' The Melancholy Tracking of Old Age

You guessed – this is not going to be one of our more cheerful postings, though – as always I hope – an honest one. I came upon this phrase about watching the remorseless process of ageing at the same time as I saw an article by Dr.Luisa Dillner of the British Medical Journal publishing group. She describes how the body changes as we get older. Here are some of the signs, familiar to many of us.

The one comforting thing is that it all starts from a very early age. For example skin becomes less elastic at 30 years, ‘crow’s feet’ can appear and skin spots due to melanin deposits begin to show. Muscles get smaller and skin starts to sag whilst for most people hair loses its pigment and is grey for most people by the time they are 50.

Arteries narrow and get stiffer between 20 and 80, their lining getting two or three times as thick, making it harder for the blood to flow through them. So blood pressure increases in the over 50’s. The heart gets less efficient at pumping, and a proportion of its cells die and aren’t replaced. At 85 the heart can beat only a fifth as fast as for a 20 year old.

Our capacity to take in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide gets worse around the age of 20, and by 70 the surface area in the lungs that do this job is reduced by 15%. Strangely the kidneys grow from 50g to 250g in the first 50 years of our lives, but then get smaller again and therefore their functioning is less reliable. The reason why the sudden change we experience as we move into a light from a dark room, is that pupils get smaller as we age – a 60 year old gets 33% as much light as someone of 20.

And our brains? Reasoning, problem-solving and memory are generally fine, says the doctor, but what she calls ‘information-processing’ is slower, as messages take longer to travel between nerve sells. She adds that there may be problems turning short-term memory into secondary memory to retrieve later.

I feel I want to end by saying something cheerful! I suppose facing the physical truth about ageing is that it saves us from being anxious about ourselves. What’s happening to my body is what’s happening to everyone else’s. We are part of a community of common experience, much of it good, most of it positive.

Bryan

Age and Aspiration

There’s a striking picture in today’s ‘Guardian’ taken from behind, of an elderly man with broad, hunched shoulders, white hair leading to a bald head. It is the Republican candidate for the U.S. Presidency, John McCain who is 72 years old. At the end of his term, if he wins the election, at 76 he will be near to my own age.

Mc Cain has had much governmental experience since becoming a Senator in 1982. He has the reputation of being his own man, sometimes being out of favour with his own party, tenaciously fighting various issues in the Senate that are important to him. He was instrumental in restoring relations with Vietnam in the 1990’s. He is regarded by many of his generation as a war hero. From 1967 to 1973 he was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese, tortured but refused an early repatriation, his war wounds leaving him with lifelong physical limitations. He is an ardent citizen of his own country and speaks of the U.S.A. as a moral force for peace in the world.

Now, these blogs are apolitical. They are intended to reflect on the condition of ageing – on what happens to our bodies but also how we feel as older people and how we keep a sense of belonging to all the generations. The blogs also resist the myth that the young have all the answers to the world’s problems and can manage, thank you, without any help from older people. Experience is important and although the formation of our character and attitudes belong to another world compared to the present age, we still have a social contribution to make, and many of us wish to do so. We are against age-ism. As long as we can, let’s go on doing what we want to do, providing it does no injury to others, and for as long as we want. The great humanitarian Jimmy Carter is doing just that, to the profit of many.

Even so, it does surprise me that a man who is well over 70 wishes to preside over the most powerful nation of the world (if at the moment one that is like many others, in a state of financial turmoil). It will surprise me even more if he is elected.

B.R.
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