felt as if some key ingredients were missing in their life-fulfilling quests. I was reminded of all the elderly people I’ve interviewed over the years who had enjoyed long – sometimes exceedingly long – and satisfying lives. Whenever I asked them their secrets, they never once mentioned Botox or condos in the tropics or quixotic jaunts to find their misplaced selves. Often they would talk of God, or of some unnamed spiritual power beyond their mortal existence that helped relieve the burden in the toughest of times.

For some, it was also the ability to laugh, at themselves and their abundant foibles, that got them through.

But at the center of each and every contented life, without exception, was family. More than anything, needing the love of family and being needed in return was the anchor that had always assured them they would never really be adrift for long.

You can’t buy that kind of fulfillment, no matter how much money you have, and you get to keep your hard-earned wrinkles, too.