Old, Older, Oldest

Barzillai the Gileadite also came down from Rogelim to cross the Jordan with the king and to send him on his way from there. Now Barzillai was very old, eighty years.

2 Samuel 19:31-32

How old is very old?  If you asked the Bible, the psalms would answer that the span of a man's life is threescore or, by reason of strength, fourscore.  Most folks run out of steam when they hit eighty, in other words.

Eighty seems to be one of those developmental pivot points, where a profound change occurs.  Life swings on a hinge, rather as it does in early adolescence.

When our daughter was in middle school, my wife and I tried to prepare ourselves by reading a book titled How To Talk So Teenagers Listen and Listen So Teenagers Talk.  The author hedged that there is no magic moment when kids become teens.  But for most girls, he explained, the transformation from playing with dolls to thinking about getting a tattoo arrives in the second semester of seventh grade.  For our family, that was right on the button.  And it was helpful to pinpoint the precise age of the transition. What a difference a semester, or a birthday, can make.

In my experience as a parish minister, caring for an aging congregation, I saw eighty as another threshold, not the passage from childhood to adolescence but the portal from old to very old   For many seniors it's the age when the option of moving to an independent living community is out of the picture, because one can no longer pass the required physical.  For elders who may have heard that retirement consists of three phases, go go, go slow, and no go, eighty marks the last stage, when your giddy-up has got up and went.

In the go go years that I volunteered as an emergency responder with the fire department (when I was in my sixties), we were frequently summoned to help when someone had fallen in their home. After eighty, many people who take a tumble won't be able to get back up without assistance.

Now that I am seventy and retired from the force, it's hard for me to imagine answering the pager for midnight calls any longer and harder still to imagine a man a decade older serving as President of the United States. It's past the demarcation line.  And perhaps the fourscore mark sheds light on the difference between Biden and Trump.  There is only four years difference between the two but during that interval from seventy-seven to eighty-one something shifts, physically and mentally.  It explains why one man, although a narcissist and a bully, appears energetic (even frenzied at times), while the other, although fundamentally decent, seems geriatric.

 

How old is too old?  Washington was 57 when he was inaugurated, while Lincoln was 52.  FDR was 51 when he ascended to the presidency and Teddy Roosevelt just 42 when he was sworn in. An argument can be made that our greatest leaders have tended to take office in mid-life.

So yes, Biden should withdraw from the race and so should Donald Trump.  Both political parties should nominate younger women and men now and in the future.  And yes, there should be mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices, just as there are for career officers in the U.S. military.

How old is too old?  I could hedge and qualify my answer but the next man who puts his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office shouldn't be any older than Barzillai the Gileadite. Eighty.