by Madeleine Kando
My long distance friend Rebecca came to visit this week. I don’t see her a lot, since she lives in Holland, on the other side of the big pond. She is old, like I am, but charming, sweet and terribly damaged by something that happened in her early twenties. That was when she found out her husband had been cheating on her with her sister from the day they were married. This happened 50 years ago. The husband is gone, the sister is gone, but the wound has never healed. Rebecca is not so much bitter as completely uninterested in her own future and even her present seems to take a backseat to her main preoccupation, scratching and unscabbing this old old wound.
I feel sorrow for her and a good deal of confusion. I also am prone to certain obsessions regarding my past. Who isn’t at my age? There is a drawer in every old person’s head, marked regrets, but I can keep it closed most of my waking hours. Rebecca on the other hand, has lost the key and her drawer is now permanently open, oozing its nasty contents into her otherwise very witty, interesting and intelligent mind.
‘She just needs a good dose of therapy’, I hear you say. But what will that do? Would it take away the hurt? Would it leave a void? Rebecca’s self image is now so fused with what happened all these years ago, that she might not survive the excision.
You see, growing old is a complicated affair. It creeps up on you like a black cat in the night and settles in comfortably. Before you know it, old age has taken over the reigns of your life. You are too caught up living you see. You don’t spend your days thinking: ‘Oh, my God! I am older than yesterday!’ Then, suddenly, you ARE old.
Until recently, I could pretend I wasn’t old. When my mother was still alive (she died 3 days shy of her 104th birthday), I equated old age with her. I was a spring chicken compared to her. Her old age kept me young. We were different species, Ata and I. She was old and I was not. I could always commiserate with me friends about my poor old mother who couldn’t do this or that any more. Wasn’t it terrible that she couldn’t go out to the store by herself, that she had bruised her arm because of her eyesight? Wasn’t old age terrible? The ‘it could never happen to me’ mentality was alive and kicking in the good old days before my mother died.
Once your mother passes the 100-year goal post, you know that she has escaped death’s claws. But contrary to everyone’s expectations, she died and now I am confronted with the inescapable reality of my own mortality. I am trying to wrap my head around what it means to be an old ‘Madeleine’. It is ridiculous to try to make sense of something that is so natural, but I believe it is a result of society trying to shove old age under the rug, as if it didn’t exist. We are on our own, us ‘old folks’. There is so much out there to support and validate all the other life’s stages, but old age? Nah. Who needs old people anyway? They are senile, useless creatures, a burden on society. It takes a thick skin to not be affected by this perception of old age. We are equated with other sections of society, like the criminals, the mentally ill, and the poor. We are ‘the other’, the ones that you will never be, thank God.
This is ironic, because of the 5 major life stages: (childhood, young adulthood, adult hood, middle age and old age), we spend an awful lot of our time in the last stage, at least in our affluent Western societies.
Were I to live in Monaco, I would have the misfortune of being called a Monegasque, but my average life expectancy of 90 years would amply make up for it. I would spend 11% of my life as a child, 11% as a teenager and 28% as an adult. By the age of 45 I would be pretty much obsolete as far as nature is concerned, being beyond my reproductive years. But I would still have half of my life to live! My middle age years would account for 22% and the remaining 28%, I would live as an old person. I created a neat little table to show you.
This is astounding. More than a quarter of our time we spend being old! What does it mean when a society’s norms place no value on a quarter of a person’s life? It sounds a lot to me like societal norms haven’t kept up with standards of living and medical advances.
Being old is a marvel of nature and we should see it as such. It is the beneficial side effect of prosperous societies. If I lived in Afghanistan, where life expectancy is 50 years, I would have been dead a long time ago. Had I lived my life in Angola or Bolivia, I would be a somewhat fresher corpse, but only in 40 out of 224 countries would I still be alive by the age of 80.
People talk about how ‘young’ a country’s population is. In Niger, the median age is 15. Only 2.5% of the population is over the age of 65. In Monaco, 32% of the population is over 65. In the US, it is 32%. Does that mean that Niger is healthier, younger, and more vibrant? No, it means that people die before they reach a certain age because of malnutrition, poor health care and bad quality of life.
These days I am looking for stories about old age, for movie titles that have the word ‘old’ in it, documentaries, and novels, anything that reflects who I am in my old age. It isn’t easy. Our culture abounds in childhood adventures, heroic deeds of the young, dramas about couples, divorce, love and pain. But stories about being old are rare. Even stories about death are more abundant, as if society tells us that once you reach middle age, you might as well frog leap to your final resting place and bypass old age altogether.
What I would like to tell my friend Rebecca is to stop living in the past, to take old age by the horns and run, hobble or limp with it. It doesn’t have to be a Marathon and as Maurice Chevalier so famously said: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” leave comment here
