The Last Ocean

by Nicci Gerrard

  They probably weren’t older than her, just as the woman with grey hair in my carriage probably wasn’t older than me. But we often fail to see ourselves as middle-aged, though we know we are; or old, though we know we are. (Simone de Beauvoir observed in Old Age that the old tend to say ‘them’ rather than ‘us’.) The person in the mirror is a shock, rising towards us in the morning wearing the face of someone we never thought to become, gazing at us in horror from a future that has arrived before we are ready for it. Why did I so mind that a courteous stranger saw me as an older woman? I am, after all. What is it about getting older that I resist or don’t entirely believe? I don’t try to look younger than I am. I don’t disguise my wrinkles (though I do buy anti-ageing cream, knowing it doesn’t work). Most of the time, I like it that my face is marked by experience, like a map of my life. (Or in part I do, I say I do, I want to. Nevertheless, there are days when I scrutinize myself in the mirror, the pouches under the eyes, the brackets around the mouth and the lines above it, like I’ve been stitched up; the chipped tooth, the thinning skin that’s lost its elasticity, and feel a bit anxious and dismayed.) I would never have cosmetic surgery. I would never conceal my age, although on websites, scrolling down through the years until I get to 1958, I always feel a slight surprise at the sight of how much time I’ve already gone through. I’ve long ago got used to the fact that my children now walk faster than me, swim faster, bike faster, think faster . . . As I grow older, I often experience invisibility as a gift, not an insult. Yet when a young man stands up for me, when I meet myself in a mirror, it still seems like a category error.

  Recently, at a book-signing in the Netherlands, two Dutch men of about my age came up to me. They gave me a slim, hard-backed notebook and, smiling, watched me as I opened it. It was full of photos of the three of us thirty-nine years ago: sitting on a train, sailing a little dinghy on a cold and windy day, changing the tyre on a car while roaring with laughter. In one, we are in a crowd of people celebrating the end of a friend’s finals at university. I was twenty then. I look rather drunk, very carefree and happy, very young, clutching a bottle of champagne. I stood in the bookshop staring at these pictures of the past, at these two strangers who turned out to be long-lost friends, and could barely speak for the complicated mix of emotions that winded me: amazement and gladness and sadness and disbelief that we had become these middle-aged, creased creatures with marriages and children and jobs and cars and houses. The past at that moment seemed more powerful and real than the present.

  We suffer from ‘temporal vertigo’, absorbing all the ages we have ever been. That old woman I saw lying in a hospital bed beside the photograph of herself joyful on a beach long ago housed both the old and young self and everything in between. We identify ourselves as young, because in one sense we still are. The older, current self is a newcomer, still something of a stranger, who we have to live with but who we don’t feel entirely comfortable with and may sometimes be distressed by. The heart takes time to catch up with a change that feels like a cinematic jump-cut. You’re young and starting out, eager and full of hope – and all of a sudden, you’re middle-aged: a crumpled, pouchy face gazes in startled outrage from the mirror. It is easy to know what it is to be young for everyone has been and still is, somewhere inside, and it is hard for the young (and even for the old) to imagine being old, for we see the old at a distance, through the wrong end of a telescope. Hard and disturbing and even appalling. That will never be me.

  I think back a year or so, talking to my agent (about the idea for this book, in fact). We were sitting in her room, me on a sofa that felt slightly too low and too soft, so I was cast backwards, already a bit collapsed. It was hot; I was hot (menopausally so, with the raging urge to take most of my clothes off, particularly my shoes and socks, which I didn’t). I was trying to find something in my bike pannier that I had printed out, but the pannier was large and full of bits and pieces, and anyway I couldn’t locate my glasses, which were actually dangling around my neck; when I found them and tried to put them on, they got tangled with my bike keys that I hang around me with a ribbon like I’m my own hook, and also with my necklace. I felt encumbered, incompetent, shabby, graceless. I looked up and saw my agent, young and smooth-faced, her eyes kind, looking at me as I fumbled.

