Each day, my dog Helgi and I walk about eight miles. We started on Wymore Street, in the middle of Elliott, my neighborhood, and passed by the city workers’ fuel station and dump, with the odd hint of a baseball field, where the same old boats had been parked for months, rained on and loose. Then we climbed Round Top Street, which made my legs very pretty, and boasted, like many such streets of Pittsburgh, a series of extraordinary stairs running parallel to the inclined asphalt, where once, in a snowy winter, I saw a moving van sliding helplessly down it, a tremulous ‘O’ sound coming from the mouth of its driver.
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We made a soft landing in Crafton, an isolated neighborhood whose semi-downtown, boarded up, boasts a lone business, a vacant massage parlor named Pinch Me (“Experience the Pinch”). Beyond was an expanse of forest interspersed with the bushes of huge, old houses, across whose front lawns we proceeded, taking some hill or other as our midpoint. At its summit we will now begin the long arc towards the small house situated on the far side of the slope. Because of its topography, and the presence of water and bridges everywhere, Pittsburgh neighborhoods were quite different from their neighbors, and old-timers later told me that there was really no reason to “cross bridges” – any number of bridges – to get anywhere else.
Old wooden or sometimes concrete staircases are built up the steep hills, a relic of the days when workers found it the fastest way to cross the wild instability of the city and get to a job at a mill or plant. Groundhogs sometimes live under the stairs, and so do people, and once I noticed, as I was raising my head while climbing, at the bottom of the landing of one of these stairs there was a plastic bag stuck so strangely that for a second it looked like a shrine.
Like liquid mercury, old age wobbles and slips when seen. But it has to start somewhere, at least from the bureaucracy.
in memoir BibliophobiaSara Chihaya writes about her “dispersion” – how, in her “most lost moments, I see myself disintegrating and flowing into everything and everyone, invisible and dispersed.” When I read this line, five years after I left the city, I underlined and starred it, and wrote Pittsburgh in the margin: This was the feeling I often wanted, because it would mean I could finally stop living inside my brain, and stop obeying the chronological timeline of my brain and body. That’s why I walked far into areas that were still new to me, and that’s why I started doing a ton of work, hoping to make me forget that I was sitting there in a creaky chair until it got dark again.
Of course, it’s one of the oldest things in the world that, at least in some cultures, is afraid of the passage of time. To say further, it is one of the oldest things in the world, which is feared to emerge in old age and in the category of old people. Jonathan Swift wrote, “Every man wishes to live long, but no one wishes to grow old.” In Western antiquity, writes academic William Ian Miller, old age could be viewed in one of two ways – as a glorious time of virtue and wisdom, or as “a representation of all that is abhorrent about embodied existence”.
For humor-oriented people, centuries ago, old age was “the age of phlegm.” Oldness was about “rottenness, meanness, greed, cowardice, irritability, irritability, sadness, crying, evil eyes, deafness, dripping nose, cough, baldness, falling of teeth, foul breath, loss of libido, loose flesh, forgetfulness, frequent abuse”. Opened haphazardly, Simone de Beauvoir’s book on aging reminds us of Horace’s words to an old woman: “Antiquity makes furrows in your ancient forehead… Your breasts are as loose as a mare’s legs… What a scent fills every part of her loose limbs.” Centuries later, in the 1980s, an Illinois market researcher compared aging to a “Peoria winter,” a term that somewhat shocked me, for I spent my teenage years not far from Peoria, a town that has always amazed me for the beauty of its river, post-industrial, but where winters are harsh and snowy and spare.
From my pink couch in Pittsburgh, I read this illusion of age fear, sunlight streaming down through dark wooden windows. I went to some branches of the Carnegie Library – West End, Mount Washington, Maine – to study. (One day, I combined that work with a trip to one of the Carnegie museums, where I noted feedback posted on a wall by museum visitors, in response to a request for “Your Pittsburgh Story.” “I don’t actually have one, I’m 12 years old,” wrote one visitor. Another: “I moved here and hope I move in soon.”) In my home, on stacks of books all around me. The name of a famous industrialist was printed. Pages, here so many years after his life and death. Reading on this topic felt less about assuaging a fear, but rather about trying to explore it, trying to better understand the reality of old age, which had become a vast category that was almost impossible to define.how old was sheThat question which has only one answer and which has no meaning.
