You're Old, I'm Old . . . Get Used to It!

by Virginia Ironside

  I always remember my grandfather telling me his favorite clue was “Napier’s admission of wrongdoing in India.” The answer was (as any fool knows, when he recalls that General Napier took the town of Sind in India and had to convey the news to his superiors in a telegram without anyone finding out) Peccavi. 1 Oh I know that this will baffle the non-crossword-doers among you, but the sheer genius of that clue and the answer delight me still today. (My own favorite is “Bottle party? Impossible!” [2,3,2].2)

  These days I do the Jumbo cryptic in the London Times with a friend who lives in the Lake District. We do it together on the telephone, and great fun it is, too. Not only is it meant to keep the brain lively (though I’m not sure how true this is), it gives one a great excuse for hauling out reference books—you can spend a lot of the last years of your life looking up the derivation of words in the dictionary—and boring each other to bits with information like “Yes, an oilee was indeed a young miner in the Welsh pits—and oilie is someone who has done very well out of oil, according to up-to-date New York slang. So, if it says ‘sounds like,’ it must be oilee.” “Or oilie,” says my friend from the Lakes dejectedly. “They both fit. We’ll never know which is right.”

  Give Up

  You can do what you like. Get up when you want. Sleep when you want. Watch movies in the afternoon. Eat when you like. Go where you like, when you like.

  But there is a lot to be said for winding down and spending the rest of your life pottering about in your slippers, peering at Google every day, and filling the hours between dawn and dusk answering thorny questions like, “Should I have another cup of tea now or later?”

  One friend of mine told me, “It’s so great now, being able simply to loaf around. I don’t think I’ve done any proper loafing since I was fourteen.”

  While lots of oldies see the decade or so that follows sixty as an opening to a new, adventurous world, for me it’s not the sound of doors opening that I love. It’s the slamming sound of doors shutting that I like, making space for much more parochial pleasures.

  Birds and Gardening

  If you’re anything like me, you’ll find, after sixty, you turn more inward than outward. I’m far fussier about my house than I used to be, and having always thought birds rather a waste of airspace, I have now become obsessed with the blackbirds, robins, and so on in my garden. I have actually bought that very thing that I used to dread my grandmother bringing out, a Bird Book, which tells you whether you have a lesser spotted nuthatch on your doorstep or a greater crested wagtail. I even have a bird feeder, and a cat-scarer, and subscribe to a site that tells me Which Kinds of Nuts Attract Which Kinds of Bird. Unfortunately, of course, due to my ripening cataracts, I am unable to tell the difference between all the brown things that come hopping about my garden, but I like to think the lawn is awash with goldfinches, tits, and chaffinches.

  Then, of course, there’s gardening, something I used to regard with dread as a kind of outdoor housework. They do say that gardening is an elderly way of satisfying some kind of parental instinct, that we always want to nurture and grow things. It’s just in our nature. The kids have fled the nest, so we’ve got to make do with nasturtiums instead. (The great things about nasturtiums, you will find if you grow enough of them, is that they never fly the nest. They just reseed, meaning, when they die, you never have to spend hours in the bedroom sobbing your eyes out and then, when you get up, pretending that you don’t mind at all.)

  I try to grow things from seed, and very pleased I am when one in about a hundred actually makes it to the flowering stage.

  But beware. Recently I read that apparently, according to scientists, thirty minutes of digging, weeding, and pruning five times a week can revitalize sexual performance. Such moderate exercise is enough to reduce the risk of impotence by around 38 percent. So don’t go mad. Unless, of course, you want more sex. Which means you haven’t yet read the chapter on sex.

  5. Death

  There is one great thing about dying, which is that you don’t have to get out of bed to do it.

