- Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media
- Ezekiel Emanuel, pictured here with brother Rahm, says he knows when to say when.
Last Wednesday’s Tribune found columnist Mary Schmich remembering her mother’s death. “She was stooped and attached to an oxygen machine, her fingers so gnarled she could barely hold a coffee cup much less play her beloved piano.” And yet—”until very close to the end, she took pleasure in her day. . . . What I took from her is that the diminished life . . . can still be worth living.”
Schmich, however, was less interested in arguing with Zeke Emanuel’s essay than in bringing it to our attention. It “will make you talk and think,” she wrote, “not just about death but about how you want to live.” She didn’t exactly give Emanuel’s views the benefit of the doubt, but neither did she set out to put him in his place. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think Emanuel was writing off old age. I think he has an audacious idea about how to approach it. But understand that my thoughts about his essay are colored by the book I just finished.
Frankl’s book gives us two ways to think about Zeke Emanuel’s essay. “There is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them . . .” Frankl writes. “Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past.” Their accomplishments are set in stone. And Emanuel clearly understands that. But if old age offers no possibilities, why bother with it? If somebody young wants to envy his past realities, fine! But they won’t need him around for that. So we can accuse Emanuel of shrinking from old age as some inmates shrank from Auschwitz, so terrified of its rigors and cruelties that even now, long before he sets foot there, he has capitulated.
