Dick Van Dyke Says He’s Experiencing ‘Physical Decay’ Just Weeks Before 100th Birthday

Dick Van Dyke says he’s finally feeling his age ahead of his milestone 100th birthday.

“I’m not playing a super-old any more. I am a super-old,” the Mary Poppins star wrote in a November 13 essay published in The Times, a U.K. outlet.

Van Dyke — who turns a century old on December 13 —  went on to remark on his physical “deterioration.”

“Like my old characters, I am now a stooper, a shuffler and a teeterer,” he wrote. “I have feet problems and I go supine as often as is politely possible.”

The Chitty Chitty Bang Bang star added, “My sight is so bad now that origami is out of the question. I have trouble following group conversations and complain frequently about my hearing aids, though I would never refer to them as ear trumpets. I’m not that old.”

The actor admitted that he misses the vitality of his former social life.

“And every single one of my dearest lifelong friends is gone, which feels just as lonely as it sounds,” wrote Van Dyke. “It’s frustrating to feel diminished in the world, physically and socially. I get invites to events or offers for gigs in New York or Chicago, but that kind of travel takes so much out of me that I have to say no. Almost all of my visiting with folks has to happen at my house.”

While Van Dyke says he occasionally slips into “grumpy old person” territory, he won’t define himself as such.

“I’ve made it to 99 in no small part because I have stubbornly refused to give into the bad stuff in life: failures and defeats, personal losses, loneliness and bitterness, the physical and emotional pains of aging,” he wrote. “That stuff is real but I have not let it define me.”