Anticipating The End

Jenny Diski, age 66, pens a thoughtful essay about growing old:

[One] definitive non-sexual way of knowing you’re old is the moment when your doctor tells you that ‘you’ll have to learn to live with it,’ or that whatever ails or pains you is ‘the result of wear and tear’. You wait for the suggestion of a procedure, the next appointment, and then realise that you aren’t going to be considered for it. You see a virtual shrug that says you are no longer young enough for a resource-strapped institution to be overly concerned with getting you back to full health. There are higher priorities, and they are higher because the patients are younger.

It comes to you that whatever ailment you’ve got at this point is decay inflected by decay, in one form or another, and, to people who aren’t you, only to be expected. It is, to put it simply, which they won’t, a recognition of the beginnings of the approach of death. … None of the gung-ho books on ageing has more than a brief mention of the proximity of death as one of the symptoms of old age to be dealt with. ‘Acceptance’, they say, without much elaboration, and then move rapidly on. Even if it won’t kill you imminently, the degeneration of the body will alter and limit how you can live, whether you can get out, continue to work and travel. I can’t think of anything about the reality of ageing which improves a person’s life. The wisdom people speak of that is supposed to come to us in old age seems to be in much shorter supply than I imagined, and apart from that, it’s a matter of how self-deceptively, or stoically, you are able or prepared to put up with the depletions, dependency and indignities of getting old.