Our Aging Monarchs

I n As You Like It, Shakespeare wrote:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

The artist Robert Smirke depicted the “seven ages of man” in a series of paintings between 1798 and 1801. Consider the final three. With the benefit of experience, “the justice,” Shakespeare’s fifth age of man, is wise and judicious — a natural leader. But then things start to regress. “The pantaloon” (the mildly disparaging 16th-century term for an aging man) begins to lose his physical and mental rigor. Shakespeare describes the seventh and final stage, old age, as “a second childishness and mere oblivion.”

The Bard’s contemporaries were used to abrupt exits. Wars, diseases, and the absence of modern medicine meant that many rulers left the world’s stage in their prime. Today, however, our own rulers continue leading well into the penultimate and even final stages of their lives. And it shows.

Take President Biden, who at age 81 is increasingly demonstrating signs of memory loss and senility. On Thursday, special counsel Robert Hur released his report on the president’s mishandling of classified documents, noting that during interviews, Biden “did not remember when he was vice president,” he “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” “and his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”

Hur characterized the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Responding to Hur’s report in a press conference Thursday evening, Biden might have dispelled the first part (“sympathetic” and “well-meaning”), but he did little to restore confidence in his mental state. He called the president of Egypt the president of Mexico, lost his train of thought when describing rosary beads his son gave him, and said “press” when he meant to say “public” — ironically while dismissing a reporter’s point that voters are concerned about his age.

The public’s concerns are not easy to dismiss. In a recent NBC poll, 76 percent of voters cited having major (62 percent) or moderate (14 percent) concerns about Biden having the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term. The same poll found that 48 percent of voters report major (34 percent) or moderate (14 percent) concerns about 77-year-old Trump. Which is still a significant minority. Trump has had his own gaffes lately, confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, and the president of Turkey with the prime minister of Hungary.

Of course, aging leaders is not an issue that’s unique to America. Think of the United States’ ally, Israel, led by 74-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu at a critical moment in its history. As for our adversaries: the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, is age 84, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is age 71, and China’s President Xi Jinping is 70 years old.

When King Charles III acceded to the British throne in 2022, at age 73, he became the oldest person in history to do so. On Monday, 18 months into his reign, Buckingham Palace announced that the monarch has “a form of cancer.” The type is not specified, leading to rumors that it may be aggressive or even terminal. On the advice of his doctors, the king will be stepping back from some of his duties, with counselors of state — Queen Camilla and Prince William — filling in for him.

But others, such as Biden, have even more consequential roles to play, not to mention far less obvious successors.

There’s a reason we have such a thing as “retirement.” The latter two stages of life are well suited to leisure, spending quality time with loved ones, and making peace with God. After all, what’s next? As my great-uncle Frank, who died aged 98, liked to put it — “eternity leave.”

What old age is obviously not well suited to is a highly demanding, hugely consequential leadership role. Being president of the United States, for instance.

When our bodies begin slowing down, it’s a sign that a change of pace is in order, that we’re in a different season of life. Resistance and denial can lead to poor judgment, cantankerousness, antagonism, and desperate, flailing egos, which — when combined with power — are extremely dangerous.

How many Democrats wish Biden would have stepped out of the way for someone else? How many Republicans wish Trump had not pursued a political comeback? And while elderly popes are not unusual, how many Catholics wish that Pope Francis, 87, would enter a more steady, contemplative phase of his pontificate?

It’s not that people in the twilight of their lives can’t behave rationally or are irredeemably proud. Think of Queen Elizabeth II, whose noble life of service continued until days before she died at age 96. But rather that with aging there is a decline in ability, a deterioration of standards, and a greater risk for imprudence — all of which heighten the need for humility. The late Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI is one such example, whose resignation on health grounds at 85 opened a way for future popes to do the same.

What’s troubling is that many world leaders are in their final stages of life yet behave as though they’re invincible. In doing so, they doom their successors to inherit the wind.