Someone asks you the identity of a friend with whom you have recently spent time. Despite yourself, you cannot come up with her name. A quick mental review of the women you know best produces no results.

You feel frustrated at being unable to remember a person you know well. Why, you wonder, must I struggle with a label for such a familiar face? What is happening to me that I have failed to recall someone so close?

Shrugging it off, you pronounce it to be a “senior moment.” You have long since concluded that it is one of aging’s most typical experiences. Society has invented this term, and you hear it used often.

For the last few years, I have been carrying on a vigorous one-man campaign against the expression. I believe it to be in the best interests of my age peers to stop speaking of memory lapses this way.

Though it may seem harmless, even playful, to label our temporary inability to recall words as senior moments, it actually does harm to us in the long run. This conviction of mine has been strengthened of late by two women psychologists who have reported on their research.

These scholars, Laurie O’Brien and Mary Lee Hummert, took three groups of middle-aged men and women and gave them a memory test. The people had two minutes to study a list of 30 words. Then they were asked to write down as many as they could recall.

The first group was told they would be compared with people over age 70. Participants in the second group were told they would compete with people in their 20’s. Finally, members of the third group were not to be tested against any others.

You might expect the second group to have been intimidated by being compared to young people. After all, those in their 20’s reputedly have sharp memories with few deficiencies. It seemed, for all the world, an uneven contest.

But, to my surprise and apparently that of the researchers, the test takers who did worst were those pitted against people over 70. These middle-agers could remember only 12 words or so, whereas those compared with the twenty-somethings scored more than 14 words. They did just as well as the test takers who were not compared with any other group.

Erin Linn, a friend and neighbor who is an active scholar in psychology, says of this type of research: “I think it’s very important. It adds to our knowledge about the importance of stereotypes.”

Dr. Linn has hit on the central meaning of the experiment discussed here. Those who fared worst in the memory test were those who shared stereotypes of the later years. They have bought into the widespread idea that people 70 and above have memories like sieves.

Just being associated with the oldest generations was enough to make middle- agers falter in recalling the words in the test. The researchers also reported, from other sources, that these same people, some of them still in their 40s, felt anxious about growing old.  

This stereotype finds dramatic expression in the words senior moment. It implies that my age peers have a stranglehold on forgetting and ignores the fact that people of all ages have lapses in memory.

The goal of my campaign is not to drop the phrase “senior moment” from the American vocabulary. Rather, I want to retain the words but change their meaning.

These words ought to let everyone know how later life can prove to be a season rich in thought and affect. It can be, and often is, a time for harvesting the beauty and meaning that mark the life of virtually everyone who has lived for decades. Fascination is the appropriate response to much that we have experienced.

My friend Frederick Buechner has written: “Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep within us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to bring it back to the surface in bits and pieces.”

So much of growing older is psychic and dramatic in ways that others cannot see. The senior moments in which I recall the richness of my world and my life are what make later life so precious. These moments live on with us and enrich our spirit, turning growing older into an inner adventure.

That’s why it makes sense to empty out the expression “senior moment” and fill it with new material. Why should we willingly downgrade old age, a time in our lives that deserves respect for its power to renew our appreciation of human existence?

Senior moments, yes, but only if they suggest the virtues of later life, not its deficiencies.

Richard Griffin