Paul Collins

A long time ago, in the swinging 60s, when the world was so much younger and the possibilities of tomorrow loomed as large as the promise of a new day dawning, a pretty young blond Welsh girl named Mary Hopkin, a protégé of Paul McCartney, had a hit song called “Those were the days.” Produced by McCartney, it was a commercially salable song with a catchy melody and touching lyrics. Well, one would expect nothing less of a song that was arranged and produced by McCartney. In a soft and lilting voice, the singer lamented the passing of the years, and those golden moments that she thought would never fade away singing,, “Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end, we’d sing and dance forever and a day.” However, as McCartney’s bandmate, George Harrison also once said in song, “All things must pass. None of life’s strings can last.” Both songs were indeed a case of art imitating life.

Today, in the real world, legions of baby boomers find themselves looking at their fading youth through life’s rearview mirror as they step over the threshold of senior citizenship. In 1945, the United States and its allies came home from World War II victorious. Once home, their priority was to reclaim the years that they had lost while fighting a war that had to be won. They got married, and had children. In fact, 76 million babies were born between 1946 and 1964; hence the label, the baby boomer generation.

This group that still remains as the largest segment of our population, reshaped and defined American society for over five decades. And now, they are aging and their ranks are thinning. Now, their magic youth is like an old used car that has too many miles on it to keep up on the super highway of a modern world that is careening along at lighting speed. The sobering reality is that unless they are very lucky, they are entering a stage of life that sees them running down through a gauntlet where they are, or will be at some point soon, confronting a set of serious and daunting health and financial challenges.

Today, Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, killing 100,000 people each year. The ones that it takes are our parents, our grandparents, our spouses, our siblings and our neighbors. Its victims are not merely statistics, rather, they are people. They are the people who we love. This fatal and progressive brain disorder robs people of who they are. To put it another way, Alzheimer’s is a thief that steals those who we love away from us forever. I know, because this heinous and insidious disease has touched my own family.

That being said, Alzheimer’s, and Dementia have evolved to become the defining malady for baby boomers everywhere as they age. Parkinson’s disease is another disease that largely effects the elderly. Today, approximately 5.6 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s, and this number is projected to skyrocket to a staggering 16 million by 2050, and there is still no cure. While Parkinson’s can be treated to the degree where people can live and function with it, Alzheimer’s is a frightening one way journey from which there is no return ticket. It’s a world away from forgetting what you did with your car keys or misplacing your eye glasses.

I look around me today, and I see how the world has changed. Some days it feels as though technology has stripped us of our ability to actually sit down and talk to people face to face. While technology is wonderful, and I am just as addicted to my smart phone as everyone else is these days, I can see that, as a society, we are drifting into the mire of being increasingly socially challenged. We’ve evolved to where we find it far easier, and far more preferable, to text, tweet or e-mail someone rather than to talk to them face-to-face and make direct eye contact. So in some respects, technology, for as amazing as it is, is also a sad by-product of the steady erosion of social skills in the 21st century. My point here is that perhaps we can do something to help those who raised us, and who made it possible for us to realize our own dreams and allowed us to grow up with all of the freedom and bounty that make us the greatest nation on Earth. Perhaps we can turn off our cell phones, tablets and PCs and talk to those aging people for whom life has become a very scary, confusing and isolated place. Maybe we can, just for a little while, step away from our own careers, our own wants and needs, open our eyes, and see the plight of those who now face a string of tomorrows that are uncertain, and that are now little more than ghostly shadows of their yesterdays. Maybe we can try to understand this generation that is fading away and slipping through our collective fingers day by day. For as hokey and naïve as I may sound saying this, maybe we can be there for them as they were there for us. Maybe we can show them how we love them before it’s too late. Think about it. Do something about it, for without them….there’d be no us.

Paul Collins is a freelance writer from Southborough, Massachusetts.