The Old and the Young

The American society today is obsessed with youth.

Everywhere you look, it's another advertisement for a product to make you look younger.  The anti-aging creams, the wrinkle-smoother, stay fit to look younger, botox, Demi Moore - at 40 (or is it 50 now?) and still looking good!  We shuffle our elderly into special homes, where they stay out of sight, in their own communities.  We are losing the wisdom of the years, and we are that much more afraid of old age and death because it is much easier to lock them in the hospital bed, the old folk's home, the closed casket. 

Now we are a society obsessed with youth.  We compliment those celebrities who have managed to fight the look of age for the longest - who's still 50 and looking fabulous in their 20-year-old body, achieved through surgery, chemicals, and loads and loads of money.

This is the age of the youth industry.

Of course, youth has also been the highest indication of beauty.  Even the plainest woman, with her smooth skin and bright eyes, can attract the eye.  What does it say about our society then - are we obsessed with beauty, and so obsessed with youth?  Or is it really death which we fear?

As a child, my family briefly lived in Lafayette, California.  I remember, just behind the house of a close friend of mine, was a giant cemetery.  I remember peering out from her bedroom window and staring at the rows and rows of white and grey tombstones spread over that hill.  They looked like little signs in the ground, there to remind the living that they, too, once walked their dreams upon this earth.

Here lies Johnny, father, son, and brother. 

Here lies Meredith, the kindest of souls and a loving wife.

Rest in peace, dear Paul.
You will be missed, my Adrienne.

Such dull, empty words.  In the end, everyone is loved, kind, missed, in peace.  An expensive casket to seal a rotting body, hiding its stench and the feast of maggots and worms.  We need our painted wood, our marble.

Where is the beauty of life, returning to the earth from which we were first nourished?  From the earth grew the plants our mothers consumed, bringing it to the womb in which we were parasites, taking.  taking.  taking.  We all forget that it is the necessary balance, for us to someday feed back all we have taken from.  Our earth and our mothers.  Instead, we stave off death.  We fight off age.  We are living longer and enjoying life more, and it seems the longer we are alive, the more daunting death can become.

So now, where does that leave us?  I grew up in a Chinese family, and like many Chinese families I know, my grandparents stayed with their children and raised their grandchildren.  They've been an integral part of my life, living in my parents' and my aunt's house since I was a little tyke.  They walked my cousin and me to preschool every day, cooked the meals, and carried me everywhere.  How many children, now, grow up with barely any contact with grandma and grandpa? 

They are too much a reminder of what is coming.  We aren't giving back our bodies.  We want to stay alive, we want to keep taking.

Death scares me, until I remember that there is nothing to be feared.  We did not feel pain and hunger when we did not exist.  We did not feel joy, achievement, or love.  We are participating in the ultimate cycle and balance of our universe.

Sometimes that isn't enough.  I wonder about me, how I would be in old age. 

Will I, too, begin to panic when old age begins to settle in?