c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Kathleen O’Brien is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

UNDATED _ There was a gap in the obituaries of Frank Sinatra, a cluster of years glossed over because they were of scant musical interest.

They were the years just before his death, when he had been withdrawn from public view.

By all accounts, while his health was frail and his mental capacities slipping, he was hardly on his deathbed. He was basically just old. In this, he was entitled; after all, the man was 82 when he died.

There are plenty of lonely people out there in nursing homes yearning for human contact. Yet here was a man beloved by legions of fans whose family virtually cut him off from humanity.

To what purpose?

The inescapable message was that getting old is somehow shameful.

Why else exert so much energy to closet him from public view?

Sinatra, of course, may not be a good example of anything more than his own singular life. He shunned and fought the press most of his life; the aggressive secrecy that engulfed his final years may well have been his choice. (Doubtful, though.)

Yet, for another example, one need only look to another Southern California celebrity around whom the curtain has been drawn: Ronald Reagan. He bade his goodbye to the public in 1994, when he and his family announced he has Alzheimer’s disease. Since then, sightings of him have been few and far between.

That secrecy in turn sets up a cat-and-mouse game. A schoolboy’s tourist photo of Reagan on a park bench makes the newspapers. The tabloids run a blurry paparazzi photo of a wizened Katharine Hepburn.

Both Reagan and Sinatra endured much criticism during their careers _ Reagan because that came with the territory, Sinatra because he reaped what he had sown. So both families had reason to fear their elderly charges would be ridiculed in old age.

Would that really have happened?

So far, even those who hated Reagan’s presidency have been circumspect about his illness. Any Reagan/Alzheimer’s jokes out there have died on the vine.

Suppose Reagan had shown up recently when they named a Washington office building after him. And suppose he did do something bizarre or pathetic _ drooled on his tie, or ripped his program into paper dolls.

Well, yes, Howard Stern would make obnoxious wisecracks, and perhaps Imus would join in. But surely it would have stopped there, for surely we haven’t become so childish a culture as to attack the frail elderly.

After all, in our own lives, we treat our aging friends, relatives and neighbors with kindness. We see them embark on the long descent, and we understand.

We mourn the loss of what was, but at the same time we adjust to what is. It may pain us enormously that the grandmother who was such a great cook is now a great-grandmother who can’t eat solid food. But we don’t separate her from the world just because she isn’t the woman she once was.

Would we prove unable to do the same for celebrities?

In shielding their elderly relatives from the public eye, family members are acting on the assumption that as a culture, we cannot tolerate aging. They look at the attitude around them and decide they want to protect their loved ones from it.

In fact, it is we who are being protected _ from an unsparing view of life.

IR END O’BRIEN