  —Kingsley Amis

  AS AN AGONY AUNT, I try to understand most things. I can understand people harming themselves, I can understand their being phobic about signing their names in public, I can imagine that some might find pleasure in any number of strange sexual practices. But I’ve always had a bit of a blind spot when it comes to people who are frightened of death. It might be, of course, that I’ve so often thought about it. Even when I was in my twenties, I decided very firmly that if life didn’t improve by the time I was thirty, I would jump off a cliff. It didn’t improve but by then I had a son, and therefore the cliff jumping had to wait, and so it continued, until now, when I’m left with fewer (I hope) years ahead of me than years behind me—and I’m starting to think there isn’t much point in cliff jumping when it’s going to happen so soon anyway. It’s rather like reading a book at bedtime. It may be two in the morning and you’re dying to go to sleep but when you see you’ve only got twenty pages left, you stagger on till you reach the end rather than leaving it unread till the next day.

  I see death as something rather wonderful to look forward to. I see it like coming home. I see it as a merciful relief from all life’s anxieties and troubles. I see it as a longed-for respite—and the idea of coming back again, even as a chirpy robin, let alone a human being, fills me with horror. The other thing is, of course, that it’s going to happen to all of us. So why not welcome it and accept it rather than dread it? Everyone around me always goes on about how stupid people are who see life as a glass half empty rather than a glass half full, so why can’t they feel the same optimistic way about death? It would seem sensible. When older people call up and say, tearfully, “Oh no, I’ve been told I’ve only got a few months to live,” I tend to think, Well, what do you expect at your age, dearie? I don’t imagine you were expecting to live forever.

  As a seventy-five-year-old friend said to me the other day, having just come away from a grisly candlelit vigil beside an eighty-five-year-old friend who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease hideously for ten years and had been dying of it for the last ten days, “Why all this surprise over death? After all, you and I don’t have a special relationship with it. All the signs that we’re going to die have been there from the very day we were born.”

  Us oldies have had years and years to get used to the idea of death. We shouldn’t be so pathetic about it, we shouldn’t dread it. We should set a good example to the young, and teach them, too, to welcome death, when life gets too wretched, or when it’s clear that we’ve spent quite enough time at the party and our hosts are starting to yawn and look at the clock.

  It’s a Great Time to Die, Anyway

  That’s another plus for us oldies. The recession is settling in for a couple of decades, global warming (if you believe it, that is) spells the end of the earth as we know it, and, frankly, there’s not a lot of fascinating stuff looming on the horizon. It would have been horrible to have died during, say, the Renaissance. You’d be kicking yourself for not being around to see the glorious works of art, and read about the amazing scientific discoveries and new theories that you knew must be in the air. But now, at the risk of sounding like an old bore (see “Boring for Britain”) what is there to look forward to? Literature has pretty much reached a dead end, books themselves appear to be a dying art, and soon we’re going to have to read everything on screens, which is literally a pain in the neck; modern classical music is well-nigh incomprehensible; the last art exhibition I went to sent me home reeling. The world is being taken over by machines, you can’t even talk to an operator on the telephone anymore, and we are all gradually going to become less and less individualized and more like one another. The last time I felt a frisson of real excitement about what was going on around me was in the ’60s, and I don’t think the jaded feeling I have at the moment about the state of the arts and civilization is entirely because I am ancient. There is a hint of the end of this civilization i
n the air, a fin de siècle zeitgeist, and I certainly am quite excited about being part of the fin.

  Isn’t Death Fascinating?

  I’ve seen a number of people dying and they all went off, at the very end, incredibly peacefully, so there’s nothing to fear. Many were pleased. Even Freud said, in a letter he wrote to a friend in 1936, “I still cannot get used to the grief and afflictions of old age and I look forward with longing to the journey into the void.”

  None of those I saw die shook their fists at close of day, or raged—raged “against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas suggested. Indeed, the last words of three of them were impeccably polite. They said “thank you” for some small kindness; then they closed their eyes and died. And a young relation of mine actually said a day before his death, “You know, Virginia, every day a bit of my body shuts down—I can’t stand up anymore, or I can’t lift a cup to my lips—and it’s so odd but I don’t mind. I can’t tell you how incredibly interesting it all is.”

