Talking About It

I heard of someone the other day who was told off for talking too much about her age. She is 73. Robustly she defended her right to share with other people the sort of experiences which we have tried to identify in these postings. ‘This is important to me’, she said, ‘so I want to talk about it’. And so she should. I agree with her, though I recognise the dangers. If confession is good for the soul, expression can be helpful to the mind. Just talking to the mirror is no fun. There’s so much that’s new about these latter years of life. To keep it all bottled up can make what is otherwise odd into something that seems disturbingly bad. We can’t demand it, but we do need an audience sometimes.

I suppose you have to wait for the right moment and the right person. Younger people have limited patience with the elderly. For them they can be the people who hold up the bus queue, try to make friends with little children, can’t find the change to pay at the checkout and start speaking sentences they can’t finish. Speed is everything today. Older people are slow!

The middle-aged are working so hard at not being old that they don’t want to be reminded of the horizons that await them. When I was still one of them, I used to hear my mother say again and again that she wished she was dead. We all tried to reassure her that we wanted her to live, forgetting that she actually needed to say these things to us. This was her story. Frail herself and now a widow, she no longer had the appetite for life. We should have allowed her to tell us so.

In fact those of us who are getting on carry an experience that might be of value to everyone if more people would allow us to share it. We are guardians of a dimension of life into which most people one day will enter. We have frustrations and fears and we are inclined to moan a lot, but there’s a resilience and courage and even serenity about us that we would like to express as well. It has been hard to come by, this knowledge we have had to learn, and we shouldn’t keep it to ourselves.

…so, please, may we talk the talk? It could be of benefit to others as well as to ourselves.

B.R.

Ageing and Responsibility

These postings have been an attempt to cope with the ageing process, sometimes recognising what’s happening to us and adjusting to a situation that is hard to prepare for, and can creep up without warning. Necessarily the postings have been about us. Too much so perhaps. As if the world was full of elderly people, and the rest of the human family are of lesser importance and can look after themselves. But age brings with it responsibility.

This week a letter appeared in the Daily Telegraph signed by 110 distinguished psychologists, children’s authors, educationalists and mental health practitioners expressing concern at ‘the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioural and developmental conditions’. This they believed ‘is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and public, of the realities and subtleties of child development’.

They go on to say that ‘since children's brains are still developing, they cannot adjust, as full-grown adults can, to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed "junk"), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in, and regular interaction with the real-life, significant adults in their lives’. The letter continues, ‘our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs’. The signatories conclude that it is 'now clear that the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised'.

Admitting that this is a complex socio-cultural problem to which there is no simple solution, they go on to argue that ‘a sensible first step would be to encourage parents and policy-makers to start talking about ways of improving children's wellbeing' and' propose as a matter of urgency that public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century. This issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades’.

The letter has already created the debate that it desires, and there has been a lot of media response. But news stories have a short life. The elderly however have a long memory and can empathise with the argument that many children today though endowed with immense riches compared to our own younger days, at the same time may be emotionally and mentally impoverished. I guess our maturity makes us care about that. And join the debate.

B.R.

Recognising a Stroke

Strokes can happen to anybody and are not restricted to older people but they are one of the possibilities that may affect the elderly and which at low times we may wonder or may even worry about. A stroke is a type of cardiovascular disease. It affects the arteries leading to and within the brain. A stroke occurs when a blood vessel that carries oxygen and nutrients to the brain is either blocked by a clot or bursts. When that happens, part of the brain cannot get the blood (and oxygen) it needs, so it starts to die, and therefore is unable to function properly, and paralysis or death can follow.

A friend sent me some time ago the following information about how to recognise a stroke and I have just rediscovered it. A neurologist has said that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke. But getting there in time is the problem. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed and then reaching the patient within the critical time.

Apparently there are three steps of recognition. ‘Read and Learn them’!, says my correspondent. Symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify and unfortunately the lack of awareness can spell disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize what is happening. Doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

1. Ask the individual to SMILE.
2. Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
3. Ask the person to REPEAT A SIMPLE SENTENCE COHERENTLY (e.g. ‘It is a sunny day today’.)

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, the advice is to call the emergency services immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher. After discovering that a group of non-medical volunteers could identify facial weakness, arm weakness and speech problems, researchers urged the general public to learn those three questions. They presented their conclusions at the British Stroke Association's annual meeting in February 2005. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of the stroke, and prevent brain damage.

B.R.

Lost

Loosing things is part of getting – and being – old. There are always kind people around who reassure us by saying that they too - all their life indeed - have been loosing things; ‘it is nothing to do with age’, they say. But it is, and those of us who are old, know it is. It’s to do with failing memory of course,trying to remember where we put things and what we had planned to do next, but it’s also about failure of concentration. People who are kind to me, may say when I am dithering, ‘are you listening to me?’ The truth is that generally I am, but I can’t keep attuned to what they are saying as easily as I once could.

I first noticed it when names became a problem – and no one believes you know who they are if you can’t name them as well. Sometimes when I was still working I could remember a bit of a name – the first or the second, or even a nick-name, but never the whole lot. And trying to introduce one friend to another when both had become anonymous could be painfully embarrassing. Forgetting names and loosing things. Horrible. Once when I searched for something lost only to find it was in my hand, our six year old grandson said soothingly, ‘Never mind, you are very, very old and things like that happen when you are old’. True, sadly.

Recently I have realised that that the latest thing I have lost is my waist: lost and never to be found I fear. I was never sylph-like, but a few weeks ago I became aware that I was always pulling up my trousers, as if I was employing the new fashion of the young for droopy drawers, quite inappropriate for someone of my age. Perhaps I was losing weight, I thought – a pleasing prospect; certainly I am not as heavy as I have been. But then it became clear that the weight may be alright but it’s the shape that’s the problem. Hardening of the arteries can be the penalty of age, but thickening of the waist as well it seems. Yet another physical development that one could do without.

But I exist, and happily: inhabiting a body that often seems a stranger to me, but, true for all of us, mine is the only one I’ve got!

……This is the first of occasional postings that are effectively postscripts to the original series of blogs, and they will generally be not too serious observations on what it is like to be what some of us now are. Old!

B.R.