Certainly, the sorry spectacle of America’s 46th president being forced to give back the nomination his own party fixed for him fits hand-in-glove with the theme of this year’s World Day: “Do not cast me off in my old age.”

It was huzzahs from the rooftops for Biden being the man to lead the Democratic Party against Donald Trump until, suddenly, it wasn’t. Admiring eyes turned to alarm when someone, somewhere, somehow belatedly noticed that the president is 81 years old and highly unlikely to get any younger. Support, and its loud-mouthed second cousin money, evaporated. 

Huddling in a Delaware beach house with a bout of COVID, mocked and jeered for the number of involuntary trips he’s taken around the sun, the president suffered the ignominy of casting himself off from the political life he’s known for 50 years.

Regardless of political preference, across the continent, perhaps around the world, grey heads heading to their best before dates had cause to pause and reflect: “Ah, that’s what the poet meant by it ending ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’”

In Biden’s case, the bathos of the long denial followed by the short ejection was exacerbated by his character traits of hubris, myopia, and chronic inability to count to the number he admits he cannot speak, i.e., his actual age. Those traits are hardly unique to him, which is why, as Register columnist Lea Karen Kivi writes in this issue, it’s imperative to have a plan for the years when the days dwindle down to a precious few.

Citing Rosanna Macri, a specialist in bioethics and intergenerational mediator, Kivi notes that “a comprehensive aging plan developed well ahead of a health crisis is the best way to avoid family conflicts when emotional tensions are elevated, and to ensure that the wishes of elderly loved ones are respected. Not only do such plans prevent conflict, they assist the elderly in enjoying their lives to the fullest.”

To avoid being cast off in old age, then, cast your clear wishes ahead of you well ahead of time. A key thing such clarity brings is preventing the wrong-headed conflation of age and illness. Chronology causes limitations but it is no causal guarantee of obsolescence. Joe Biden is old, yes, but what mattered to his prospects for a second presidency was that he is infirm. Neurological impairment, not the number of candles on his birthday cake, is what caused his numerous gaffes and his devastating ineptness during the now infamous debate with Trump. 

At a broad social level, refusal to respect that essential distinction is fed by what Toronto Archbishop Francis Leo, amplifying Pope Francis, calls the “throw away culture” that victimizes the elderly whether or not they are grandparents.

Its darkest extreme, Archbishop Leo writes in his message for World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, begets the MAiD mentality that prescribes death as fix-all for both age and illness, 

“When a society considers killing the elderly and the sick as the ‘right thing to do,’ the ‘compassionate way forward,’ or ‘the only logical course of action,’ the value it places on life is radically diminished and we are headed down a dark and destructive path. We need to ask ourselves: ‘What is more valuable than life?’” Archbishop Leo says.

So we do. Indeed, we are at a moment in the social, cultural and political experience of the inhabitants of what has traditionally been called the West when there is simply no more crucial question. Joe Biden’s woeful electoral end epitomizes why.

Here is a man, a devout Catholic, who came to embody the dominant belief of the day that his value, his signature of meaning, his existential purpose, was, at age 81, still “running the world,” not living life itself as father, grandfather, great-grandfather and down the roll of ancestry and history.  

Yet as Archbishop Leo warns: “Familial bonds cannot be torn asunder. Authentic love, which gushes forth from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, looks beyond utility and seeks a relationship with the other ‘just because.’”

Perhaps after a year of mature reflection, President Biden will take this sacred truth to heart. What a mascot he would then make.