Month: April 2023

April 2023

By Richard Fleming

Growing old is confusing and confounding. And it can be peculiar.

For me, an odd part of the journey is how my curiosity has evolved in a morbid direction. The further I travel down the road, the more interest I have in obituaries. I want to know who is dying, how old they were when they passed, and what led to their demise. Don’t get me wrong, I do not spend oodles of time perusing death announcements. A wide array of other subjects – social, political, medical, cultural, and others – intrigue me more. But I must acknowledge my curiosity about who is dying is expanding.

There are many opportunities to indulge this interest. I receive a quarterly newsletter for retired physicians of The Permanente Medical Group, where I worked for three decades. It offers many interesting articles but I first look to the back of each issue to review who has died. I want to see if I recognize any names. I look at their year of retirement to see how long they lived after hanging up their stethoscope. Only after reviewing the death announcements do I delve into the newsletter’s other pieces.

I also receive a quarterly newsletter from the Topeka High School Historical Society. My approach is the same. I first turn to the “In Memorium” list which is thankfully arranged by year of graduation. I look at who died from my class and from the classes a few years ahead and behind. I usually know some of the names. Only later do I digest the newsletter’s other articles.

Friends contact me on occasion to let me know of a mutual acquaintance who died. And newspapers are always a rich source of obituaries for well-known people – politicians, celebrities, or other notables.  

Each time a colleague, classmate, or friend dies, it feels like a chapter of my life has ended. When public figures I grew up with pass on, it feels like part of my past has slipped away.

Deaths of others lead me to ponder the brevity of my stay on planet Earth.

I feel fairly confident I’m not the only senior whose interest in peeking at obituaries is peaking. It is an understandable phenomenon. We older folks live in uncertain times. The Grim Reaper might move into the neighborhood anytime. Once he does, we know he will come knocking on our door some day. This is inevitable. For me, scanning death lists feels like a useful way to audit the Reaper’s activities. It helps me anticipate what lies ahead. I become a one-person Neighborhood Watch program focused on threats to my own mortality.

Deaths carry different implications, depending on the person’s age. When I learn of people in their 90s or older dying, it offers a small measure of comfort. Every death is sad. But when a person succeeded in traveling far down the road, their passing feels less threatening. It offers hope the knock on my door may be decades away. And when people in this age group die, I’m not as curious about the cause of death. “Old age” suffices.

But when I learn of people dying in their 60s, 50s, or even younger, it gives me pause. It makes me nervous. Am I am living on borrowed time? I need to know the cause of death, to understand why the person died at such a young age. If their death was due to an accident, it feels less threatening somehow. But when someone younger than me dies from a medical problem, like cancer or a heart attack, it generates concern. On a strictly rational level, I know the death of a young person has no bearing on when the Grim Reaper will come for me. But it makes me wonder if my odds are worsening. I do a quick review of any symptoms I have recently experienced, just in case.

A few days ago, I was startled by a sharp knock on the front door. Who could it be? Why didn’t they ring the doorbell? But after a moment’s reflection, my anxiety dissipated. I had just read about Al Jaffee, the lead cartoonist for Mad Magazine, dying at age 102. I loved that magazine when I was a teenager. Since Al Jaffee had lived that long, I had no reason to worry about who was knocking. Sure enough, when I opened the door there was a FedEx package lying on the porch, and I breathed a small sigh of relief. Events like this confirm my curiosity about obituaries is not that weird after all.

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April 2023

By Richard Fleming

One of the keys to successful aging is maintaining a positive attitude. A sunny disposition. We need to seek any rays of light piercing the darkening clouds, even if they are few and far between. Thankfully, at least one sunbeam shines brighter for older folks than for the young. We should value it. We should cherish it. I am referring, of course, to the ease of decluttering.

Many activities of daily living become harder as we age. Cooking. Cleaning. Fixing broken items. Maintaining our health. Driving. Exercising. But getting rid of unused, unneeded items becomes much easier.

