How will we cope with growing old?
It’s a relatively new question for the human race. A quick look back in time reveals that the Paleolithic era – the Old Stone Age – offered an average life expectancy of thirty-three years. By the 17th century it was forty-eight; the 18th century, fifty-six; the 19th century, sixty-two, while the present life expectancy in the UK is eighty-one years; though many will live for longer. I know an undertaker who regards anyone who dies in their seventies as ‘dying young’.
Things have changed. When I was a child, you lived a little past your retirement, a few years of grace, and then you died. You weren’t a problem to anyone, neither your family nor the state. The Beatles sang “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” They imagined that to be very old. But what about ninety-four, which is common enough now? Our ability to keep people alive has advanced considerably since the Old Stone Age when grandparents didn’t exist. Death has been slowed and care homes have multiplied.
A recent study in Nature Ageing concluded that the rate of improvement in life expectancy is slowing and dramatic life extension is now unlikely. This may not be bad news. Not only must the elderly cope with being less in demand and less productive, wherein lies a sense of worth for many. They must also handle being a drain on everyone’s precious resources. Some are happy enough to help out but not all. ‘I can manage an hour a week for my parents, early Saturday,’ said a busy dad recently. ‘They’re a complete nightmare.’ It is not a cheerful commitment. It wasn’t like this in the Stone Age.
It has been called ‘the curse of medicine’, which offers longevity of life, but with no promises about quality. We used to have a care home next door, and we’d hear residents in the garden, taken for walks by the staff. But these walks stopped and when we asked why, it was because no one in the care home was fit enough to walk in the garden. The threshold of need had been raised. Residents were now fit only to spend their time in the communal lounge or in their rooms, ‘variously conscious’ as one carer told me. I spoke also with a visitor whose father had been there for two years. ‘I said goodbye to him a long time ago,’ she says. ‘So who do you visit now?’ I ask. ‘A memory, I suppose – and one I find it increasingly hard to remember.’
We are a generation faced with a problem previous generations didn’t face: slow death. How do we manage the measured crucifixion of gradual loss – the disintegration of status, identity and role and of physical and mental capacity?
It can be a psychological struggle. Some will perhaps reinvent their past to provide solace, puffing up their back story, and summed up in the line: ‘The older I get, the better I was.’ Others might go in the opposite direction, allowing quiet despair into the narrative: ‘Just what was all that about? I did a lot – but what did I actually achieve?’ As a retired priest once said to me, ‘My life feels like nothing more than a mis-spent half hour.’
The ageing process is letting go of things we once had. We used to do a lot, we were in demand, but the season is different now and instead of doing, increasingly we are done to. Our pay, which we used to work for, is provided by our pension. Our garden, in which we used to battle hard, is handled by a gardener. We exist on a plethora of pills and need help with the stairs and putting on our socks. Friends and family may applaud us for ‘staying active’ or ‘managing for ourselves’; we do not go gentle into that good night. Yet they did not offer such applause, or feel the need to, in our younger days. It’s a sign of the times. And despite our best efforts, the discrete care of family or caring agencies increases.
Jesus never grew old. But he knew what it was to be handed over and to have his power removed. In The Stature of Waiting WH Vanstone throws searching light on the change in Jesus after his arrest, as he moves from doing to being done to. In Gethsemane, a new path is chosen. He is no longer active but passive. Once he had set the agenda for others; now the agenda of others controls him. From here on, he initiates nothing but becomes the object of other people’s actions.
This is nowhere more clearly revealed than in Jesus’ words on the cross: ‘I thirst’. In former times, Jesus had himself offered to assuage the thirst of others; he had been the initiator of help: ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.’ But now the situation is reversed and he is the one in need and it is those around who respond. He has become the object of the help he once offered.
Jesus never grew old but somehow visited the heart of ageing. In the Garden of Gethsemane, where the passion began, he walked knowingly into the diminishment of his powers, physical, social and verbal. Vanstone refers to it as ‘the stature of waiting’. And for many, including some of the Gospel writers, his glory never shone so bright as in those days.
No two human stories are the same. We decline in different ways and at different speeds; it can be brutal, it can be gentle. But however experienced, decline is the reality as we approach the finish line and reality is somehow to be embraced. If we are at war with reality we are unhappy. A woman I know in her late eighties has lost many of her powers, but blames the doctors rather than her age. She imagines if she had a good doctor, who took proper care, her health would return and all would be well again. She struggles to accept the reality of growing old and lives with significant resentment.
The truth is, we have always been dependent on others. Some may imagine themselves master of their universe, making things happen, activists and initiators, without need of others. But this is delusion. We rely on others in so many ways, from the cradle to grave, in every realm of existence – physical, emotional, practical, legal, spiritual and financial. Dependence is not a new story for anyone. No one is an island and there is wellbeing in the appreciation of this truth, whatever our age. It just arrives with more savagery towards the end and finds some of us unprepared.
But the diminishment of our powers brings no diminishment of worth. I remember being in a particularly awkward meeting of church leaders, in which theology was more to the fore than humanity. It was then we became conscious of a banging sound, tears and screaming in the street below. It was a little boy who had been shut out of his home. He was screaming to be allowed back in, desperately hammering on the door. Theological battles melted as we confronted helplessness. It was agreed I’d go out to see if there was anything I could do. But just then, the door was opened and the boy ran inside. Our meeting was not the same after that. Theological red lines had been superseded by compassion, created by helplessness, by a boy who had no power. In the street below, we witnessed the stature of waiting and never once imagined the boy to be worth nothing.
For many, the diminished figure of Jesus on the cross – the epitome of hopelessness, abandoned by his friends and utterly powerless – is the most powerful expression of his worth. It’s not what you do but who you are as decline bites. And it may be that you have seen the remarkable alchemy in the loss of someone’s powers. I am reminded of Jim, who recently died of cancer, but who, in his final months, was almost translucent with glory, like an old stained glass window, transfused by the weak winter sun.