  That’s the spirit.

  And What’s So Great about Living, Anyway?

  The problem is that so many people see living long as some kind of competition. When the author and playwright Simon Gray was told he had only a year to live, he realized his vocabulary about death was slanted. He referred to himself or other people as having “made it to” or “got to” a certain age—and when thinking of someone who died, he reminisced that had he lived he would have “pulled off ” another fifteen years.

  They say that old age isn’t too bad when you consider the alternative. But what is the alternative? Everlasting life? No thanks.

  Nowhere is the desire to live long seen so clearly as in Miami, a city also known as God’s Waiting Room. It’s rather like Hove, with gangsters. When I was there recently, I descended in an elevator from my hotel room, about five billion floors up; when I got to the three-billionth floor, the door opened to welcome a very elderly, very clean old man, wearing a spotless linen suit and sporting a silver-topped cane. He had that creamy white hair in which you can see every comb line. No egg stain on his tie. The thought almost flitted through my mind that I might quite like to have his grandchildren. There was a silence and then, as we crawled down the remaining floors, he suddenly turned to me with a look of pride and said, in a gravelly voice, “I’m ninety-eight years old.”

  Now, I expect one of my grandsons to tell me proudly that he is four and a half, but I don’t expect a mature person to announce their age. Perhaps this poor guy does nothing all day except be ninety-eight. And anyway, what was I to say? “Oh, very good”? Or, more honestly, “Poor you! I do hope life doesn’t go on too long. It’ll all end soon, I promise.”

  I find this curious pride in old age all over the place. Even the man who helps out at my local mosque pulls me toward him and whispers in my ear, “I’m eighty-nine.” But at least he has the sense and decency to add, rather sadly, “Old age is not merciful.”

  Certainly everyone in Miami looked fantastically old. You see alarmingly pulled-back face-lifty faces atop crinkled bent old figures, all out of kilter. You imagine that when they’re 150 they’ll be trying to persuade each other that it’s the “new 130.”

  In America I gave talks to groups of people who all looked just like a sea of wrinkles, ancient specimens, most of whom were apparently held together by pieces of string. Could it have been that they may have had what, in my hotel spa, was advertised as a “longevity massage”—and if so, what did it involve? For some reason I imagined bodies being stretched out as on a rack. In the lobby there was a book for sale called Secrets of Longevity: 100 Tips on How to Live to 100. Heaven preserve me. What I wanted was a book called How to Make Sure You’ve Popped off by 75: 100 Tips for a Quick and Painless Death.

  To be fair, most people I know do say they’re not frightened of death so much as frightened of dying. And none of us wants to enter a strange half-life of pain, blindness, deafness, the loss of all our faculties, and, often, a complete change of personality. Some Alzheimer’s sufferers can actually turn violent and assault those they previously loved. That is no life for anyone.

  I have seen a friend die recently, on a life-support machine, her body covered with tubes, wires, with no hope at all of recovery, surrounded by people arguing for days over whether they should choose an option known, apparently, as Power Off. Thank God the sensible people prevailed and she was put out of her misery.

  What people are put through these days when it comes to death is worse than it is for animals—not that animals have a great time. When I had a dying cat, I took him to the vet to be put to sleep, but in this new, extraordinary climate of “right to live,” even the vet was reluctant. The poor animal had to live on in great pain for three weeks before he almost expired on a Sunday night, and the emergency vet told me that I had a “very big decision to make.” “I’ve made it!” I screamed. “Put him out of his misery now!”

  So when some argue about keeping people alive, come what may, I feel like saying, “For heaven’s sake, what’s the big deal?” I’ve already lived far longer than most people were expected to live a hundred years ago. At sixty-five, I feel I live on borrowed time and every day’s a bonus. As Proust wrote, “We are all dead people, waiting to take up our posts.”

