In 30 years, the assisted suicides of people won’t be met by the furor that followed the death of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer who ended her own life with a fatal dose of barbiturates on Nov. 1.
In 30 years, the media won’t bother with stories like Gillian Bennett, an 85-year-old Canadian woman who took her own life in August using alcohol and barbiturates because she had decided not to live any longer with dementia. Upon her death, a website, deadatnoon.com, went live with an essay justifying her choice and arguing for assisted suicide. In 30 years, an explanatory website will be as unnecessary as a newspaper story, because this form of dying will be just another one of the ways that we die.
This shift will be part of the lasting legacy of the 76 million baby boomers who make up about 25 percent of the American population and who will be aging and dying in the next 20 years. A century from now, the historians of the future will not credit them as much for their boisterous 1960s counterculture as for the gray twinkle and fade in the early 21st century that forever altered the way America dies.
For a middle-aged Gen X-er like me to play in the thanatopsis sandbox like this is bittersweet. (“Thanatopsis” is a meditation on death, from William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem.) Of course, it’s untoward to point to anyone’s death, no matter how inescapable it is. The main source of the bitterness, though, is acknowledging that the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers will always overshadow me. Better than I know the contours of my historical experience, I know theirs: born into postwar prosperity, the hedonism and idealism, its psychological aftermath, and the nostalgias (The Big Chill, A Prairie Home Companion). I envied their generational mindset, the self-identity of a group that was formed in the same historical crucible, so as a senior in college in 1989, I pitched an article on “my generation” to a national magazine. Very kindly but firmly the editor, a baby boomer, refused it on the grounds that generational forms of thinking were now outré, even as he admitted getting his start in journalism by publishing a “my generation” piece in 1974. This epitomizes to me how sorry a creature the Gen X-er could be: weaned on someone else’s cultural themes, always too late to the party. (Fortunately Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland were more persistent than I was.)
All this is blunted by knowing that when (and, let’s be honest, if) I become an elderly Gen X-er, many of the sharp edges of old age will have been blasted smooth by the massive demographic cohort that has preceded me. That’s the sweet part of the bittersweetness.
In 30 years, the media won’t bother with stories like Gillian Bennett, an 85-year-old Canadian woman who took her own life in August using alcohol and barbiturates because she had decided not to live any longer with dementia. Upon her death, a website, deadatnoon.com, went live with an essay justifying her choice and arguing for assisted suicide. In 30 years, an explanatory website will be as unnecessary as a newspaper story, because this form of dying will be just another one of the ways that we die.
This shift will be part of the lasting legacy of the 76 million baby boomers who make up about 25 percent of the American population and who will be aging and dying in the next 20 years. A century from now, the historians of the future will not credit them as much for their boisterous 1960s counterculture as for the gray twinkle and fade in the early 21st century that forever altered the way America dies.For a middle-aged Gen X-er like me to play in the thanatopsis sandbox like this is bittersweet. (“Thanatopsis” is a meditation on death, from William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem.) Of course, it’s untoward to point to anyone’s death, no matter how inescapable it is. The main source of the bitterness, though, is acknowledging that the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers will always overshadow me. Better than I know the contours of my historical experience, I know theirs: born into postwar prosperity, the hedonism and idealism, its psychological aftermath, and the nostalgias (The Big Chill, A Prairie Home Companion). I envied their generational mindset, the self-identity of a group that was formed in the same historical crucible, so as a senior in college in 1989, I pitched an article on “my generation” to a national magazine. Very kindly but firmly the editor, a baby boomer, refused it on the grounds that generational forms of thinking were now outré, even as he admitted getting his start in journalism by publishing a “my generation” piece in 1974. This epitomizes to me how sorry a creature the Gen X-er could be: weaned on someone else’s cultural themes, always too late to the party. (Fortunately Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland were more persistent than I was.)
All this is blunted by knowing that when (and, let’s be honest, if) I become an elderly Gen X-er, many of the sharp edges of old age will have been blasted smooth by the massive demographic cohort that has preceded me. That’s the sweet part of the bittersweetness.
by Michael Erard, TMN | Read more:
Image: Colin Chillag, Grandma-Grandpa, 2012
