Gerontophobia

Gerontophobia is the name Dr. Juvenal Urbino gives to Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s fear of aging, but the concept reaches beyond that diagnosis. Jeremiah had chosen to die rather than grow old; Urbino, approaching death himself, recognizes the same fear from the opposite direction. His failing memory, bodily vulnerability, and anxiety about what follows death make aging a private ordeal, while his medical and civic career shows how knowledge and public action can resist some forms of decline without abolishing mortality.

Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s decision

Jeremiah had told his lover that he would never grow old. She had understood this as a determination to resist age, but he had meant it literally: he had decided to take his own life when he turned seventy. He reached that age on January 23 and set the night before Pentecost as the date. His decision was not sudden. He and his lover knew the details in advance and spoke of them repeatedly, suffering the passage of days they could not stop.

The decision did not mean Jeremiah had ceased to love life. He loved the sea, love itself, his dog, and his lover. As the chosen date approached, however, he increasingly succumbed to despair, as if the death he had planned had become an unavoidable destiny. His lover knew what was coming and could not prevent it. At their final parting, Jeremiah asked her to remember him with a rose; she later recalled that request when explaining the closeness and secrecy of their last hours.

Dr. Urbino concluded that Jeremiah had died from cyanide vapors activated in a photographic tray. He judged the death intentional, not accidental, and ordered the inspector to bypass legal procedures so that the burial could take place that afternoon and discreetly. When the subject arose again, he called Jeremiah’s reason gerontophobia. The term turns an intimate decision into a diagnosis, but it does not make the decision easier to comprehend: Jeremiah’s fear coexisted with an ardent attachment to the very life he chose to end.

Urbino’s encounter with aging

Urbino’s response to Jeremiah is shaped by his own aging. In old age he hears less with his right ear, leans on a silver-handled cane, and carries scraps of notes whose meanings can become confused among the medicines and instruments in his medical bag. The cultivated appearance he preserves—linen suit, gold watch chain, carefully combed pale hair and beard—stands against the physical and mental changes he cannot control. He remains fastidious, but he recognizes that his memory is eroding.

Paper offers only a temporary defense. Urbino has learned to write things down, yet eventually forgets what the reminders mean. He searches for glasses he is already wearing, locks doors twice, and loses the thread of a book when he can no longer recall its premise or the relationships among its characters. More unsettling than these lapses is his diminishing trust in his own judgment. The experience is not simply forgetfulness: it is the sense that the faculty by which he has made decisions and understood the world is gradually failing.

He experiences age as physical knowledge as well as mental change. After his daily siesta, he becomes conscious of his organs—the shape of his heart, liver, and pancreas—and recognizes that he has outlived the companions represented in his generation’s portraits. He believes, on the basis of his medical experience, that old age has a distinctive odor, one he has noticed in cadavers, in patients who conceal their years, and in his own clothing and sleeping breath. This perception makes aging intimate and inescapable: the physician who has spent a career identifying disease cannot stand outside the bodily process he observes.

At eighty-one, Urbino understands himself as connected to the world by only a few slender threads. He keeps them intact not because he has defeated his fear but because he is terrified that he will not find God in the darkness of death. That fear separates him from Jeremiah’s choice. Urbino believes that old age may be indecent and can understand why someone would wish to escape it, yet his Christian faith and dread of death keep him attached to life.

Medicine, memory, and mortality

The contrast between the two men is sharpened by Urbino’s professional history. After specialized study in France, he gained national recognition for methods that helped ward off the province’s last cholera epidemic. The earlier epidemic had killed a quarter of the urban population in less than three months, including his father, a respected physician. Urbino responded to that loss by studying cholera in depth, training with the epidemiologist Professor Adrien Proust, and building a public career around medical knowledge and urban reform.

His authority is practical as well as symbolic. When he returns home, the market’s filth, rats in the sewers, and children playing in street puddles convince him that another outbreak is likely. When a patient from Curaçao arrives at the Misericordia Hospital with blue discoloration, Urbino recognizes cholera, alerts colleagues, and has neighboring ports warned so that the schooner can be located and quarantined. He also restrains a military commander who wants to declare martial law and fire cannons as treatment. In this episode, scientific judgment replaces panic; his work can prevent an outbreak from becoming a catastrophe, but it cannot prevent aging or death.

That limit becomes visible in Urbino’s first encounter with Jeremiah’s death. A young intern regrets that he has never had the opportunity to examine the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Urbino answers that someone driven mad by love will surely provide such an opportunity one day, then realizes that Jeremiah is the first suicide by cyanide among the many he remembers whose cause was not the sufferings of love. He tells the intern that such cases almost always leave crystals in the heart. The remark joins clinical observation to a familiar emotional explanation, while Jeremiah’s death disrupts the expectation that suicide must be caused by romantic suffering.

Later, music allows Urbino to feel compassion for Jeremiah despite the bitterness associated with a letter. He speaks of him as a lay saint: a gifted photographer devoted to children’s happiness, learned in worldly matters, and austere in his habits. Urbino also seeks to preserve Jeremiah’s photographic plates, arguing for their value as images of a generation whose future may depend on those who survive it. His effort to honor the dead and preserve their records stands beside his fear of losing his own memory: in both cases, paper and images offer a fragile defense against disappearance.

The concept’s wider reach

Gerontophobia is explicitly attached to Jeremiah, but Urbino’s later reflections give it a second, more divided form. He can imagine agreeing that old age should be ended before it is too late, yet he remains bound to life by faith and fear. The concept therefore marks no simple opposition between a person who fears aging and one who accepts it. Jeremiah loves life while deciding against its continuation into old age; Urbino recognizes the indecency and burden of age while refusing to choose death.

The novel also sets this fear against a shared life that has endured its own transformations. After thirty years of marriage, Urbino and Fermina Daza have become, in the narrator’s image, a single being divided between two people. They have passed through daily misunderstandings, moments of mutual hostility, and reconciliation, and come to love one another without haste or excess. Their long companionship does not erase the age difference or mortality: Urbino is ten years older and, in old age, feels himself stumbling through its mists. But the relationship supplies one of the ties that make continued life meaningful.

The concept’s force lies in the contrast between the fear of decline and the different choices it produces. Jeremiah fixes a date and carries out a decision made years earlier. Urbino continues to work, remember, record, and remain attached to his wife and to the world, even as he knows that his powers are failing. Neither medicine, personal discipline, nor love makes aging disappear; each instead reveals what a person is trying to preserve as time narrows the future.