a good age

T.S. Eliot said: The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
The weather forecast is vile but at the moment I am writing this, there is a Mediterranean blue sky and all the usual portents of spring. I want to catch this moment of expectation, just before Easter. As a society we face a general election and, we think, ten years of austerity to pay off the profligacy of the last ten years. There is a certain appeal to non-materialistic values – for example, recognising the impermanence of things, according to Buddhist understanding of the world. We could do with less greed, hatred and delusion in our lives, that’s for sure.
How may older people think to be helpful at this time, apart from a traditional role of being active grandparents for working-age parents – I can see one such couple across the street.
In certain cultures, there is a tradition that older people may become renunciates, going off to the forest to look after their spiritual health. I am not suggesting that, but there is a case for taking a different stance. We have become coy about ageing – the correct phrase now seems to be ‘people who are older’ – older than what? Older than people who are not older. I heard a 50 year old commentator talk eloquently about the deaths of his aged parents and how this might be done better than in a hospital surrounded by tubes that get in the way of the simple act of holding hands. But he went on to describe a good death as coming after a fine meal and fantastic sex with his wife – that, I suggest, is the dream, of a person who is younger. This was not the priority of his parents at their age, I think. He was intelligent and compassionate but his imagination failed him when he described that good death. Final salary pension schemes and bonuses and pay-offs encourage the idea that older people have the same expensive needs as they did when they were raising their children and fulfilling their ambitions and buying status.
There are other needs and they do not cost the same – but as a society we cannot afford, it seems, these costs associated with peace of mind and the comforts of lying in one’s own bed. After thirteen years, a ton of legislation of all kinds, two wars, a free market and a banking crisis, the government is proposing a national care service – in four years time. Don’t hold your breath.
The next generation of older people will have known the good years, the overpriced handbags and underpriced shoes, second homes and three holidays a year, air travel free at the point of delivery, Perhaps they can set an example of living in relative poverty with dignity.