What I am learning in my eighth decade: being old is like being young, only with a bit more stiffness and a lot less hassle. But to enjoy your old age, you have to work at it.
Do you ever think about being old, about the sort of person you will be in old age? If you are under 50, probably not, why would you take a look down the wrong end of a telescope? Once you’ve turned 70, though, you are definitely on a trajectory that gives you pause for thought about the nature of old age and what kind of old person you will turn out to be.
Here is my theory: you will be the person you are now, only older. Old age will not make you more sociable, if you are naturally introvert, nor will it (health permitting) prevent you from enjoying the company of others if you are a natural extrovert. If you love sport, or the cinema, the theatre, woodland walks, none of that will change. Ok, circumstances will change — if your knees are giving you gip, your daily jog will be slower; if your hearing starts to fail you, you may choose cinema performances with subtitles. One day you’ll have to give up your driving licence, and take a taxi to town. These are the superficial adjustments that will need to be made in old age, but fundamentally nothing will change all that much, because you will still be you.
What makes me so certain of this? Simply that, at 71 years old, I still feel like the me I have always been. One of the reasons I am writing about this is to get it out of my system in order not to say it out loud all the time. No-one watching me go about my daily tasks would believe me anyway. When I was in my middle years I would smile indulgently when the old folks banged on about not feeling their age. I would study their lined faces and watch them as they hauled themselves from their armchair, taking a moment to realign their hips before moving uneasily across the room, their initial steps unsteady as their limbs adjusted to their new perpendicular position. Clearly you’re not the same person you once were, I would think, springing gazelle-like from my own chair and bounding across the room in one easy motion to open the door for them. And here I am, inhabiting the Land of the Aged, where if you sit for more than half an hour a weird stiffness sets in. I have disciplined myself not to grunt when getting out of my chair in the hope that my silence fools my younger companions into believing that the manoeuvre is effortless. At moments like these I do feel my age. But, for the time being, they are transitory. Once on the move, I feel like myself again. And that self is ageless. What I mean by that is that I feel like me, in this moment, undefined by my age, but shaped, as you are too, by my life story. It is my essence, not my body, that defines me. But what of the future? How to retain this essential self in the face of physical decline, even adversity? I have looked for positive role models in every stage of my adult life — notably as a teacher and as a mother. Do I need one for growing old?
A role model for a graceful old age
I have been an orphan since the age of 46, so unlike some of my friends, I do not have a real-life role-model for ageing in the form of my own parents. However, I have been fortunate to have a very dear friend on the other side of the English Channel. I first stayed with her family in 1966, when I was a young student of French. Her mother was a beautiful, elegant forty-something. Living in the same house was her grandmother, seventy-something, equally beautiful, equally elegant. There they were: three generations of women under the same roof. The grandmother was well into her nineties when she died. Frail, a little forgetful, but still the same person she had always been. Last year, more than 50 years after my first visit, I went to see my friend’s mother for what would be the last time; still beautiful, she was clearly nearing the end of her long, interesting, healthy life. She died a few months later, leaving her fifty-something daughter and her twenty-something granddaughter with a blueprint for their own old age. This is something I do not have, as my paternal grandmother died of typhoid fever in Africa at the age of 45 and my maternal grandmother succumbed to polio at the age of 49. What I have learned from my friend’s mother and grandmother is very uplifting, and it is this: a life well lived is a life well lived, and a life in old age, notwithstanding its inevitable frailties, does not change this. These women filled their home with family and friends (I was first made welcome there from the age of 17, and I still am — there was always Champagne, and there still is.) They were interested in people of all generations, they loved good food and wine, they were keen gardeners. Old age might have slowed them, but it didn’t change who they were. Always soigné, always inquisitive, always good-humoured, their old age was as graceful a phase in their life as all the others.
Ageing is a gradual, not a transformative process
I sometimes hear people claim to be “growing old disgracefully” projecting a devil-may-care image of themselves. Is this merely an extension of who they were in the past, or is it, as Jenny Joseph suggests in her wonderful poem Warning, an attempt to make up for the sobriety of their youth? When she is an old woman, Jenny Jones proclaims, she will wear purple and a red hat, go out in the rain in her slippers, pick flowers from other people’s gardens and learn to spit. In middle age, I laughed at this and nodded my head knowingly. Only I didn’t know then what I think I know now: that we are not Optimus Prime. Old age does not transform us into something unrecognisable in shape and character from who we were when younger. (There is a caveat to this statement, and I have discussed the shadow cast by dementia in my article Me and Mrs Baldwin.) If anything, old age has the potential to make us more like ourselves, and here’s why:
We no longer have to wear our work persona. Those hours spent round the table going through some tiresome agenda with colleagues whom we may or may not have respected, are replaced by leisurely lunches with people we definitely want to spend time with, and with whom we can truly be ourselves.
We were always interested in stuff — politics, literature, growing sweet peas — but with more time on our hands and a lot less stress in our lives we can read more, reflect more, discuss more, do it all a little better. Ok, so our recall may not be as good, and we may take things more slowly, but that’s fine, because we have fewer constraints in our daily life.
We are more confident. Many of us, by the time we retire, have reached the ‘self-actualisation’ stage in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Like me, you are probably familiar with Maslow’s pyramid, but as a student I struggled with what ‘self-actualisation’ actually meant, until my tutor told me this: “Imagine that your boyfriend’s parents are coming to dinner. The casserole is in the oven, the table is laid, the candles are lit. You just need to choose what record to put on the stereo (this was 1970, remember). Do you decide on Bruch’s violin concerto, because it is what will impress your guests, or do you play the latest Beatles album, because you love it?” Self-actualisers, he claimed, are accepting of themselves. They no longer need to create a construct of the person they’d like to be — that they believe will impress others, because they are comfortable with who they are. When I suggested that I might choose Bruch over the Beatles not to impress but to please, he pointed out that self-actualisation is also about being accepting of others. It would be a long way from self-actualisation to label my guests as fuddy-duddies for preferring Bruch to the Beatles, he warned me. It is the motivation for our choices that matters, not our choices per se. We become the best version of ourselves when we choose the violin concerto out of consideration for others, whilst also being able to recognise that we are not doing it to win approbation.
Old age gives you permission to be who you are….
Maslow’s view was that only a few people ever reach self-actualisation. Mine is that many do, but it is a lifetime’s work. We are happiest in our skin in old age, not because we don’t care what people think of us — we most certainly do. Do I want to please my family, my friends, my neighbours? Of course. But the letters after my name, the size of my house, whether I wear designer labels…. None of this has currency now. It never did, of course, but maybe I didn’t always recognise that.
What counts now is the interest I have in others, the smile on my face, and the quality of my chocolate brownies (they are pretty good, according to my grandchildren). And relax….
….but is no time for complacency
Actually, don’t believe the messages in your retirement cards about putting your feet up. As Bette Davies famously said: Old age is not for sissies. Stretch. Walk. Smile. Ask questions. Don’t talk too much, especially about how good things were before people had mobile phones. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Straighten your back. Put up cheerfully with the stiffness and other minor niggles, and certainly don’t huff and puff when you get out of a chair. Check before you put on that sweater that you didn’t spill your soup down it yesterday. To retain the essence of who I am in the face of more rapid physical decline, conscious reflection is required now more than ever before. I’ll keep you posted about how it’s going!
