Dick Van Dyke admits it’s 'frustrating to feel diminished' as he nears 100th birthday
Dick Van Dyke is reflecting on aging as he nears his 100th birthday on December 13.
In an essay for The Sunday Times, Van Dyke wrote about now feeling closer to the older characters he would play as a young man, like Mr. Dawes the bank manager in “Mary Poppins.”
“Mostly, it’s the physical deterioration that feels accurate. Like my old characters, I am now a stooper, a shuffler and a teeterer. I have feet problems and I go supine as often as is politely possible,” the 99-year-old wrote.
He continued, “Those fake old-timers smacked their dentures. I chew nicotine gum, all day long — still, decades after I quit smoking! My sight is so bad now that origami is out of the question. I have trouble following group conversations and complain frequently about my hearing aids, though I would never refer to them as ear trumpets. I’m not that old.”
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The “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” star does empathize with the older characters he once played.
“It’s frustrating to feel diminished in the world, physically and socially. I get invites to events or offers for gigs in New York or Chicago, but that kind of travel takes so much out of me that I have to say no. Almost all of my visiting with folks has to happen at my house,” he wrote.
But he says the “physical decay” is “superficial.”
“Thank God, on the inside, I am as different from them as I could get,” he said.
He continued, “I’ve made it to 99 in no small part because I have stubbornly refused to give into the bad stuff in life: failures and defeats, personal losses, loneliness and bitterness, the physical and emotional pains of ageing. That stuff is real but I have not let it define me. Instead, for the vast majority of my years, I have been in what I can only describe as a full-on bear hug with the experience of living.”
The star also credits his relationship with his wife, Arlene Silver, for keeping him youthful.
“Without question, our ongoing romance is the most important reason I have not withered away into a hermetic grouch. Arlene is half my age, and she makes me feel somewhere between two thirds and three quarters my age, which is still saying a lot. Every day she finds a new way to keep me up and moving, bright and hopeful and needed.”
