Out of Time (30 page)

For most people there is a considerable contrast between early and advanced old age, with the relative fitness and sociability of ‘early’ old age nowadays often extending through people’s sixties and seventies, even into their early eighties, at least for those with adequate means of support and access to good healthcare. However, increasing debilities and at times comprehensive dependencies become harder to avoid as people move into their mid-eighties.
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This is what is causing such political concern at present. The determined and continuing shrinking of welfare resources comes up against the needs of an expanding number of very old people. Providing adequately for the fragile elderly, as well as for those who care for them, is one of the most significant welfare battles of the moment.

Repeatedly, scandals reveal how lamentable is the provision
currently on offer, even in the most affluent societies that could choose to deliver vastly better services for the old and vulnerable.
²
In Britain the campaigning journalist and broadcaster, Joan Bakewell, was appointed the Voice of Older People under the last Labour government in 2008. In recent years she has stressed the urgent need for a more powerful post to be created to defend the interests of old people and deal with the ‘national disgrace’ evident in the continuous revelations of neglect in provision for social care of the elderly.
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Another well-informed social commentator, Yvonne Roberts, has taken up the baton, pointing out that ‘over-sixty-fives are a net contributor to society at a rate of 30 to 40 billion pounds a year because they pay tax, spend money that creates jobs and are volunteers, carers and significant contributors to charity’.
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The question any nation must consider is how to push for more comprehensive resources for its ageing population, strengthening provisions for care in the community for vulnerable old people in order to keep them out of hospital for as long as possible. Instead, the current coalition British government, in 2012, proposed to cut spending on adult social care by a further one billion pounds in the coming year alone. It is deplorable, and hardly cost-effective, when lack of adequate facilities to care for the elderly in their homes takes them into hospital sooner. At the same time, in a vicious cycle, NHS cost-cutting has disproportionately impacted upon older people, with more than half of hospital beds cut in 2011 targeting elderly patients, making it more likely that they will be discharged too soon and returned to hospital faster.
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Meanwhile, those fighting to improve the care and services for the elderly come up against the orchestration of opinion, taking up the worst tunes emanating from the USA, pitting the old against the young and
insisting the old have already appropriated a disproportionate share of resources. In reality, the same lack of adequate provision is evident in the USA, where the care of the elderly remains work that is both poorly paid and extremely stigmatized.
⁶

There is much to say about improving the care of the very old, and a burgeoning literature addressing the problem.
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However, in this book I have been mainly concerned with the ways in which conceptions of the elderly impact upon self-perception, sapping confidence and making it harder to feel that we remain in charge of our lives as we age. As we have seen, some of the main apprehensions expressed, especially in older women’s writing, concern questions of intimacy and loneliness, although this is something many of us do not even dare to mention for fear of increasing the shame of appearing discarded and worthless. Added to the sense of isolation that can come from the lack of an intimate partner, there is also the narrowing of social horizons, especially after retirement from jobs or other forms of shared activities. We know that older women (sixty-five and over) are more than twice as likely to find themselves living alone compared with older men, while young men (aged twenty-five to forty-four) are twice as likely to be living alone compared with young women.
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It is true that being single when facing old age is not something all women lament, indeed for the most part older women cope with living alone far better than men, although many do complain about loneliness.
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Nevertheless, it is certainly more definitive, irreversible, and can be more precarious than living alone when still young.
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These days, living on one’s own does not necessarily entail the absence of intimate, even erotic, ties.
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But sustaining such ties into old age when living alone becomes ever more challenging.
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It is surely important to see that embracing life is hardly the same thing as avoiding disappointment, pain and sorrow, whatever our age, or gender. Indeed, as we age, it is often the reverse, even though ‘happiness’ is officially promoted as an all-encompassing goal, infuriatingly by the very same governments who are busy removing the necessities for living well from the poor, sick and disabled. ‘Cruel optimism’, is how the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant summarizes the prevalent rhetoric encouraging everyone to remain attached to fantasies of the good life, especially in the USA since the 1980s. Because living well requires economic stability and durable intimacies, people’s sense of personal failure can only increase with the growing precariousness of jobs and the shrinking of welfare entitlements, which are themselves rarely culturally acknowledged as sources of personal misery.
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Indeed, the growing economic and social insecurity faced by so many in our time has been described as a distinctive form of social regulation produced by neo-liberalism, termed ‘precarity’ by European social justice movements fighting for better lives for all.
¹⁴

Quite apart from economic survival, however, I have also repeatedly wondered how any of us can approach the end of our lives sufficiently open to the world to stay recognizable to ourselves and others as
in some sense
the same person we have always imagined ourselves to be. Ageing is hardly a straightforward affair, when just shifting from one context to another will always have serious implications for our ties to the world. Giles Fraser, for instance, illustrated this when he compared what were briefly his new surroundings in the
Guardian
newsroom in 2012 with his former workplace at St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was the cannon chancellor before resigning following his objection to the eviction threats against the Occupy
protesters camped on the Cathedral’s doorstep. In the rule-bound, peaceful environs of the Cathedral, he reflected, he could develop an acute sensitivity to what he saw going on in the world. As a journalist in a busy newsroom, however, he needed headphones to block out the ceaseless hubbub. It ‘would make your head explode’ without them, which risks giving one a much narrower vision of the world: ‘So the question is’, he wrote, ‘how to remain porous to its complexities without suffering the overload that closes down the imagination?’
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Older people are not likely to find themselves in noisy newsrooms – though they will be found often enough in hectic Accident and Emergency wards. Trying to ease life in line with one’s capacities while retaining certain essential continuities becomes harder. Yet while we may be all too aware of the personal changes that come with ageing, we also have some other sense of there being certain abiding qualities that we possess, which can be disconcerting if others no longer acknowledge them, making it increasingly hard for us either to affirm them or even to recognize ourselves.

