The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.) By OLIVER SACKS

THIS IS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

LAST night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium” (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold. A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his 80th birthday — a special bottle that could neither leak nor break — he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.”

Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. My mother was the 16th of 18 children; I was the youngest of her four sons, and almost the youngest of the vast cousinhood on her side of the family. I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.

I thought I would die at 41, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude — gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude, too, that I had been able to give something back. “Awakenings” had been published the previous year.

At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”) I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”

I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever “completing a life” means. Some of my patients in their 90s or 100s say nunc dimittis — “I have had a full life, and now I am ready to go.” For some of them, this means going to heaven — it is always heaven rather than hell, though Samuel Johnson and James Boswell both quaked at the thought of going to hell and got furious with David Hume, who entertained no such beliefs. I have no belief in (or desire for) any post-mortem existence, other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still “speak” to people after my death.

W. H. Auden often told me he thought he would live to 80 and then “bugger off” (he lived only to 67). Though it is 40 years since his death, I often dream of him, and of my parents and of former patients — all long gone but loved and important in my life.

At 80, the specter of dementia or stroke looms. A third of one’s contemporaries are dead, and many more, with profound mental or physical damage, are trapped in a tragic and minimal existence. At 80 the marks of decay are all too visible. One’s reactions are a little slower, names more frequently elude one, and one’s energies must be husbanded, but even so, one may often feel full of energy and life and not at all “old.” Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life.

When my time comes, I hope I can die in harness, as Francis Crick did. When he was told that his colon cancer had returned, at first he said nothing; he simply looked into the distance for a minute and then resumed his previous train of thought. When pressed about his diagnosis a few weeks later, he said, “Whatever has a beginning must have an ending.” When he died, at 88, he was still fully engaged in his most creative work.

My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

I am looking forward to being 80.

Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of “Hallucinations.”

GETTING A HEAD START ON OLD AGE

Watching me trying on my mother's silk suits before the mirror, Payson said, 'are you doing your old thing now?' And and I said, 'yes, why not get a head start lest it catch up with me unawares?'

There are many times during the day, catching a glimpse of my body and face in the mirror, I am reminded (but not troubled) by my aging. I had a week before I started on my conscious aging process when a sight of myself in a photograph (like the kind I posted earlier wearing my mother's clothes) sent me into paroxysms of despair and depression before I realized I had to face it head on instead of letting it fester inside me subconsciously.

MY MOTHER THE POWER HOUSE

Of course, what I said about my mother in my last blog is not the whole truth. As I age, I admire my mother more and more for the way she lives her life. At 91, she is still very independent -- runs her own household with a cook, a maid, a cleaning guy, a gardener and a driver; she buys her own rations in a very organized way so that she is never out of any supplies; she is involved in every aspect of her life, and engaged with it fully. every winter her garden is easily the best in the neighborhood -- people often stop and take photos of the flowers; her house is clean as a whistle. It is painted and polished inside and out almost every year; just a few months ago she had someone upholster all the furniture in the house. now, in mango season, she makes sure the mangos are off the four trees in the backyard before the neighbors get to them, and distributed equally to all the many family members. and occasionally she still   arranges flowers in vases for her room.
I can only hope that I am just a fraction of what she is when I am 91!

MY MOTHER THE DRAGON LADY

I notice that my last post said nothing about my mother so let me make amends here. I don't want to be like my mother in ways that I can help it. I suppose that is what evolution is about -- learning from your parents mistakes. I suppose what I consider my mother's greatest mistake is her inability to see things from any but her own point of view. There are many others: wanting everyone in her life to be a 'yes' person, a sycophant, and then complaining that no one loves her. She can be a Dragon Lady, and in my life I have always avoided women who are into their own power. But for those women who have had such mothers, I offer hope. After my father's death in 2007 (I adored . . . no, adore him -- more of how dead people can be alive for us, later), I vowed to love my mother unconditionally. As she grows more and more lonely in her old age, I call her daily, visit her as often as I can, and love her when I am with her. She has said her mother didn't know how to love and she inherited it from her -- my mother has never been physical, but the last time I visited her she actually lifted her hand and placed it on my arm -- the closest she has come to making a loving gesture! Yes, I know a few people like that in addition to her. How sad it is.

SOME MORE ABOUT MY MOTHER AND AGING

There, you can see a little bit more of the dress here. when you are about to be 65, like I am, you can't avoid noticing (mirrors are not kind!) how your face and body lose their contours, and you begin to look like a bag. I generally try to put a good face on it by wearing jeans, or black, and leaving my hair open -- partially because I have always done it, but also because hair framing your face makes you look a bit more 'girlish.' But no matter what I do or wear (I haven't colored my hair for tens of years now and am not about to), I can't escape the face of my aging. What you can't escape you have to turn around and face and eventually, embrace. this is my task now. It isn't easy, but one trick is looking at yourself as you look now with eyes grown even dimmer twenty years from now. I bet twenty years from now when I look at this photo I will think I looked pretty good. 

BECOMING MY MOTHER, NO! LOOKING LIKE HER

These days Dhani Ram, our local tailor, is here in the house, altering the silk, crepe de chine punjabi suits (5 of them) that my mother gave me on my last visit to her. I am wearing one of there, here:They are not clothes I would normally wear -- it's not my style -- but I have really enjoyed wearing the lightweight clothing and the feel of the luxurious silk. I am looking like my mother today -- something I have resisted over and over to no avail. Can't see much of the dress in this photo I took in the photo booth, but a little bit of the floral kameeze. I have made the necklace, by the way.

COFFEE, CHOCOLATE, GLORIOUS LAZINESS AND WONDERFUL ENERGY

I never drink coffee because it always makes me very acidic and bloated. Once this winter when I started taking an ounce of Payson's morning coffee and diluting it with a lot of water and or milk, I had a dream that made me stop taking it completely. I say to someone in my dream, Socrates had his hemlock and I have my coffee. I interpreted it as : coffee is going to kill me! I say the same thing when I get on a roll of eating chocolate. Well, I have had four days of  doing very little of what I usually do, just lying about, reading, or not even that, embroidering, cuddling, watching the tube. I had thought, my brain is tired (it was, from too much research and making notes on the research), my lungs are giving me trouble (they were), I need a rest (I did). But this morning I had an urge for coffee like you wouldn't believe and whenever I have an urge that's so strong, I indulge. I went to the kitchen (our cook's away on leave) and made myself a cup (not an ounce or a hemi demi cup but a whole one) of coffee just the way I like it -- with milk and honey and yum! scrum! AND I've been at my desk all morning, quite stoked with energy and happy to be alive and doing things like babbling here!

so, I shall resume, hemlock or not. I will not drink it regularly, as a habit, but as medicine. That's the way to indulge in one's vices. Speaking of vices, I have another one -- playing electronic backgammon!  But instead of playing it the whole day ( I can, sickeningly) I limit myself to three games (at a time!).