  Twenty or so years before that, I was at a launch party for the re-publication of J. G. Links’s magisterial guide to Venice, first published in 1973; Links was dead by then, but his widow, Mary Lutyens, was there. I knew a bit about her: she was a theosophist and sometime mystic – the biographer of Krishnamurti, admirer of Gandhi and fierce critic of the Raj – a vegetarian, a believer in tolerance, a traveller, a novelist, a scholar of art history and a distinguished biographer. She was clever, free-spirited, beautiful and full of curiosity. At this party, she must have been about eighty-eight years old, her wonderful face a mosaic of wrinkles. She was in a wheelchair, and the party flowed around her, like a river around a stone. Guests had to bend down to speak to her. They talked loudly (I don’t know if she was deaf; nor I think did they) and slowly, separating out each word as if she had trouble understanding things now, or as if they did not share a common language. I remember seeing the expression on her face, which was one of magnificent fury.

  At about the same time as this, I interviewed P. L. Travers (who wrote the great Mary Poppins books) for the Observer newspaper. She was clearly near the end of her life. Her face was ravaged by time. She could no longer walk (she told me her aim was to be able to reach the first lamp post on her road, but I think she never managed this) and she had trouble speaking; every word was an effort and had a cost and a value. I had never met anyone as old as she was: she seemed to me then to have come from a different age, a relic of past glories, and I regarded her with a kind of awe. She knew that she would soon die and, with painful slowness, she told me something of her life and her philosophy – although she was a private woman, fierce and proud and solitary, and when I left her I felt that I had barely scratched the surface of her mystery. Late that night, she rang me and in her ancient, halting, rumbling voice told me that she wept her secrets into her pillow every night; no one would ever know her soul. Shortly after this encounter I heard that she had died. I’ve never forgotten her: she gave me a glimpse into the uncanny depths of the human mind and showed me – I shouldn’t have needed showing, but I did – that in age people become more. They gather up all their selves. In that battered, sore body of hers, the body that she couldn’t haul to the first lamp post up the road, in that impenetrable mind, she held the hidden richness of her past.

  My mother is old and nearly blind, bashed about by multiple strokes, but indomitable and so full of spirit you can warm yourself by standing near her. Sometimes when I am with her people will pat her hand call her ‘dear’ and ‘sweetheart’, as though she were a child again. And when my father was lying in his bed in the downstairs room I found myself calling him ‘sweetheart’, calling him ‘poppet’ and ‘darling’, as if he were a baby and I his crooning mother. My father, who was so modest and so dignified.

  (Raymond Tallis – the philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic, humanist, patron of Dignity in Dying, retired medical physician specializing in geriatrics and all-round extraordinary person – tells me that if anyone ever calls him ‘poppet’, he will be hard-pressed not to ‘top them’. A keenly intelligent man, he is also humane; he thinks feelingly. When he was still practising as a doctor in Manchester, he insisted that his staff give patients their proper name, Mrs or Mr or Ms or Dr, never ‘love’ or ‘darling’; never to resort to the infantilizing collective pronoun – ‘how are we doing today?’ It seems a small thing but the language we use is subtly powerful in shaping our attitudes; to address someone with courtesy and formality acts as a corrective against objectification, diminution, even a kind of unconscious derision.)

  To age is a process that doesn’t just ruffle the vanity but agonizes the ego, because it brings ‘the contra
diction between inner and outer of a different order to anything we have previously faced’.

  Montaigne described old age as a ‘special favour’ and ‘privilege’. But – until he sent King Lear to rage upon the heath, to descend into madness and earn a new and revelatory kind of sanity – Shakespeare’s old characters are almost invariably pompous, tedious or feeble, appearing as comic interludes, walk-on fools. Dickens usually puts his old characters in dark corners; they are the misers and mad people, spontaneously combusting out of pure rage, or they are the saccharine and the saintly from whom all desire and restlessness has leaked away. In films, the old are mostly notable for their absence, or are cameo parts and supporting characters. In fiction and in real life, the general rule of thumb is that the older people get, the more invisible they become; and when they do make themselves visible they are often regarded as a bit batty, if potentially endearing.