My own fear had nothing to do with my body. It was a little more spread out. And I’ve read that others’ fears about aging reflect the pervasiveness and variability of aging. There was a 1974 report I found, administered by the National Council on Aging, titled The myth and reality of agingMore than four thousand people were asked to answer a series of questions about their feelings about aging. The report was actually no report. Rather, it was a condensed collection of coding categories such as:
Being 65 or older is the worst.
>65’s have brain weakness
Worse than >65 – neglected
>65-worst condition of disabled people
>65 worse – wear out
Over 65 – Loneliness is worse
>65-Worst of Bordum (sic)
And also, I noted, with some trepidation:
When and why do women get old?
older women-menopause
women old-other dead
old women-set in secrets
women look old
Distilled in this way, to the coding categories, a certain clarity shimmers. “Women look old and old.” It was an empty but mysterious, even nonsensical claim. I kind of liked it. These phrases kept running through my mind over the next few days. How old was he? Women look old. Did I feel old? Did my age coincide with what was happening to me, the way I made the tree line line up perfectly with the telephone line in Central New York? Obviously there were no answers to these questions, but as time progressed, they seemed to become sharper.
Claiming anything like old age was self-indulgent and shameful. And yet the past few years, partly because of the pandemic, have been such a strange blur that I’ve felt a lot older.
I parsed a blurry, floating data set from a decade and a half before my birth. A large number of people have identified that when a woman is “psychologically old, or she thinks or feels old, or she is worried about aging and dying,” this is when she is “old.” But a large number of people did not answer the question. That was because, it turns out, there was some fundamental confusion or disagreement about when people initially got old. Forty-one people said they thought “the average woman gets old” before the age of forty, a surprising thought in 1974, when life expectancy at birth for the average woman was about seventy-six years. Then there were a few lines of about three hundred people identifying the advent of obsolescence in the early, mid and late sixties. But the largest number of people – about a thousand – gave the following vague, correct answer: “It depends.”
Just recently, I read a statistic that more than 20 percent of Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four consider themselves middle-aged. If this was the case, then technically I wasn’t too far away from the arrival of old age, a realization that shocked me.
It is true that old age has no clear beginning. Like liquid mercury, old age wobbles and slips when seen. But it has to start somewhere, at least from the bureaucracy. In the United States, we can say that old age begins at age sixty-five – this is the time when you can start using Medicare and collecting Social Security (if you haven’t started yet). In Australia, the bureaucratic onset of old age, or when you can collect your pension, anyway, is at the age of sixty-seven, in China at the age of sixty-three (for men, at the age of fifty-five to twenty-eight), in Greece, at the age of sixty-seven (and many European countries are gradually increasing it to this number). Internally, it is more ambiguous. According to a twenty-five-year study in Germany, people tend to put off old age – the older you get, the more you think old age is still ahead of you. Speaking about that study, an academic: “Some people have such negative views about the elderly that they don’t want to associate with them…So if they’re 70, they’ll say old age starts at 75. And when they’re 75, they’ll say old age starts at 80.” Like death, the “old” bobs on the horizon, a boon to watch but never pass.
Yet it can appear suddenly and irreversibly, as in the Cynthia Ozick essay I love, which ends thus: “Your hair is graying, you are a well of tears, what you wanted to do (beauty and justice) you have not done, Papa and Mama are down to the earth, you live in panic and fear, the future shrinks and grows dark, the stories are but vapor, your The innermost longing is nothing but an old wounded pen, and God knows what it is?” Ozick was fifty years old when she wrote that essay. In Pittsburgh, if I was feeling something similar, I had less authority: I was only in my thirties. Claiming anything like old age was self-indulgent and shameful. And yet the past few years, partly because of the pandemic, have been such a strange blur that I felt much older, that what I remembered had moved far beyond the last buoy. I felt time speeding up beneath me. For many people, the world felt like it was moving fast, and the early days of the pandemic were both very far away and very close.
To be more precise, I felt as if my life had made a kind of record-skip from my late twenties to my mid-thirties. I hadn’t yet found a partner or started thinking about children; I didn’t have a “real” career yet; I was alone in this new place, juggling things together and not really having anyone to talk to about them. Apart from a few family members, no one knew I was here. A terror rose in the night that I would spend the rest of my life like this: without the shell I was once proud of myself, which I realized would depend on other people to see it through. Alone, I was thinking, there was no purpose for a conch shell.
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derive from Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old By Lucy Schiller. Copyright © 2026 by Lucy Schiller. Reprinted with permission of Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan. All rights reserved.
