Introduction

‘If we do not know what we are going to be, we cannot know what we are: let us recognise ourselves in this old man or in that old woman.’ — Simone de Beauvoir, Old Age

Each generation is living longer than the last. It is now not unusual to live twenty or even thirty years past retirement, and as a result most of us will experience an extended ‘old age’ — but what does that even mean?

I realised, when I was in my twenties, that I did not know any old people (even now I hesitate, wondering if perhaps I should use the polite convention when referring to the elderly and write ‘older’ — I did not know any older people). It was not deliberate: my grandparents had all passed away during my childhood; my parents were only in their fifties. I lived in inner-city Melbourne, working for a company that produced architecture and design magazines that, like all glossy tomes, were concerned only with the new and the conventionally beautiful. All of my social interactions were with people around my age: a little younger, a little older. The fact that I didn’t know anyone over the age of seventy came as a slow-dawning realisation — somehow I had omitted an entire generation from my life. (No, I had omitted multiple generations, for as I learned, a seventy-year-old is at a vastly different stage of their life than someone well into their nineties.) As a person who likes to plan ahead and know what to expect in the days, the weeks, the years to come, I came to think this omission might be perilously short-sighted of me; I began to wonder what it was like to be old.

Over the following years I returned to university to study social work, a course structured around the many aspects of life that so often need a little bit of extra work to remedy: family violence and conflict, drug and alcohol abuse, the justice system, homelessness, child abuse, mental health problems. There was no mention of ageing or older people within the course, the assumption being, perhaps, that these are all difficulties experienced while young and the only thing one has to worry about in old age is, well, being old. But when it came time for student placements, I knew I wanted to work with older people, and so I organised my field education to take place in the aged-care ward of a hospital in Melbourne’s western suburbs. The Geriatric Evaluation and Management (GEM) ward housed older patients who needed more time to recuperate than a regular hospital stay could offer, and my stint there was an introduction to the curious idea that old age is to be managed rather than lived. Working with patients who had landed in hospital with broken hips, dehydration, dizziness, malnutrition, delirium, and any number of misfortunes, I spent some months coming to know the things that can afflict our bodies and minds as we age.

To be old is not a defining characteristic — we remain, first and last, ourselves — but our age does influence how we participate in the world, largely through how we are perceived. A brief survey of the media landscape will show that the opinions and experiences of older people are given little airtime. It is true that older people remain prominent as they age — ex-politicians, media personalities, and businesspeople who built their influence and power base while younger — but the experiences of ordinary older people are largely missing from public consciousness. In movies and novels older people often appear as bookends, used as devices to cast a narrative back in time, their purpose to recount stories of their younger selves. But what of how older people live now, and their day-to-day experiences? How often do we see this appear on the screen or page?

Too often older people are considered as a homogeneous mass — old, first and foremost, and therefore lacking distinctiveness. They are imbued with generalisations: feeble and vulnerable; crotchety and misanthropic; or selfish and hell-bent on retaining their youth, health, and finances. I had the idea that I could write my way into and through my curiosity. In order to do so I decided to go to the source. I set out to interview older people about what it was like to be over sixty-five (the somewhat arbitrary age of retirement). I was not sure what I was looking for. People of any age can be charming, eloquent, selfish, or dull, and I wasn’t sure that old age was enough of a unifying experience to draw any conclusions or observations. Not to mention the haunting feeling that as a woman by now in her early thirties I had no business writing about old age. Surely it is the kind of intangible experience that must be lived through to be properly understood? But despite these misgivings, I remained curious and set about seeking out interviewees. It was, however, difficult to find older people who wanted to talk about their age; to be fair, if someone wanted me to talk about being in my thirties I would feel just as nonplussed. It was even more difficult to find people willing to drop the mask of stoicism and positivity that society exhorts older people wear, and to tell me what it was really like. In the end, the people I met with wanted to talk — they wanted younger people to know something of what they were going through. I was reminded of Anna Funder’s comments at an Adelaide writers’ festival in 2007 when asked why, as a young Australian woman, she thought she was the right person to interview ageing ex-Stasi officers for her book Stasiland. She replied that her outsider status was what made her endeavour work: these men couldn’t just brush her off with comments such as ‘you know what it was like’, because she didn’t know.

I didn’t know. So at kitchen tables, in living rooms, in noisy cafés, I asked many older people what it was like to be the age they were: how did they fill their days; what interested and frustrated them; what had changed or stayed the same over the years; how had their age influenced the way they lived? I didn’t ask what these people had ‘done’ with their lives as though their worth was all in the past, or to list their achievements beginning with the number of grandchildren. We spoke of the present and the future, rather than the past. While only a few conversations have made it into this book, every meeting was important and influenced my thinking in some way. And through many of these conversations — some open and genuine, some guarded and uncertain — I discovered that a failure of our bodies and their constituent parts is only the most obvious facet of getting older. What is more encompassing, and more troubling, is the way society orchestrates our gradual exit from public life as we age, recasting us from lead players with individual agency to burdensome detritus.

It is not just that older people feel the rest of society see them as no longer relevant; it is also that difficulties which can affect older people are largely not seen as problems. I was astounded to learn that the highest age-specific rate of suicide for men is in the group aged eighty-five and above, that older single women are increasingly facing possible homelessness and poverty in retirement, or that individuals frequently languish for years without proper care in chronically understaffed nursing homes. These things barely rate a mention in the public consciousness — they are accepted as just the way things are for people beyond a certain age. A direct example is seen in how there is (quite rightly) concern and outrage about young people being condemned to unlovely nursing homes when their bodies fail them, but similar concern is not shown for older people, despite the fact that the very same things that make a nursing home inappropriate and dismal for a young person — understaffing, boredom, cost-effective and bland menus, being shut off from the world; the list is endless — make nursing homes inadequate for a person of any age.

Too often the only public conversation about ageing revolves around the question of euthanasia, discounting the possibility that until we as a society figure out how to live our later lives with dignity, perhaps we are in no position to jump to conclusions about how to end our lives with dignity. When governments talk of dependence ratios, and economists deplore the imminent grey tsunami of the ageing population, it is no surprise that we come to internalise this marginalisation as we age until the thing most feared is not death, ill health, or to be alone, but to be a burden.

For those able to age healthily and productively — working beyond retirement, caring for grandchildren, volunteering, looking after ageing partners — it is easy to think the problems of old age are irrelevant. That ageing is an inconvenience, something to laugh wryly about, an excuse to take it easy after years of hard work. When we ourselves are not the burdensome old, their plight does not affect us. But some of us won’t be so lucky. It might be genetics, a financial crisis, long-term poverty, or sheer bad luck that brings us down, but eventually something will make us realise we are not infallible, and we do need help. And when that time comes, it shouldn’t be a difficult thing to expect and to ask for.

The myth of independence is the most harmful story we tell ourselves. None of us begin life alone, nor should we end it that way. The valuing of independence above the more accurate notion of interdependence restricts the possibilities allowed us. Interactions become transactions, and the act of asking for help becomes an admission of defeat rather than an acknowledgement of need in turn. In our current way of thinking, old age has become a time of loss and apology, and our longer life expectancy something of a sentence.

It is not simply a matter of each individual taking into account the likelihood of living into their eighties, nineties, or beyond when making decisions about finances, health, and life choices. It is also necessary for governments and society to change the way we perceive intergenerational relationships and to properly consider the way the ebbs and flows of the life course affect our ability to give and receive. To live a long life should be a joy; to be old should not be a burden. Good economics and sound social policy will help us to get through later life, but kindness and respect will help us to enjoy it.