Foreword

by Sophie Cunningham

Much has been written about middle age — that moment where some people feel that they are sliding into invisibility or, worse, irrelevance. Much less has been written, though, about the time of life Melanie Joosten seeks to understand in this book, A Long Time Coming, a series of essays that consider life for people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties: people at, as Joosten puts it, that ‘invisible turning point where we stop respecting the old and begin punishing them for existing’.

By 2060 a quarter of the population will be older than sixty-five, a fact that is presented in some media with the kind of intensity and dread usually reserved for the apocalypse. Of course, if you seek out the company of older people you’d know that they are often smarter and funnier than most other people in the room. Over the last couple of years I’ve met a succession of people in their seventies and eighties who are competing in ironmen competitions, getting PhDs, camping in remote deserts, working for various political campaigns, trekking, and travelling around the world to plant trees. But it’s easier to be aware of people who are outgoing, and the reality is a lot starker for many older Australians. Ageing doesn’t treat us all equally.

For starters, people are not necessarily kind to the elderly, and benign neglect is the least of it. As Joosten documents, both men and woman, from all cultures, are vulnerable to land grabs and financial raids from a generation of younger people trying to get by in increasingly difficult times.

The poorer you are when you’re elderly, the tougher it is. Most pensions come in at 28 per cent of the average income. Partly for this reason, ageing can be harder for women who are alone and therefore more financially vulnerable. (For some women, though, getting older can mean liberation from traditional roles.) And the experience of ageing isn’t just shaped by finances or gender; it’s culturally specific, as Joosten’s essay, ‘Too Hard, These Days’, on aged care in the Tiwi Islands, sets out.

Then there is dementia, the disease everyone dreads. As Joosten writes, ‘each week there are more than 1,800 new cases of dementia in Australia: approximately one person every six minutes. Affecting close to one in ten people over sixty-five, it is our second-leading cause of death.’ Dementia is hard to talk about, harder still to think about, but given the inevitability that the illness will touch all of us one way or another, talk and think about it we must. We must also consider loneliness, a profound problem for those who have lost most of their friends and family. For all these reasons, and for many more, older people have a high (and rarely discussed) suicide rate.

These are all important subjects. But most important of all is Joosten’s insistence, and, indeed, the insistence of those she interviews, that old age isn’t a problem, it’s a stage of life. People shouldn’t be terrified of being dependent, or ‘a burden’. They have, as one of her essay titles puts it, ‘the right to be old’. They have to right to be scared to go into a home rather than being considered ‘a problem’ if they put up a fuss. They should not be patronised. The ways in which some elderly people behave cannot be reduced to a series of symptoms to be managed using medication.

Ultimately A Long Time Coming is about seeing people as they are. It is about the importance of empathy, about embracing the vulnerability in ourselves and in those around us. This collection is, as Joosten so skilfully and movingly illustrates in her final essay, ‘As Long as Life Endures’, about making yourself available to sit with people. To listen. To connect. To treat others as one day we would all hope to be treated.