Dick Van Dyke, 99, says he is ‘physically and socially diminished’

Dick Van Dyke has spo­ken can­did­ly about the emo­tion­al weight of grow­ing old­er, admit­ting that while he remains com­mit­ted to joy, move­ment, and grat­i­tude, age has left him feel­ing “dimin­ished” — both “phys­i­cal­ly and social­ly.”

The leg­endary Mary Pop­pins star, now 99 and approach­ing his 100th birth­day on 13 Decem­ber, shared that near­ly all of his clos­est life­long friends have passed away. “Every sin­gle one of my dear­est life­long friends is gone,” he wrote. “Which feels just as lone­ly as it sounds.”

In a health diary for The Times, the Chit­ty Chit­ty Bang Bang and Diag­no­sis: Mur­der icon cred­it­ed his longevi­ty — and much of his hap­pi­ness — to his wife, Arlene, who is 54.

“With­out ques­tion, our ongo­ing romance is the most impor­tant rea­son I have not with­ered away into a her­met­ic grouch,” Van Dyke said. “Arlene is half my age, and she makes me feel some­where between two thirds and three quar­ters my age, which is still say­ing a lot.”

Still, aging has tak­en its toll. Van Dyke wrote that he now feels too “dimin­ished” to trav­el fre­quent­ly and has had to decline invi­ta­tions to events and even work oppor­tu­ni­ties out­side Cal­i­for­nia. “That kind of trav­el takes so much out of me that I have to say no,” he admit­ted.

Van Dyke, who has pre­vi­ous­ly crit­i­cized Don­ald Trump and the cur­rent Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion, also expressed sor­row over the state of the world today.

He described liv­ing through two South­ern Cal­i­for­nia wild­fires in under a month — includ­ing the worst in region­al his­to­ry — and said the chaos and cru­el­ty across the globe “could turn any­one sour and dark — young and old.”

“So yes,” he added, “I sup­pose at cer­tain times of day I am the grumpy old man who yells at the TV.”

How­ev­er, he stressed that these moments do not define him. At heart, Van Dyke said he is some­one who loves to stay active, dance, laugh, and spread pos­i­tiv­i­ty.

“For the vast major­i­ty of my years,” he wrote, “I have been in what I can only describe as a full-on bear hug with the expe­ri­ence of liv­ing. Being alive has been doing life not like a job but rather like a giant play­ground.”

Last year, the actor said he does not fear death — acknowl­edg­ing gen­tly that at his age, he could “go any day now.”