This is the second post in a series related to Old Age Themes. Contrary to everything you read elsewhere, you will learn here that old age is not great.
Drabble on Dying
Additional examples in support of my belief that decrepitude is depressing is found in this book by Margaret Drabble. The main character, Fran Stubbs, is a septuagenarian who inspects old age homes so she has a couple of good reasons to be suspicious of the claims about the good things to be found in "Old Crockdom". The quotations below are all from the Canongate Books 2017 edition of The Dark Flood Rises, if you wish to see if I am being honest. By the way, I enjoyed the book as did the reviewer who wrote this:
"Ageing and dying in style...Margaret Drabble’s sharply drawn characters look back on lives lived and forwards to achieving a good death.” Observer.
Pp. 29-30
“She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models or residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented and medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. Old fools who didn’t have the courage to have that last whisky and set their bedding on fire with a last cigarette.”
P.44.
“We can all expect to live longer, but it’s recently been claimed that the majority of us can expect to spend the last six years of our prolonged lives suffering from a serious illness, in some form of pain and ill health.”
Fran found this statistic, true or false, infuriating. Longevity has fucked up our pensions, our work-life balance, our health services, our housing, our happiness. It’s fucked up old age itself.”
Pp.50-1.
“There just aren’t enough younger people around these days to infuse the energy into the elderly. The feeble, as never before in society, in history, are outweighing the hale. The balance is wrong. The shape of the bell curve is a disaster. It’s a dystopian science fiction scenario, a disaster movie.”
The hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have let themselves get into this kind of predicament. They abandoned the elderly, or drowned them, or clubbed them to death, or exposed them on snowy mountainsides. They kept on the move.”
Bonus Information:
Drabble is the sister of A..S. Byatt the novelist, and the wife of Michael Holroyd, the biographer of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John, among others. If Drabble and Holroyd were interviewed via ZOOM during this pandemic, you would find the following author well represented on their extensive bookshelves.
"We are in the first-floor drawing room of Sir Michael Holroyd's enormous house in north Kensington. Drabble used to have a home in Hampstead and continued to live in it for several years after they married, but when Holroyd was very ill with cancer, in 2013, she finally moved in with him and sold her home, which she says she still misses. They also have a house in Somerset, near Porlock, where she goes to write. The north Kensington house is shabby chic (perhaps more shabby than chic), with some very good paintings — Augustus John, Gwen John and a portrait of Lytton Strachey by Dora Carrington — but hung seemingly at random....
But what really surprised me were the bookshelves — proper built-in, wall-to-wall bookshelves, as you'd expect from two famous authors, but containing not the complete works of Holroyd and Drabble, but the complete works of Lee Child. Lee Child ? I squawked. "Oh yes, haven't you read them? They're totally gripping," Drabble says equably.
"I think I was recommended them by Antonia Fraser, who herself is a detective writer, and I just read my way through the entire lot. I read them on the Kindle and persuaded Michael into them when he was ill, but of course he can't read a Kindle so we had to buy them twice over."
Source:
"I Absolutely Love the Premier Inn: I Just Felt Completely Free and Happy There," Lynn Barber, The Sunday Times, Dec. 11, 2016.
For the first post in this series see: Contrarian News For Old Codgers (OATS1)
Post Script:
Those of you who are depressed by all this, will feel better when you consider that Drabble was born in 1939 and Holroyd in 1935.
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