Presidential nominees' age doesn't seem to matter

We who remember the 1980 presidential race recall the anxiety being expressed about Ronald Reagan's age. The Gipper would turn 70 just a few weeks after the inauguration. That was a matter of real concern. Would he be able to complete his four-year term? Would old age catch up to him before he completed his term?

As it turned out, Reagan had plenty of stamina for his first term, and he was overwhelmingly elected to a second term, when he made a joke about the age issue, telling Walter Mondale he would not hold the younger candidate's youth and inexperience against him. But there has been some speculation that unforced errors and slip-ups near the end of Reagan's second term might have been related to early signs of the Alzheimer's disease that he announced less than six years after leaving office in a public letter that is one of the most touching and profound documents in presidential history.

Where is the concern about the age of presidential candidates this year? Donald Trump is 70 already. Hillary Clinton will be 69 before election day. Bernie Sanders is 74. Of these three candidates, concern about age has been limited to Sanders, whose popular support lies with younger voters.

Should voters be worried about the age of presidential nominees? All of us have known people who had physical and mental limitations in their early 70s, but we have also known people who were physically fit and mentally sharp well into their 80s. Baby boomers (including me) are counting on 70 being the new 50, 80 being the new 60 and so on. We think, at least, that we are aging more gracefully and with better retention of our faculties than previous generations. So a 70-something president isn't such a worry, even one who follows the youthful Barack Obama.

This election year, voters have plenty to worry about concerning the party nominees without being concerned about their ages.

Early warning signs I don't want to see

Jane Brody's New York Times article about cognitive impairment as a sign of impending dementia hit me like a water balloon dropped from a high-rise. If you're having a problem remembering things, such as simple, familiar words, or names of people you know, you might have only a few more years of functional living before Alzheimer's disease takes over your life.

What scares me is that I have had these cognitive impairments for some time. I've always had difficulty remembering names, even in my twenties. Something in my cognitive makeup doesn't latch onto names, so for years I've run into people whose faces I know but whose name I cannot produce. Words also escape me from time to time. The name of a flower I see by the walk just escapes me, as does the common noun that I know perfectly well but my brain just won't produce. I've learned to live with these frustrating and sometimes embarrassing impairments. If it gets no worse than this, I can take frustration and occasional embarrassment, but if these lapses are indicative of looming dementia, I don't want to face it.

In their declining years, my parents both exhibited mild to moderate dementia and confusion, which they tried to hide. Dementia, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are diseases that have a genetic element, and that gives me more cause for concern. When my parents were spending their final years in a nursing home, I told my wife that if she suspected I was losing my mental faculties, she should sign me up for skydiving lessons. "If I can't remember to pull the ripcord, I don't want to live, anyway," I said.

I stand by that sentiment. It seems cruel to see someone who is intellectually sharp trapped in a body ravaged by MS or ALS, but it seems even worse to me to occupy a relatively healthy body but lose memories, reasoning and personality, leaving nothing but a shell. For the present, I'm hoping that Brody's early warning signs are, in my case, simply a case of brain overload, having retained more facts and memories than my brain can efficiently store and reproduce.

Will you always have your memories?

"You'll always have those memories," I was told. One can hope so, but I'm not so sure.

"Memories are made of this" and "No, no, they can't take that away from me," lyricists write. But I have my doubts. I've lost many things in my life — dear friends, a sister, my parents, other relatives, contests and possessions — but the saddest and most devastating thing to lose is your memories, the ones you thought you'd always have. I've seen too many people, mostly the elderly, who have become disconnected from their memories, like a train that has uncoupled from its engine and is stranded forlornly. A friend told me recently about the death of his father from Alzheimer's disease, surely the saddest malady in all of human life. At the end, he did not know his son or the wife who had refused to move him into a care facility; she cared for him at home, but he did not recognize her. He did not know who that woman was.

I cherish my memories and supplement them with photographs and mementos — useful reminders of events gone by. But I fear the day when those memories fade like old photographs and become so faint that I cannot reconstruct them. Let me die with my memories intact instead of becoming an empty shell without a past.