  Becoming old is seen as a story of deficit and loss. The sense of decay provokes fear, disgust and a kind of recoil. ‘Please, please, don’t talk about old age so much, my dear old friend. You are giving me the creeps!’ wrote Elizabeth Bishop to her friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell, adding, ‘I wish Auden hadn’t gone on about it so in his last years, and I hope you won’t.’ ‘The creeps’: something unseemly then, something weirdly shameful, on a different track entirely from inevitable decline.

  In youth and health, ‘it is all there to hand,’ says Raymond Tallis to me: ‘the size of the world, the available world, the community of the mind’. Youth gives us ‘alacrity’ and ‘abundance’. It is about possibility; you are eligible for everything. When I was young I had the feeling that all that happened – however bruising; however sad – was part of the formation of myself. Rejection, divorce, failure, humiliation, all the setbacks and ambushes of life: I was under construction and they were materials. Now I’ve begun to feel that my ramshackle, cobbled-together house is pretty much built and I have to live in it, even if the tiles are loose, the windows rattle, and it’s not the one I’d dreamed of. Living in the house I made, no one else to blame but me, one day not so far off I will be able to reach up ‘and touch the ceiling’ of my end.

  ‘The story of ageing is the story of our parts,’ writes Atul Gawande. ‘Consider the teeth.’ Yes, and consider the eyes, the hands, the knees, the hearing, the heart. Consider the skin – young, it is smooth and elastic; it fits us and holds us intact. But as we age, it sags and folds; pinch it and it no longer snaps back. We can no longer take our body for granted and repeatedly it lets us down. It betrays us. With the wear and tear of time, worn and eroded by life, we fail like complex systems fail, ‘randomly and gradually’. Being old can seem to mean that ‘something is not quite right’. Look at the advertisements in the magazines for older people: laxatives and aids for incontinence, stair lifts, walk-in baths, tonics and remedies for aches and pains . . . We want to avert it: buying face cream to reduce wrinkles, lured by the dentists’ promise to restore the whiteness of a smile and turn back time, even going under the knife. We live in a culture where senility is scary in others and unacceptable in ourselves to a point where it is almost seen as an illness.

  In his New Yorker piece about Silicon Valley’s quest to live for ever, Tad Friend ironically evokes it as ‘the creeping and then catastrophic dysfunction of everything, all at once. Our mitochondria splutter, our endocrine system sags, our DNA snaps, our sight, hearing and strength diminish, our brains fog, and we falter, seize and fail.’

  It is for these reasons that Ezekiel Emanuel – distinguished oncologist, bio-ethicist, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author– is ready to die when he reaches the age of seventy-five; or at least, he no longer wants to struggle to keep alive, as he explains in his controversial article, published in the Atlantic in 2014. Under a beaming image of himself looking healthy and exuberant, he sets out his reasons for allowing nature to take its course. As a doctor, Emanuel has seen too many people holding on to life at all costs, until it is a ragged, tattered, excruciating thing. People are pumped full of drugs, plugged into machines, go under the knife, endure experimental treatment that makes their final months and years an agony of pain, hope and despair. Yet Emanuel is not simply saying that he doesn’t want life at all costs, but that at a certain designated age – seventy-five – he will have lived to his fulfilled age and will no longer accept any kind of medical treatment. In his late fifties, fit and active and successful, he writes:

  I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss . . . but living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us.

