Christianity Today July 15, 2026 7 min signal 2026-07-15

Old people aren't doomed to misery

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

July 14, 2026

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Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Flatiron Books

Every week, our church prays for old people. Our elderly parishioners beg relief from their back and knee pains. They ask God to heal friends suffering from dementia and heart disease. They plead for their parents, now in their 90s and breaking their hips, their landlines riddled with robocalls. The younger worshipers among us have prayer requests, too—for a grandmother who can’t afford the home help she needs. For a father disabled by his medication’s side effects.

America is aging. It’s a stark demographic reality apparent in our small congregation, where as many congregants are caring for elderly relatives as for young children. And it’s the impetus behind the new book Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old, out this summer from writing professor Lucy Schiller.

“Exploration” is right. Aging Out is discursive and unfocused, offering not so much an argument as a vibe. The vibe is a bleak, gray, acronymic mass of Medicare and illness and scams, the systems and susceptibilities that await all of us as we age. Schiller accurately calls this the “aging industrial complex.” In her wandering, she does come across some interesting histories, including the origins of old-people advocacy group the Gray Panthers. She makes smart observations about the pathologization of loneliness—quickly “becoming a billable entity for everyone”—and the contradictions of AARP, “an organization [that] can be both a humanitarian force and an insurance broker.” But those takes often peter out on the page, interrupted by a little cursory reporting and a lot of personal angst.

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It’s this angst that consumes the book, more so than its painstaking explanations, for example, of the differences between assisted living facilities and nursing homes. Under the angst is grief. When Schiller’s grandmother Anita died of COVID-19, the writer balked at how age seemed to render her loss less significant. Anita’s advanced years, Schiller writes, were “a neat way to make sense of” her passing as “less painful, less scary, less incomprehensible.”

That flippancy feels wrong to Schiller. As it should! Lurking underneath Aging Out is a sense that our “personal fear of oldness” makes us shut people away, lest we have to reckon with the debility and decline coming for us. We’re disgusted and resentful in equal measure—those boomers with their wrinkled faces and wispy hair, their Social Security checks and high rates of home ownership. Why shouldn’t they sacrifice themselves for the sake of everyone else’s economy?

But Schiller doesn’t find her way to a full-throated affirmation of dignity (old people matter!). Nor does she land on a specific call to action about caregiving or community. To be fair, the book never promises that. It’s an “exploration,” not a polemic or a policy proposal.

But even an exploration should have a destination. Instead, Schiller gets stuck. She wanders through Pittsburgh walking her dog and thinking, drives around listening to Bruce Springsteen and thinking, sits at home on a pink couch thinking. “There were some days I felt I couldn’t bear it,” she writes: “the way I seemed scared, in so many ways, of slowly, inarguably joining the future.”

At least she’s self-aware. But sometimes, that self-awareness is tedious to read. For instance:

I mostly just wanted to stop thinking about myself—to return to the diffuse self I liked to be. To not be frustrated and bored by pain, and subjectivity. To be multiple, in the way that so many of our structures are able to be. But humans, no.

Still, fair enough. None of us want to be trapped in our own minds, separated from everyone around us. I’ve felt this way before myself, “sitting inside my own brain without respite, becoming more and more annoyed at my own patterns and limitations and idiocies.”

But the cure for this isn’t more rumination. It’s leaving the pink couch. For Schiller, it would mean interacting more generously with the admittedly awkward neighbors she meets at the dog park, or having a conversation with the resident whose room she won’t enter at one of the care facilities she visits. The book’s dearth of reporting feels not so much like a failure of journalism as a failure of relationship.

Schiller is an obvious introvert. And she’s right that the loneliness discourse discounts the pleasures of solitude for people of all ages. But just as obvious is that she isn’t happy in her isolation. “I had descended into the strange subterranean structures of aging, almost as a way to avoid the contemporary world,” she admits. As birthdays pass her by, she fears that “my loneliness, or whatever it was, that black hole, would be probed and explored by endlessly well-meaning people whom, in one way or another, I needed but could not choose.”

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In conversations with the old people in my life, I hear what Schiller documents in Aging Out. I listen to the impossibility of comparing Medicare Advantage plans, the indignity of joints betraying bodies, the compounding grief of losing more and more friends to accident and illness. From your 30s, where I sit—along with Schiller— it is easiest to avoid considering these realities entirely or else to do what Schiller does: To look ahead paralyzed, terrified of being abandoned and forgotten, anticipating a weakened brain and bad breath, desperate to remain “outside the control of people and institutions who tell us what is best.”

But this, of course, misses some of the reality of growing old, which Scripture depicts just as often as a blessing. Age means a bearing of fruit from fresh green leaves (Ps. 92:14) and the donning of a crown (Prov. 16:31). It also means more vulnerability, yes, to which the Lord will respond with compassion (Ps. 71:9). Old people are intrinsically valuable by dint of being human, but they’re also uniquely wise (Job 12:12). Ideally, they possess more space and time for prayer and for other people. And for the mature Christian, more years means a fullness of temperance and self-control and sound judgment (Titus 2:2). Us whippersnappers can look forward to these promises.

For a book about old people, Schiller spends very little time with them—but the moments she does share or observe speak to this fullness. She encounters no stereotypes of twee ladies or grouchy old men ranting at their visitors. Instead, she sees old people shopping confidently for fish or chatting with neighbors over cigarettes. She fondly remembers her grandmothers, who made art through arthritis and left their mark on the next generation.

At our church, the same old people lamenting their sicknesses and losses are laying our snack table with figs and oranges from their gardens, reciting Scripture they’ve memorized after years of reading, and dispensing advice to new mothers and college graduates. They’re praying for the rest of us, and their prayers often feel more faithful than mine, more confident in God’s provision based on all they’ve tasted and seen of it so far.

“I had been working so hard, forever, I think, to prove my ‘use’ to some unnamed, invisible power, so that in the end, I would be absolved of something,” Schiller confesses. Elderly people, and other people in positions of dependence, prove that “usefulness” is no precondition for being loved. May Schiller find that to be true in her own still-young life, with (God willing) so much left to be lived.

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