Angry for the Old

I continue to read Julia Neuberger’s Book ‘Not Dead Yet’. She is very angry at the way in which older people are marginalised in British life. Her list of targets is formidable. I have already mentioned her dismissal of QUALYS. She is angry with Insurers who won’t agree to cover older people who are doing voluntary work. She condemns the virtual ban on older women being featured in magazines, frontline politics and television, and calls it ‘a display of youthful fear of age and experience’. Although 1.8M older people in this country are said to live in poverty, Age Concern is ‘too polite in their campaigning’ to help them she alleges. She is critical of most voluntary agencies for the timid way in which they advocate a more just treatment of older people. One of her surprise targets is free bus passes for people in their sixties who may still be working. The money saved could then be used for supporting people who are much older.

She sees age discrimination everywhere. Retirement ages in particular should be banned. It is ‘a sheer waste of skills and knowledge’ and forcing people into retirement before they wish to stop work can cause pain and ill health. (Apparently the staff at Parliament’s second chamber, the House of Lords, have to retire at 65, even though the average age of their lordships and ladyships must be far in excess of that!). She acknowledges that some people welcome retirement with open arms but still argues for the right to work for people who are still able to, and believes that they are in the majority, which I rather doubt.

Neuberger persistently criticises the care of older people in the U.K.: it is inadequate, unfeeling and inconsistent. She was surprised to find so many good stories about home and residential care, especially when run by charitable organisations, but is appalled at the many shortcomings of a national system which is under-funded and staffed by people who are under-trained. Residents in Care Homes should be more involved in the running and management of homes, she argues, the cost being shared by the State and the individual.

One interesting discovery for me was that at the age of 95 our organs are likely to be the same as those of a 75 year old. For centenarians, therefore, the ageing process is put on hold. Not, however, a prospect that makes me ambitious to reach that age! Neuberger has the cryptic comment that ‘people over a hundred die quickly ‘because we let them, and 85 year olds die slowly because we don’t’.

More from this passionate and compassionate book, but another time.

B.R.

' Successful Ageing '

I don’t much like this description of how it should be with us as we get older. ‘Success’ seems over ambitious, especially when all energy may be devoted to surviving! But Julia Neuberger uses the phrase several times in her book, ‘Not Dead Yet’, which I am still reading. She refers to a meeting of gerontologists in the U.S.A. where the scientific view was that success is primarily measured by good health. But others who were there - and she would agree with this – were of the opinion that success is a much more complex matter and involves ‘engagement with life’ (healthy or not), with the freedom to do what you like and most of all the freedom to be loved. Having your own home could be a large part of that, with the autonomy that goes with it and the ability to organise your life in your own way (hence the dread of ending your days in an Old People’s Home).

If you ask many older people what matters to them, Neuberger says, it is love : love of a partner, even one maybe now dead, of children and grandchildren, siblings, friends and more distant family and an interest in the world around us. Often success means dealing creatively with that world after the death of someone you love. She refers to where Katharine Whitehorn in her recent autobiography writes about the experience of becoming a widow. ‘Losing your husband has two separate aspects, there’s missing the actual man, the lover; his quirks, his kindness, his thinking. But marriage is also the water in which you swim, the land you live in : the habits, the assumptions you share about the future, about what’s funny or deplorable, about the way the house is run, or should be…you have to learn to live in another country, in which you are an unwilling refugee’.

My experience as a bereavement counsellor confirms this. As you get older inevitably you think about your own death, but its other people’s death that is so painful to us. It can be very hard sometimes to ‘recover’ yourself when someone who has meant everything to you is no longer there. You feel misplaced; a ‘refugee’ indeed.

Apparently there is an official measure by which medics sort us older people out and it’s called ‘Quality Adjusted Life Years’, a system which seems to determine whether an older person who is ill is worth medical care. I’ve looked it up on the internet and where I can’t make sense of it find it incomprehensible, and where I can, deeply insulting. Neuberger calls it a tyranny of definition and urges that it should be dumped. Doctors should take their patients own definition of their health and possible treatment in a broader sense than a fixed qualitative assessment. I guess most older people would agree to that, as I do.

B.R.

Saying How It Is

We live in a community where people are not shy in sharing their personal story.Two of our neighbours routinely catch up with the latest news over the garden fence as they hang out the washing, for example.

On my way home from my allotment yesterday I passed by the house of an eighty year old man who attends the same exercise class as me. He was painting the railings of his house and in five minutes told me that maintaining it kept him busy, that he had a long privet hedge he keeps tidy and what a nuisance it is, that there had been trouble with the gutters which have now been dealt with and that the Council had never consulted with local householders when they laid a path across a field to which people have access as they pass by his house (which was what I was doing), and that that could be annoying sometimes. ‘Well’, he said, ‘it keeps me active’. Knowing him a little, I felt after five minutes, I knew him quite well.

My wife had a similar experience on the local bus the same day. Getting on board with our daughter and two year old grandson, there was this elderly man looking on them fondly. ‘I’ve got a GREAT grandson!’, he said. There was a pause, then, ‘and they’ve called him after me’. Another pause. ‘Mind you, they were on to a good thing because they needed to borrow £20,000 to help them buy their house’. He went on to refer to the so called ‘good old days’. That’s rubbish’, he said. ‘THESE are the good old days. I’ve never been so well off as I am now. Nor you I expect’, he said, pointedly looking at my wife.

Two contented older people.

Julia Neuberger’s book ‘Not Dead Yet’, which I am reading, is subtitled ‘A Manifesto for Old Age’, and the book is full of anger at the way older people are often treated. But it’s also full of people’s stories, some of them sad but some full of joy. Pointing out the deficiencies in the British system of social care, she also identifies the natural resilience of older people and their capacity to live differently as they age, but to live well. Socialising is so important she says.

As we experienced that day!

B.R.

' Not Dead Yet '

I mentioned Julia Neuberger’s recent book on July 6th. and said that I would read it, which is what I am now doing. She sumarises her ‘manifesto’ into staccato–like statements, which become the headings for each of her ten chapters.

Here they are –

1. Don’t make assumptions about my age – end age discrimination

2. Don’t waste my skills and experience – the right to work

3. Don’t take my pride away- end begging for entitlements

4. Don’t trap me at home because there are no loos or seats – reclaim the streets

5. Don’t make me brain dead, let me grow – open access to learning

6. Don’t force me into a care home – real choice in housing

7. Don’t treat those who look after me like rubbish – train and reward care assistants properly

8. Don’t treat me like I’m not worth repairing – community beds and hospitals

9. Don’t treat me as meaningless – the right to die well

10. Don’t assume I’m not enjoying life, give me a chance – grey rage

The book is breathless and repetitive and has clearly been put together in haste, but I am finding it well worthwhile. I shall be referring to some of her statistics, research and reflections, and commenting on them in a few future postings.

B.R.