About a decade ago at my annual physical, before my beard had more pepper than salt and hadn’t quite turned to snow, my doctor told me, “You’re aging gracefully.” Looking back, I think that meant I’d managed the biggest challenge of my 50s — not dropping dead of a heart attack — and had controlled well the usual life and health issues an asthmatic man faced in the first five decades of his life.

Now nearing the end of my 60s and having retired two years ago, I’ve been thinking more about what it means to age gracefully. Since I’m a writer and a retired Homer News reporter and editor, I thought, huh, maybe I could turn this into a column. And here we are.

My cohort of silver citizens makes up a sizable percentage of the Southern Kenai Peninsula population. According to figures from South Peninsula Hospital, of the 15,575 people in the SPH Service Area from Ninilchik south, almost 23% of us are age 65 and older. Include people 55 and older, and that percentage rises to almost 40%, or nearly 6,000 seniors. That’s about the same number of people who live in the city of Homer.

We’ve been called the Silver Tsunami because of our economic and social impact, especially in health care. That might explain how the Bartlett Street neighborhood has turned into a medical campus, our own little version of Anchorage’s medical district. Most seniors now are the Baby Boomer generation, the demographic group that has been wagging the tail of the dog since the 1960s. I know: You’re sick of us.

In looking at the impact of seniors, I think we have to also consider those other 9,000 residents of the southern peninsula. The big dream houses we build for our retirement drive up the cost of housing for less-wealthy neighbors. The jobs we haven’t yet given up slow advancement for workers in their 30s and 40s. Seniors need our younger friends, not just to make our coffee, but to care for us when we’re sick, to stock goods at the grocery stores, to repair our homes, plow our driveways, and do the hard job of keeping this city running.

Oh, and though sometimes there can be gaps between generations, I’ve come to discover I like being with younger people. Last year I did a mentorship-coaching gig at KBBI Public Radio where one day a week I hung with reporter Simon Lopez and former news director Jamie Diep. Jamie left in late January to take a job with KTOO in Juneau. At a going-away gathering, I told them, “You taught me a lot. Thanks.” I meant it.

As this column evolves, I’ll look at issues of aging and talk to other elders about how they’re aging (or not aging) gracefully. First, I want to write about what aging means to me.

Here’s the thing that puzzles me: I don’t feel old. Sure, my body feels old. Every morning I wake up with a dozen irritating pains I have to shake off. My mind, the essence of my personality, doesn’t feel old. Sometimes I still think of myself as that 30-something person who has just started to figure out life. I feel like a kid. I see the world as full of wonder and surprise. Nature still astounds me. People still astound me. I find joy in the call of a raven or the glint of hoar frost on pushki.

Though I have moments of fuzziness — why did I come into this room? — my brain remains sharp. Sometimes I guess the daily Wordle in two steps. Liberated from the daily grind of writing news stories, my fiction has started to flow. (Like the molasses man, it has taken some time to warm up.) I still haven’t figured out retirement, but it’s starting to make more sense. My stock answer when asked is, “It’s a work in progress.”

And yet, I have all these years of experience stacked up in my brain. Aging has warped my understanding of time. This may sound weird, but I feel timeless, as if I exist not just in this moment, but in all the moments from birth to the present. It is as if my life is a martini glass, a glass narrower at the bottom then the top, and as I have aged, the vodka of memory fills it up and gets thicker.

That glass of memory will overflow some day, and when that happens, well, I will die. Aging gracefully eventually means dying gracefully. The hard truth of being an elder means we have more of our life behind us than ahead of us. I’ll also look at that, because I don’t think we talk about death enough, and I have a few thoughts.

So forward, because that’s all we can do, and follow me as I contemplate what I think will become the most amazing phase of my life.

Michael Armstrong worked at the Homer News for 23 years before retiring in 2022. Reach him at wordfolk@gmail.com or follow him on Bluesky at maarmstrong.bsky.social.