Westneat: Aging a fact, not a scandal

Elway said watching Biden was painful in part because it was so familiar. Elway noted he’s been experiencing for himself how aging can derail the neural processor.

“I’ll be lying in bed, and the marble circles around and finally drops in the hole,” he said. “Aha! There’s that name I was trying to remember.”

For me, watching Biden reminded me a bit of my father. My dad just turned 95. He talks frequently about how he finds it hard at times to keep pace with conversations, such as when his three sons are heatedly debating. (OK, arguing.)

He was a college professor. He’ll form an insightful thought that he wants to share, but by the time the thought moves to his tongue, it feels too late, he told me. He’s still healthy enough to live alone. But his synapse speed has slowed.

This ebbing is as natural a part of the life process as learning how to walk, according to the Seattle Longitudinal Study, a research project on aging that’s been going since 1956 at the University of Washington. Looking at the same people over decades, that study found that baseline cognitive functioning tends to improve for most people from young adulthood to midlife, but then declines slightly starting in the 60s. The first signs really are those missing nouns. Then it typically progresses downward into the 80s and beyond.

Aging is not a disease, the study reminds, and it manifests differently in everyone. But it’s also universal and undefeated.

I ran into the complexity of aging and politics as a political reporter back in the 1990s. I was doing a lifestyle feature on a congressman, Rep. Jack Metcalf of Whidbey Island, when I noticed in interviews that he would repeat himself without realizing it. Or he’d have to be prodded about what we’d been talking about.

Metcalf had already announced he was retiring at the end of his term. Still, I was faced with a choice. I could allow him to finish out his term without comment. Or I could write the news, which was that a congressman was faltering and no longer up to the job.

I’m conflicted about it to this day, but I chose the former. He was a public official, so people had an interest in knowing. But he hadn’t done anything wrong. Plus he also had already done the hardest part behind the scenes. He had faced the existential question — how old is too old? — and answered it for himself.

After he was out of office, Metcalf said he had Alzheimer’s. He died a few years after that. I’ve always appreciated what his family wrote in his obituary: “His last years were marked by a rapid decline due to Alzheimer’s disease, and his death is both a loss and a blessing for his family and friends.” A loss and a blessing. That’s the most incomprehensible thing about growing old — that it can be both.

I’ve already opined that I think both parties need to get honest with themselves and drop their nominees — Trump because he’s corrupt, and Biden because he’s infirm. The official GOP denial of reality about Trump is a travesty; the question now is whether Democrats join them in a parallel blinkered state.

I say that even though one flaw is far more egregious than the other. There’s no scandal, after all, about time’s toll. It only becomes one if you refuse to acknowledge it.