How fear of dying drives elders to their creative bestTHE CREATIVE
AGE (Avon, 2000)
Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D. Reviewed by T. George Harris
Not many books about old age and fear of death tend to boost my
mood, but Gene Cohen's The Creative Age has me singing in the shower and
chuckling even at Internet jokes. Being a white-headed wrinklie, as
Australians call us old folks, I now feel the laughs bubbling up the way
they have most of my 76 years. Why? Well, Cohen brightened my life--by
putting me back in touch with my fear of death.
Millions of us are living 30 years longer than we did a hundred
years ago, and the data suggest that just in my lifetime we've been given
a 14-year bonus in productive activity. Our species is experimenting with
lifespan. Here we are playing in overtime, with damn few dentures, more
health and energy than any cohort our age ever had. But our bodies wear
down and cramp up, aggravating reminders that the whistle will soon blow
to end the game. We tense up with anxiety and nocturnal panic, wake from
nightmares at 2:29a.m., roused by fear-moved bowels, fall into
depression, lose concentration and turn edgy each time memory hides a
name or a fact just when we have to have it.
So we have to turn tombstone terrors into creative energy, urges
Cohen. We start to get liberated, if ever, only by a "dramatic, though
often overlooked, change in the way we think about death." Shifting from
the abstract to the concrete, death changes "from something that happens
to something that will happen." Only when we look death in the
eye--whatever words work for you--and come to terms with our mortality do
we discover a creative new freedom, Cohen reports. As the founding
director of the National Institute of Mental Health's Institute for
Aging, he's looked into cases enough to dig out the subtle stuff buried
under death denials. That's why the book pays off solidly on the promise
of its subtitle: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of
Life.
My heart attack last June didn't teach me much. No life review, no
out-of-body trip. Five days in intensive care, plus months of
healthy-heart coaching, took me back into the health movement I'd helped
found with American Health magazine back in 1982. Raised on Kentucky ham
and fried chicken, I've become a 76-year-old body puritan reduced to tofu
and swimming a mile a day, slowly, behind the white-haired ladies.
Survival became the only absolute. The ruthless concentration it takes to
write anything, or do most things, became a form of original sin, a dirty
ego. So what was life good for?
Cohen's third chapter, "Transition and Transformation," took me
into flashback memories of World War II when I was a forward observer
from Omaha Beach to Bastogne, and went on to witness the liberation of
Ohrdruf, a concentration camp. I learned to "go out dead" when I knew,
without quibble, that the odds on coming back were thinner than I was. By
letting go, not hanging on to life, I fell into relaxation like a
meditation response. That consciousness helped cut away the underbrush of
life, set up a slouching nonchalance that eased me through magazine
startups, high-risk projects and even race riots. But late in life,
especially after a heart event, I lost my comfortable sense of
mortality.
Data argue that we elders have easier access to our unconscious, to
productive dreams, than most busy grown-ups. In Denial of Death, the
classic by Ernst Becker, the author argued that most art, and indeed
civilization itself, comes from our struggle to transcend our mortal
limits. What I know is I'd lost my old humor partner, death, but with
Cohen's help we're hanging out together again and we know that a workable
idea or a good joke is more important than extended tofu.
T. George Harris is the former editor of Psychology Today, American
Health, Harvard Business Review and Spirituality & Health.
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