  Anyway, isn’t there a moment when even the most life-loving among us feel we’ve just had enough? I’m sixty-five and the prospect of another ten Christmases stretching out in front of me, with all the agonies of “are they going to spend it with me, am I going to them, are they going away to their friends?” fills me with dread. Not to mention the fact that it’s not good for our children if we hang around too long. I certainly didn’t even begin to feel like a grown-up until both my parents had popped off.

  Free up Some Space

  I know that when your last parent dies you can feel lost. Finally you’re an orphan. But you are, at last, free. My own parents seemed like a couple of vast rhododendron bushes hanging over me, for most of my life. When they died, I missed them—but at last I, too, could see the sky and get the warmth of the sun. At last I could grow myself. And I often give thanks to my parents for having had the consideration to die when I was still young enough to enjoy a life free of their affectionate but sometimes stifling presence.

  I have friends of seventy-five who are still looking after a bonkers old parent, still staggering off to the nursing home to sit by the bedside of a wheezing half corpse that doesn’t even recognize them, and then staggering home again. I have friends whose lives are dominated by their elderly parents. It’s not right that older people should hang around, clogging up the corridors, like guests at a party who’ll never leave. How will young people ever have a chance to develop if they’re forever shadowed by our ailing, brooding presences?

  We’re living far too long as it is, anyway. By 2040 the number of people over the age of sixty-four is expected to grow from 9.5 million to 15 million. Scientists predict that someone born at the end of this century could expect to live twenty years longer than their equivalent a hundred years before. It’s a ghastly prospect. Indeed, Martin Amis has talked of a future in which there is a virtual war between the old and the young, with the old clogging up the hospitals and monopolizing the social services. He spoke recently about a “silver tsunami” overwhelming the younger generation and causing major civil unrest.

  Being Bumped Off

  Baroness Warnock said that she would far rather die than be put into a nursing home and spend large sums of money that could be better used by her children. My thoughts exactly. And if you think I’m being creepy, apparently 80 percent of us welcome the idea of assisted suicide when we get too old, confused, or ill to enjoy life any more.

  I have a living will stashed in almost every room in my house, in my wallet, with my doctor, with my lawyer. My poor son has been told so many times how much I want him to get rid of me if I become a burden, I’m sometimes surprised he doesn’t just seize a cushion and do it now, just to shut me up.

 
; Bumping Yourself Off

  Apparently in England we have the most timorous and conservative right-to-die lobby in the world. The kindly Dignity in Dying outfit, which used to be called the Voluntary Euthanasia Society before it was called Exit, a far bolder name, is actually legally unable to give out the telephone number of Dignitas, the agency in Switzerland that helps people bump themselves off when life gets too much.

  So what if I just got fed up with living and yet was perfectly okay physically and brainwise? What if I just thought, Hell, you know, actually, I’ve just had enough. I’m bored with living. I want to try something new? I’d have to do it myself.

  I could just take an overdose. At the back of a drawer stuffed with old sweaters and forgotten shirts I have a very, very old bottle of red and green capsules. They must be way past their expiration date, but I hope that by the time I decide to bump myself off they will join the various other over-the-counter drugs that I will dose myself with and add to the lethal cocktail. It’s comforting to know they’re there, anyway.

  Or, if I’ve lost the pills, which is likely, I could try other methods. Sadly, Dignity in Dying no longer produces a How to Kill Yourself booklet—but I was lucky to get their Guide to Self-Deliverance (great title!) in 1981. (“You need two plastic bags, approximately three feet in diameter and 18 inches in width. . . . Kitchen bin-liners are an obvious possibility.” “For drugs and car exhaust . . . this requires a secure connection between the end of the exhaust pipe and a length of stout flexible hose which should fit over the exhaust pipe—vacuum-cleaner hose appears to be suitable. ...”)