One for the Ages

One for the Ages
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 5, 2014

The gentleman up the road has been scolding me for referring to him in a previous column as ‘elderly.’ He’s 81.

This neighbour is a dapper fellow with a quick wit and rounded vowels. He walks slowly and deliberately. I know his measured steps are not from lack of spunk – he’s wary of the calamity that a fall would wreak on his bones.

I understand his caution. In the past few years I have stopped galloping down stairs three at a time. I no longer leap off the high walkway at the beach to shortcut my route to soft sand. I don’t need to test my physical prowess as I once did. I know I am not invincible.

But I feel guilty for saddling my neighbour with a lazy generalisation like ‘elderly,’ an adjective that does little but paint the lines on his face. Why do we have so few words to describe our later years? Just as we’re getting used to the idea of being middle-aged, we discover everyone younger than us thinks we’re old.

No-one can agree on when a person becomes elderly. Perhaps it’s when we talk too slowly, walk too slowly, drive too slowly. When we’ve given up on rushing, and time moves forward at a stately pace. Gerentologists now talk about the ‘young-old,’ those aged 65-74, the ‘middle-old’ (75-84) and the ‘oldest-old’ (85+).

Driving the kids home from a late swim at the beach, I threw a leading question to the back seat: “How old is elderly?”

Thirteeen-year-old son thought for a moment: “Sixty?”

“Sixty? Are you kidding me? How is that elderly?”

He shrugged. “Sixty’s pretty old you know Mum. People die at sixty.”

He had a point but not one I appreciated. “If someone dies at sixty” I explained, “we say they died too young. Not tragically young. But it was too short an innings. And hey, I’m going to be sixty in thirteen years so watch it buddy!” It was his turn to look horrified.

I decided ‘old’ is a moving target. I am one of the older mums at my daughter’s kindergarten, and one of the younger mums at my son’s high school.

And that made me wonder how my own Mum would describe ‘elderly’, now that she and all her friends are orbiting eighty. A decade ago, she would have defined elderly as anyone 15 years older than her. Now, she’s scrambling to recalibrate her terms. Elderly is anyone who can no longer ride a bike.

I wonder if my eldest son appreciates his grandmother’s ebullience. She doesn’t think of her age as something grim to be endured. She’s always first to suggest trooping off to the oval to kick the footy. She mows her own lawn. She can still outrun her 3-year-old grand-daughter at the park. My mother is one of the fortunate ones: luck and a robust constitution have so far kept serious illness at bay.

But she’s slowing down. I hear her cursing the arthritis that cramps her hands and feet. It pains her to open a door, unscrew a lid, lug groceries. She can no longer grip a tennis racquet. Her golf clubs idle in the boot of her car. I see the cuts and bruises on her arms after she’s pruned her roses. A rogue thorn tears through her papery skin.

To me, Mum has always been of permanently indeterminate age. Last year, stranded after an Eagles game with no trains running, she decided to walk the six kilometres home in the dark. Two police officers stopped to offer her a lift. “You shouldn’t be walking alone at night, Ma’am. Can we drop you home?”

“No thank you, I want to walk. And please don’t call me Ma’am.” (They took her address, drove ahead and sat waiting in her driveway until she arrived safely).

A former television colleague, now in his seventies, warns me: “You’ll feel invisible. At the shops, you’ll go unnoticed, ignored or served last because you’re not busy – you’re retired! I refuse to be treated that way. But if I complain, I’m just a grumpy old bugger!”

Few of us feel as old as we look. My neighbour pretends old age isn’t happening. And in his head, it isn’t. Body willing, I intend to choose when to act old. Then again, I might change my mind when I get there. If I still have it.