Clutter is the bane of everyday existence. High-quality medical studies confirm living in a cluttered environment creates mental stress. For example a study in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2011 found: “Multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout the visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system.” Translated into English, clutter causes anxiety.

Clutter also adversely affects physical health. An untidy home disrupts sleep patterns and lowers energy levels. While no study has examined a messy environment’s effect on life expectancy, clutter increases stress hormone release. This leads to increased blood pressure and worse immune function. We can reasonably conclude that more clutter today means fewer tomorrows.

But for young and middle-aged people, getting rid of rarely-used items can be difficult and stressful. What if they give away something they may need one day? Like those sneakers they bought 15 years ago. The last time their feet occupied those shoes might have been 12 years ago, but it is always possible the urge to jog may arise. What about the pressure cooker languishing at the back of a kitchen shelf for the last two decades? It might be needed to whip up a pot of beef stew a few years from now. And that can of caulk that has lived on a garage shelf since the Bush Administration. Bush the senior, that is. The caulk may be useful some day, even though it’s probably hardened into a rock.

I feel sympathy for the non-elderly living among us. For them decluttering is so challenging books are written about it. TV shows explore techniques to tidy up and dispose of unneeded items. Experts offer advice on how to get rid of useless stuff occupying space in cabinets, closets, garages, attics, under staircases, and on random table tops. Most importantly for the younger generation, decluttering techniques are offered by respected influencers on TikTok and Instagram.

Thankfully decluttering is – or should be – a cinch for us Boomers. We can simply and safely ignore the various “rules” experts proclaim should guide the decluttering process. Many of these recommendations use time-based criteria for deciding what to eliminate from one’s home. For example, there is the popular “5 By 5 Rule” which says if you don’t anticipate using something in the next five years, don’t spend more than five minutes thinking about whether to get rid of it. Maybe this rule is helpful for Millennials and Gen X’ers. (Gen Z has not had enough time to build up their clutter inventory.) But when it comes to us older folks, five years is overly optimistic. For me at age 71, if I don’t anticipate using something in the next two years, it is time to say goodbye. And the older I get, the shorter the time window will become. If I make it to my early 80s, one year will be more than adequate as a cutoff. If I see 85, a six-month horizon will be generous.

But I understand that future usability is not the only factor in decluttering. There are items you may want to keep despite knowing you will never need them. Like your high school diploma. Or an old but familiar sweater. That ancient yellowed newspaper clipping where you were mentioned as a participant in some civic event. Emotional ties to such things run deep. I get it. But these things are cluttering up our lives.

The way to reduce anxiety about getting rid of keepsakes is to think of our poor children and grandchildren. If we’re being honest, we know they have absolutely no interest in holding onto our mementos. They will remember and love us after we’re gone, but not because they inherited a bunch of junk they have no use for. They will remember and love us for the lives we shared and the love we provided. Actually, our kids and grandkids will probably love us a little more after we die if they don’t have to spend weeks cleaning stuff out of our homes. This is why my wife keeps telling me to start clearing the garage. So our kids and grandkids don’t have to.

Photographs fall into a special category. Our heirs may want to hold onto them. But they are not interested in inheriting boxes of print photos. They have no enthusiasm for photo albums. They only want digital images on a thumb drive. So my recommendation is to digitize all those family photographs from the past century. If doing this is too challenging, your kids will be happy to explain the process. Or they can use social media to identify someone nearby who can do it for you.

To wrap up, decluttering is the key to a healthy, happy, long retirement. We don’t need books to explain why. We don’t need influencers to explain how. We just need to get started, and fairly soon. While we still can. At least that’s what I keep telling myself when I think about our garage. There are times I even start walking towards it, but then I recall the 30-year accumulation of clutter in there. At that point I usually find several good reasons to veer off in another direction. My personal experience is forcing me to accept one other crucial fact about aging. Growing old has little impact on the eminently human trait known as procrastination.

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