Elementary, my dear: Coming face-to-face with the ‘Secrets of Old Age’

Published 9:21 am Tuesday, August 5, 2025

As my mother approached her eighties, she would occasionally sigh and say, “Oh… the secrets of old age.” But she never was explicit about what, exactly, those secrets were. I always assumed they were minor annoyances of the type that women of her generation would never refer to in polite company. The sudden appearance of a chin whisker, for instance. Or maybe an annoying bladder problem.
I also thought that “someday” she would say a bit more about those secrets, but she lived to be 97 and never did explain. It was one of many things my mother (wisely, perhaps) left me to discover for myself. And now, as my own 90th birthday peeps over the horizon, I am beginning to think that those “secrets” she referred to may well be different for each of us and are probably better left unspoken.
These days, we talk even in “mixed company” (as mom would have said) about our failing body parts, our varied medical trials and tribulations, our financial worries, even our religious and political concerns. There seem to be no “secrets” for many of us, and I wonder sometimes if our social gatherings have taken the place of the confessional or the psychiatrist’s couch. But still… old age does, indeed, present special challenges.

A different sort of secret?

I’ve also come to realize the “secrets of old age” that mom spoke of now and then may not be those whisper-in-your ear sorts of confidences that we elders are keeping to ourselves. Instead, perhaps they are “understandings” (for lack of a better word) that only manifest as we gain in years. Slowly, I have begun to suspect that those mysterious “secrets” of my mom’s will eventually be revealed — not from someone older and wiser, but as an outgrowth of my own lifetime of experience. Perhaps mom’s “secrets” were not revelations being kept from others; perhaps they were realizations that she was finally discovering for herself. Perhaps “secrets of old age” are synonymous with something akin to wisdom.
It’s only recently, for instance, that I have begun to realize that as I outlive my contemporaries — not only friends and relatives, but an entire generation — our shared memories are disappearing with them. My high school graduating class numbered 150 or so, I think, and of those, only seven or eight of us were really close. We maintained our friendship for our lifetimes, but now only two of us are left.
Milt Quan and I, though nearly 1,000 miles separate us, still talk about getting together… someday. We visit on the phone fairly frequently and give each other a hard time by email. We talk about our teenage escapades, our get-togethers over the years — our kids, grandkids… but mostly we laugh and enjoy just knowing one another through years of shared history. I don’t think we could explain it to anyone else except one of those who has gone before us. Surely Milt and I are experiencing one of the “secrets of old age” that comes to us gradually… over time.

The Secrets Yet to Come

As I think about Mom’s “secrets of old age,” something niggles at my consciousness. If shared memory is lost, what happens to “the truth of how it was” or at least to “the truth as we perceived it with those who were there with us?” Our history. What will become of it?
Even now, as we read and study and delve into the past, we are aware that we are getting only “part” of the picture. Most of us understand that two people’s observations are seldom identical in real time, much less in memory. So, what does that mean about our history? Will AI and the bots do any better at recording our day-to-day reality for posterity? Will there still be access to our words and photographs through some descendant of the computer and “the cloud?”
It’s hard enough to come to grips with our own mortality — but what of our species in its entirety and, perhaps, the record of human existence? I wonder if mom thought about that as she aged? And did she choose not to speak of it except for a soft sigh and a vague reference to secrets now and then? Certainly, it is one of the things I ponder as I come face-to-face with my own, personal “secrets of old age.”