How Old is Old?

“I don’t believe it”, conjures up the image of the grumpy old Victor Meldrew as portrayed on TV by Richard Wilson - amusing, but sadly stereotypical of the intolerant characteristics attributed to older people. Then there is Dot Cotton, a devoutly Christian lady of the East End, who drinks sherry (“I don’t drink. Just a small one then”) and clings to her anachronistic hymns, quoting from the Authorised Version of the Bible. Dot embodies all that is popularly seen as the intransigent conservatism of the elderly and the irrelevance of the traditional Church of England. 

"Old age is forever stereotyped", writes Penelope Lively, quoting Simone de Beauvoir, who pointed out decades ago that we regarded old age as "something alien, a foreign species". For an actor to be asked to act an older person still seems to involve the parody of shuffling along with a walking frame or assuming signs of dementia. The media seem to do their level best to reinforce the age-old myths about aging people.

But what does it mean to be elderly in the 21^st century? When do you become “old”? When I was younger, people who were 60 all seemed old to me, a legacy of the war partly, but now I’ve turned 60 too and I don’t feel old yet. I’m pretty fit and active physically and mentally. We are all very different and life-expectancy has increased, so the group labelled as “elderly” is now a very disparate group ranging from people in their 60s suffering illness or disabilities to extraordinary 90+ year olds who live a very active life.

Michelle Hanson wrote in The Guardian (06/10/13), “Some friends recently visited Paris, where they saw old people in restaurants with their families, drinking wine. Bliss! Here we offer tea dances and singalongs for a separate group of what seem to be rather simple-minded charity cases.”

How patronizing it is to expect us all to drop into the stereotype! I don’t wear beige and happily wear purple (see Jenny Joseph “When I am old”). The rock ‘n’ roll culture has now matured and some musicians are still rocking past seventy.

Older people are as varied in their abilities and desires as any other group, perhaps even more varied. We may easily make assumptions about what “they” might like based on our own or historic images that have been blown away in recent times with health care, longer life and more exciting opportunities. As Christians we must not perpetrate the myth that beyond a certain age everybody homogenises into a grey mass, but love and serve each person as they are and as God does.  

What is important is to get to know the older people already around us that we don’t know so well, those who have chosen not to “join in” or who seem stand-offish, those reaching the retirement age who move in, but don’t seem to want to “get involved”. Maybe they are not like us cultural, psychologically or socially. How have the needs of this group (if it is a group) changed as the years have gone by? Maybe some don’t want or need the coffee mornings, bingo and sing-along tea parties that churches and villages offer now. I for one don’t. What new things ought we to consider organising in our communities that are really relevant in the 21^st century for the active and spirited group formerly known as “the elderly”? Any ideas?