Carl H. Klaus - The Ninth Decade: An Octogenarians Chronicle

The Ninth Decade

The Ninth Decade

An Octogenarians Chronicle

Carl H. Klaus

University of Iowa Press

Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

Copyright 2021 by Carl H. Klaus

www.uipress.uiowa.edu

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Sara T. Sauers

Printed on acid-free paper

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Klaus, Carl H., author.

Title: The Ninth Decade: An Octogenarians Chronicle / by Carl Hanna Klaus.

Description: Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, [2021] | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021001152 (print) | LCCN 2021001153 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609387860 (paperback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781609387877 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH Klaus, Carl H. | Aging. | Older peopleConduct of life. | Old agePsychological aspects. | English teachersIowaBiography.

Classification: LCC HQ1061.K54 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1061 (ebook) | DDC 305.26/1 [Bdc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001152

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001153

To Jackie,
Heroine and Muse

Contents

Preface

THIS WORK IS a product of good luck and irrepressible curiosity that arrived on my eightieth birthday, eight and a half years ago. I wanted to know about life after eighty, but could find no specialized or personal books on the subject. Uncharted territory, so I decided to chronicle my eighties, also noting the experiences of other octogenariansloved ones, friends, acquaintancesand thereby produce a collective depiction of life after eighty.

Unlike daily entries in a journal, the essays in this work encompass six-month periods, from my early eighties to late eighties, each essay based on notes that I made throughout the period. For each time period, I have noted a few telegraphic subtitles that suggest the widely varied matters that most concerned me during that time, as in Eighty-Four: Decrepitude, Wisdom, Shingles, Downsizing.

Collectively the subtitles reflect challenges and pleasures I experienced during this late life marathon.

November 26, 2020

The Ninth Decade

Eighty and Before

Longevity, Leisure, Aging without Aging

FEBRUARY 2013

Im eighty going on eighty-one this coming May. Getting on in years, but I often feel as I did in my seventies, and look almost like I did back then. More surprising, I might live into the mid nineties, according to Patti, the captivating nurse who oversees the cardiac rehab where I work out on the treadmill four or five days a week. She made that astonishing conjecture when I was planning this chronicle, focused on my experience of aging. Which led me to wonder how many years I might be around to work on it. Thats when Patti projected a lifespan in the mid nineties. But just to be on the safe side, she said, youd best confine it to your eighties.

Eighty-year-olds, I was surprised to learn, are the fastest-growing demographic throughout the industrialized world. In the United States, there are more than nine million octogenarians (about one out of ten persons), and the number will rise to over fifteen million by 2025. But gerontologists have not done longitudinal studies of octogenarian life. And octogenarians themselves have written so little about their eightiesa couple of one-year journals published more than twenty years agothat the ninth decade, an exceptional period of life, is uncharted territory. To shed some light on it, I intend to produce a multi-year account of my eighties, taking into account the experience of friends and family members also in their eighties.

As for life in ones nineties, Ill leave that story to Jackie, my loving partner, who might outlast me by ten or fifteen years, thanks to her stellar condition. How else to describe the condition of someone who takes no prescribed medicine and suffers from none of the usual afflictions of aging, except for a lazy gut and a one-hour bladder? Whereas I have a sluggish thyroid, enlarged prostate, chronic kidney disease, coronary artery disease, cataracts in both eyes, hearing aids in both ears, itching on both arms and legs, Raynauds syndrome in both hands, and cant rise to the occasion without a dose of Viagra. And thats just a partial list of my so-called health issues at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Jackie, I should add, had breast cancer several years ago and got through it with verve, as if it werent a health issue at all. I, on the other hand, could hardly force a grin during my bout with Hodgkins lymphoma a couple of years ago.

More to the point, Jackies still working full time as a realtor, whereas I retired from the University of Iowa sixteen years ago. And she remembers most of her clients from the past forty years, despite a mild stroke a few years before we met, while Ive forgotten most of the students who populated my classrooms. Its not just her memory that impresses me. Its also her exercise routine, for while I need twenty minutes on the treadmill to reach my maximum speed of 3.2 miles an hour with a seven percent incline, she starts out at four miles an hour and in five minutes reaches her maximum of six miles an hour with a seven percent incline. And thats just her warm-up for fifty more minutes of other exerciseslunges, squats, sit-ups, and the like. A working mind in a working body, driven by the demands of her real estate business. So, we live apart during the week in our separate homes and come together on the weekends at my place, where she keeps in touch with her clients on a smartphone and iPad while Im still using a dumbphone and laptop.

The only work Ive been doing lately is to make my way through the annual seed catalogs, looking for new varieties to try out in my vegetable garden, then taking stock of my viable seeds from previous years, then planning what to grow in each of the seasons, and finally ordering seeds, row covers, and the like. A late winter ritual I performed for so many years it once seemed as inevitable as the rotation of the seasons, until two years ago when Hodgkins lymphoma and chemo meant that a garden was out of the question, so the catalog ritual was also out of the question, which led me to wonder what else would be out of the question. A few months later, when I was in the later stage of chemo, my upbeat oncologist regaled me with the news that he didnt see any reason why I couldnt live to be ninety-nine, which made me wonder why he didnt say one hundred. But no sooner was I in remission than he urged me to do something special, like a trip abroad sometime during the coming monthsnot, as it turned out, in celebration, but in recognition that theres a fifty percent chance of recurrence during the first year in remission, which made me wonder what had happened to my chances of reaching ninety-nine. On the other hand, now that Ive been in remission some twenty months, the odds have surely improved so much I might have a good chance of reaching one hundred or more.

How strange that Im only a few paragraphs into this piece and my thoughts keep circling around the question of how long I might live, whereas longevity rarely crossed my mind until I was beset by lymphoma and then started work on this project. Probably a result of the articles Ive been reading in the