AGED AND AGING

AGING AND BEING OLD

On this trip we are both aging and being old. It is considered an unmentionable subject, almost a taboo, but aging is a process like travelling. Travelling brings it particularly to mind because it reminds us as we passage along, of the passage of time. In fact John and I are in part, making this trip as ‘a rite of passage’ between work and old age.
Aging is the inevitable decline towards decrepitude and death. Being old is living with this constant slippage.
‘Oh – don’t think about it! It’s all in the mind! Be positive!’
I hear people respond. As if that girl-guide attitude makes it less apparent to those who see us or if it allows us to escape from the physical reality we live with daily. John is inclined to think the subject depressing. I think it needs to be met head on in a ‘red hat’ as the poem says, or if you like, face to face as one’s illusions of youthfulness vanish in the mirror each morning.
Aging is not what we want, or need, or planned or thought about – it is just happening. It is quite different from our retirement plans. I joked about being one of a cohort of pensioners in camper vans but that is actually what we are. As we journey we see ourselves mirrored in the large majority of other camper-vanners. We are doing what people of our age do.

In our minds we are both still stuck somewhere between 16 and 26. In the minds of people of that age we may as well not exist as they hardly notice us. Grandchildren know we are grand-parents, children wonder if our money will last as long as us or even pay for our frail care home. We look with sympathy at people of our age (unless they are friends who have been to our birthday parties) convinced that we are their younger contemporaries anyway. All this means that ‘age existing in the mind only’ has some truth in it but it is more complex. We are multiple ages not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world. The problem is our bodies know better that us and twinge to remind us that they are us.
I do think old people should be proud of being older and wear the wrinkles we have earned with honour.
However at the same time . . .

We both think we are physically fitter as a result of this trip but we have already learnt the hard way to be careful of our backs and knees. We are very slighter thinner and we are already more weather-beaten. We are scruffier too. Camping is as hard on clothes as on our skin. John is slightly deaf in one ear and I have early cataracts in both eyes. All of these facts that are not in the ‘mind’ sharpen our desire to enjoy this year’s travelling.
My father in his eighties, deaf and almost blind, was most concerned about his sex life. At least, John says, your father still had his memory . . .