There is hardly a topic I want less to write about and you want less to read about than old age. But a few comments are provoked by the recent outburst of government-funded attention to old people. One part of it was a poster campaign on the theme of “say no to ageism.” I got involved with another part – a nationwide “celebration,” as these things are fashionably described, of “age and creativity,” a subject which a moment’s thought will show is quite as likely to be tragic as anything else.
I hadn’t read the e-mails about what I’d agreed to do with proper attention, and I thought because I was going to talk with people in libraries I was doing something connected with reading and writing. I was taken aback when I realized that I was involved with the “older age” thing. I’m not good at accepting the passage of time. Being the age I am feels absolutely untruthful; it feels like the first charade I have ever had to keep up. And there’s nothing I can do to shake the role off, whereas anything else I ever disliked as much I could do something about.
I don’t know who exactly the poster campaign about saying no to ageism was aimed at, apart from brutal nurses, of whom there can’t be that many around. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s as ageist as they come, not because I have anything against any or all old people, but because I don’t want to be enrolled with them. Even as a kind of junior trainee.
Being treated like dirt isn’t the worst thing about being very old. The worst thing wasn’t mentioned by the campaign. I’ve known old people who wished they were dead. I’ve known people as good as dead from boredom, nervousness, anger, and a keen dislike of other people. I’ve known people who can’t be consoled for the death of old friends. And what of the fear, for many, of what is approaching? Can we be helped in this most testing of all the stages of life? Can we help other people?
If the recent media campaign avoided the negative, it even more definitely avoided the positive. The night before my little library events I got panicky and I rang a librarian to ask what to talk about. “Ah, don’t bother talking about anything,” she said. “Just shock them.” And that reminded me of the way we sanitize the existence of people whose bodies are no longer young. Did any part of the recent campaign about older people touch on sex? How do people, when the time comes, get information about sex and the aging body? Or do people lose interest in the sexuality that all their lives has been central to pride and self-liking just because they’re old enough for the free travel? Are there special physical issues? What do studies show about physical expression within relationships – married, unmarried, gay? Is there much tenderness about at all? More and more I come across couples who after years of trouble seem in old age to love and trust. What is it that happens with age?
Will it have secret blessings? Older people know more than anyone else around, even if they can’t always be bothered to point that out. Time or ill health may reduce their bodies to a helplessness comparable to a baby’s, but inside they are highly experienced. The first rule of a campaign, then, that holds our senior people up to attention, should be that it will be conducted at a high level of intelligence and discrimination. But what, for example, did the recent campaign mean by “old”? How can one word cover someone of 66 and a necessarily more frail 80-year-old at the same time? Nobody thinks that 13-year-olds are much the same as 19-year-olds.
And if it was vague about its subject, it was equally vague about what it was trying to change in us. What older people are likely to need is not to be dependant on private charity. They need access to doctors and hospitals and nursing homes. They may need somewhere to die at whatever pace fate allows. They may need their passing-on to be a scene invested with feeling and dignity. What the government spends money on is a signal of our communal priorities, and the steady and deliberate diversion of some of our national wealth toward providing these things would express respect on behalf of all of us.
But I don’t know that we’re capable of respecting people who have little and diminishing material power. The truth is that it’s not age itself that makes the old unrespected. The truth is that the wealthy old can buy respect – or the fruits of respect, which is just as serviceable. This raises questions of the most complex kind. That’s why I criticize the words of a campaign that was, of course, well-meaning. “Say no to ageism” strikes me as a wasted opportunity to be serious about serious things – a Disneyfication of issues that we haven’t yet addressed, either in the shaping of the new Ireland, or in ourselves.
The Sunday Tribune, May 29, 2005