Speaking of Age
Forum
By Ginny NiCarthy
“You’re not old,” I was told, not for the first time, by a friend in his 50s. I had just begun to explain how a situation looked from my perspective as an old person, when he protested my use of the dirty word “old.” From the near-panicked look on his face, you’d have thought I’d begun to describe a sexually transmitted disease at a sedate dinner party. To many 50-year-olds the very word “old” may, indeed, seem as unnerving as “gonorrhea.” But avoiding the word will not enable us to deny our way out of the last stages of life. Even a tummy tuck, hair graft or a dose of Viagra won’t enable us to jog through our 70s and 80s without becoming old on the way.
Once you hit 60, some people, including age mates, may refer to you as an “elder,” a term of respect that assumes you’ve been acquiring wisdom, rather than, year after year, stubbornly practicing mistakes, as some of us do. “Older” inexplicably implies you are not really old yet, and is meant to blur the naked truth of the stage of life you have reached. But a glance at a basic grammar book will tell you the suffix “-er,” a comparative adjective, means “more so,” not less so. So why do “tall-er,” “fat-ter,” “young-er” and “smart-er” designate more than the root word without its suffix, while “old-er” is meant to imply you are less old? If the question confuses you, that probably means your head is on straight.
If, at 62, instead of using the euphemism senior, you bluntly ask for an “old person’s” discount at a movie theater, the clerk may greet the request with a puzzled frown or nervous giggle. A recent professional publication referred to it’s theme as the “autumn of life,” meaning of course, the life of the old. Okay, our arches and jowls do tend to fall, along with the autumn leaves and some of us are more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of aging bodies and minds. But, like stalwart oaks, many of us remain sturdy or at least resilient, even in the “winter of life.”When will we begin to recognize old age as a stage of life that needn’t be an embarrassment? When will we view it as neither completely good nor bad, but a mix of delights, losses and complex challenges?
When will we recognize that to lose our clear sight, short-term memory and even the capacity to walk unaided is not a matter for shame or secrecy? That those losses are not something – like death in this culture – to be whispered about or referred to only in euphemistic language? Sure, anxieties, aches, pains and new losses make their appearances. But we might also cheerfully bid farewell to worries about our children, about what the neighbors think or success in our careers. That can clear the decks, so we can do as we please for a few years.
In recent decades many oppressed groups have burst out of socially imposed closets. We can join those who have re-claimed descriptors such as “queer,” “Black,” or “African American.” It’s time to stop fooling around with words meant to deny the existence of the last phases of life. It’s time to boldly re-claim the solid, reality-based status implied in that venerable word: “old.”
Ginny NiCarthy is a political activist, writer and Seattle psychotherapist (www.ginnynicarthy.org) with a special interest in helping family members in midlife communicate effectively with parents who are old or frail. Ginny NiCarthy identifies as an old woman who hopes to continue learning, contributing to society and having a whale of a good time for quite a few more years.