How to Live?

Just two months before he died in October 2004, at the relatively young age of seventy-four,
Le Monde
published a long interview with one of the most significant – if always controversial – philosophers of recent times, Jacques Derrida. Though suffering from pancreatic cancer and its treatments, he still remained enormously productive, even energetic; indeed, towards the end of his life he was more passionately and politically engaged with the world than ever before. In the interview
Derrida mentions the Socratic wisdom that to accept death is to learn how to live, and vice versa. However, he insisted that he still did not know how best to live, and could never be taught, because he had never learned ‘to accept death’: ‘I remain uneducable [
inéducable
] with respect to the wisdom of learning to die.’
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Nevertheless, paradoxically as ever, to his many friends and admirers he had certainly learned how to live, and was still teaching them right up until his last breath, and now well beyond, even though he could not, would not, make his peace with the inevitability of death: ‘It’s terrible what’s going on in the world, and all these things are on my mind, but they exist alongside the terror of my own death.’
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One thing Derrida taught his many followers, especially in his final decades, was that one must always affirm life, or ‘survival’, and its unfinished possibilities, whether pleasurable or painful. Indeed, as he explained in the
Le Monde
interview, embracing survival is always as painful as it is pleasurable, suggesting that he was never more haunted by the inevitability of death than in moments of happiness and pleasure, while conversely he had been ‘lucky enough to love even the unhappy moments’ of his life: ‘Taking pleasure and crying in the face of impending death – for me they are the same thing.’ Quoting these words, Judith Butler joined the many friends and followers who mourn Derrida, mentioning the inspiration she still draws from him in her own scholarly and political labours. In one obituary she writes that ‘without him, with him’, what ‘is finished and what is left to be affirmed is precisely the equivocation of survival itself’.
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It is indeed just this ‘equivocation’, admitting yet embracing what will often be the increasing challenges and sorrows of our longer lives, that I have hoped to capture in this book and will
return to in this closing chapter. Perhaps we can all agree that affirming life is certainly far from the same thing as ‘enjoying’ it in any straightforward sense, and even less eschewing suffering, whether one’s own or that of others. Rather, it is better seen as the capacity to feel and react to life, when sadness, anger or other negative emotions may often be the most appropriate response to what we experience or can comprehend of worldly matters, near and far. Moreover, as I noted in the last chapter when discussing mourning, it is the possibility of feeling
any
strong emotions at all that can often elude us, diminishing our lives as the years begin to flash by – a situation that is not confined to old age. Stephen Frosh notes this when he writes that ‘any feelings’ might be sought after as an alternative to feeling nothing at all: ‘the more intense and “deep” that feeling is, the more it is experienced as, in an important sense, “pleasurable” … failure to feel sadness, like the failure to mourn, may be more disturbing than the state of sadness itself’.
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Indeed, one of the intrinsic paradoxes of human existence, which we usually prefer to ignore, is that the most intense feeling we know, capable of eclipsing all others, is that of pain, beginning with bodily pain (the labour pains of child-birth come readily to my mind).

In a fragment of his as yet unpublished memoir, British literary scholar Jonathan Dollimore writes beautifully about his episodes of clinical depression, which made him reclusive for several years and cost him his academic career. He quickly adds, however, that given the government’s denial of funding for the humanities – and the pressure on academics to downplay the importance of teaching in order to work on whatever might prove acceptable for publication in the most prestigious ‘peer reviewed journals’ – ‘maybe I should say it saved me’ from the complicities
and compromises of professional success. But what he most wants to convey is his sense that the ordeal of depression and the realities of loss can also serve as a means of renewal, offering awareness of ‘the many insidious kinds of deadening that life
in time
habituates us to, including professionalism’. Leaving academia in his early fifties, Dollimore started planting trees, and becoming more attentive to his new non-metropolitan surroundings. We are back with sentiments we have heard before from people finding ways of coping with change and loss:

departure can also sensitise us to a meta-stillness within and beyond loss. There is the noise of life and there is the silence when life is absent. And then there is the deeper silence only to be intimated from within life, but at one remove from it. It’s this I’m talking about: I hear it in the winds of March or in the stillness of a foggy November landscape; even in the stillness of the late morning in any season. It opens us to the silence of oblivion, Marvel’s ‘deserts of vast eternity,’ in relation to which desire and individuation are an irrelevance … We can die just by staying alive; living becoming a dying to life. Which means that if we do survive, we incur an even greater obligation to life as against survival: not just to stay alive but to stay alive to life itself.
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The sentiments are about solitude, and the affect of absorption into that ‘vast eternity’ is strong. But the feelings are clarified only by the words we find to reflect upon and share them, if only with ourselves – whether or not they make their way into any form of text or image, for personal or public use. This is because our ties to the world, and how we feel about them, even when experienced alone, are surely most easily
maintained and their significance fully registered when we have opportunities for communicating them. As Hannah Arendt pointed out over fifty years ago, even our most intense experiences ‘lead an uncertain and shadowy kind of existence’ until they find their way into the public realm, usually through the stories we tell about them, or the ways in which they are registered by others.
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For some, although I must confess not for me, or not yet, that public realm may simply mean sharing our thoughts with a notepad or diary.