  Emanuel turns to his seventy-seven-year-old father (two years beyond his own cut-off point) for an example: ‘Once the prototype of a hyperactive Emanuel, suddenly his walking, his talking, his humor got slower. Today he can swim, read the newspaper, needle his kids on the phone, and still live with my mother in their own house. But everything seems sluggish . . . no one would say he is living a vibrant life.’ (It should be said that Emanuel senior, whose life is being downgraded, explicitly says that he is happy, and his life sounds just fine to me.) Emanuel is also concerned that ‘our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny . . . Unless there has been terrible abuse, no child wants his or her parents to die. It is a huge loss at any age. It creates a tremendous, unfillable hole. But parents also cast a big shadow for most children.’ He wants his own children to remember him as ‘active, vigorous, engaged, animated, astute, enthusiastic, funny, warm, loving. Not stooped and sluggish, forgetful and repetitive, constantly asking “What did she say?” We want to be remembered as independent, not experienced as burdens.’ At seventy-five and beyond, he says, ‘I will accept only palliative – not curative – treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability.’

  This places enormous value on being active and vigorous, no value at all on being slow and full of years. When he talks of the diminution that occurs in old age, he is talking about power: not just material, worldly power but the power that Raymond Tallis evokes when he talks of the world ‘being at hand’. He is strong in his own body (at the time he wrote the piece he had just climbed Kilimanjaro) and in his mind, at the peak of his career, obviously surrounded by family, friends, colleagues, operating on multiple levels. He is like one of those imaginary figures that have electricity crackling from their fingertips, at the centre of an intricate web of connections, the charged world pouring into them and rippling out of them, marvellously, vibrantly, powerfully alive and in charge.

  I first read the piece shortly before my father died, when I was witnessing someone I loved living beyond his time. Then, I think I was most struck by its good sense. Three years later, I am unsettled by its vigorous certainty. What is missing is an account of vulnerability. To be human is to be dependent; this isn’t a weakness but a necessary condition of being alive. We are born helpless and we die helpless, and in between is the continual flux of giving and receiving, of being at each other’s mercy, of helping others and being helped in our turn. ‘The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here. Death and time were always in alliance.’

  Death and time: the unruly acceleration of old age overturns the progress narrative. The concept of decline is the story of the body. The prejudice against old age is born out of a horror at decay. (When I was little and my grandmother came to visit I used to be properly terrified of seeing her naked. If she was in the bathroom, the door shut, I would feel squeamish at the thought of her in there, the folds of the sagging body.) But we should not think of old age as pathological, or a disease that can be cured. Decline is part of who we are; we are always impermanent, always growing towards our end, and old age is part of wh
at gives life its necessary boundary and shape. The awareness of change and mortality, which can feel vertiginous and unendurable, is at the same time what gives us selfhood, and life meaning. It is the pattern of growth and decay that makes our existence bearable (though it can feel unbearable). Life has meaning precisely because it is a process. It begins and it ends – for everything that has a beginning has to have an ending. We can only have a sense of self if we know the self will age, and the self will die.

  * * *

  • • •

  ‘Take care,’ I would say when taking my leave of my dear friend Nick when he was old and frail. And he would glare at me: ‘I certainly will not.’

  If life is an adventure, old age perhaps demands the most courage and endurance.

  ‘Take care,’ I say to my mother.

  She is in her mid-eighties and a widow after sixty-one years of marriage. She has always been a vivid personality, extrovert and captivating, but in the year after my father died she became distressingly muted. She seemed like a flame turned down very low, almost extinguished by grief and loneliness. Then, with an effort I now see was heroic, she took herself in hand, throwing herself back into life. Home had always meant my father: she was twenty when they met, and until his death had never lived alone. Bereavement has given her an existential restlessness. She went to live abroad in order to learn French, had singing lessons after a lifetime of being pronounced tone-deaf, and developed an unnerving habit of running down hills (blindly) in the middle of the road because she likes to feel the wind in her face and likes to feel free (and to astonish). She pays no attention to our cautions, which alarms and pleases us. She clambers up ladders. She travels to Angola to visit my sister. When I asked her recently, if I asked her to climb Everest with me, would she agree, she said, ‘Yes!’, her face lighting up as if I might be serious. She wants to learn to scuba dive. Her impulse for adventure is a form of self-preservation: it’s her way of staying alive.