We’re all in this together
One of the topics of the moment in Parliament and the media is that of old people and the issues that surround them. I’m talking about such as national pensions, at what age people become eligible for them, the ever-growing number of senior citizens in the population (due to increasing longevity etc.) and just how the hell the country will be able to afford the rocketing social care of the elderly which, on the face of it – along with all the other vital things the country needs – will have to be paid for by the younger generations still of working (and taxable) age.
It brings into focus the old chestnut that apparently all too often we are paying for the care and concern afforded our elderly by passing the bill on to the young generations … and so who (one day) will pay for them when they themselves become old and/or infirm?
Doing it all out of straightforward income tax – runs the argument – is the equivalent of the current generation incurring a huge bill and simply passing it on to our descendants and expecting them to pay for it. At some point the equation doesn’t add up: the sums don’t work.
When you think about it in the round, there is a small but significant gap between proposing or agreeing that ‘looking after the weak and/or vulnerable’ is not only (on the one hand) a human right that should be extended to all those who qualify for that description but (on the other) something that any civilised Western society would want to do as a matter of moral obligation anyway … and how the hell that society acquires or brings to itself the means to do it when the proportion of the Western world’s population that is elderly and/or infirm is growing bigger and bigger.
The subject came up over the weekend in a lunchtime pub drink I attended with some of my peers.
I suppose it was inevitable that, all of us being somewhere between the ages of fifty and seventy-five, most if not all of us would have some personal experience of dealing with our own elderly family relatives which at some point we would describe and/or compare as part of our contribution to proceedings. I certainly did.
Amidst the general exchange of views and situations that followed, I was struck by how often one particular aspect of looking after elderly relatives kept coming up and how common everyone’s experiences of it were, almost to the point of consensus.
Someone happened to mention – in the context of looking after his own father – that he’d come to the view that ‘getting older and thereby gradually slipping down the path inevitably lined with physical frailty and senility’ was a harder and sadder experience for anyone who in their heyday had been a captain of industry, a senior military officer, a top surgeon or lawyer, a national politician or media magnate … than it was for any ‘ordinary Joe or Jane Doe’ who had not been lucky (or talented, or ambitious) enough to rise to the top of their chosen career path.
It was as if, in a strange way, luckier in life were those who were unexceptional, average, mediocre and used to taking commands and/or ‘going with the flow’.
For, if the day ever dawned where they had to be told “Sorry, you’ve now reached the stage of life where you have to go into a home, or have carers either come to visit you daily, or else even live-in with you at home”, these would be much more likely to say “Okay. Tell me where to go and who’ll be feeding me my meals and looking after me. Show me where the TV/radio remote control is and how it works … and I’ll be fine …”
Whereas the vast bulk of the aforementioned Alpha males (or females) – so used to being in charge of everything in their domain, whether that be personal/private to them or a public one – almost always have great difficulty in accepting that they are no longer quite what they were and are now being judged (even by those closest and dearest to them) as not only in need of near-constant assistance, but also of reluctantly-given advice that they (for example) should no longer be driving a motor vehicle, let alone a powerful one capable of going over 100 miles per hour, and/or doing a myriad of things that hitherto they had taken for granted as theirs to undertake whenever they felt like it.
In short – the speaker confided – his own aged parent had now become a rhino-sized all-round pain in the butt. Difficult, argumentative, forgetful, impossible to reason with, irrational, belligerent, indeed a general fool to himself. To the point where, if he could have been transported back even just a decade and been shown the sort of individual he had lately become, he’d have been first horrified and then recommended that he be put away in a secure car home immediately (and/or possibly given the option of a bottle of single malt Scots whisky, a loaded revolver and an empty back room to which to retire when ready).
It wasn’t long before those at our table – me included – were agreeing with this thrust wholeheartedly and sharing chapter and verse of instances of similar issues to which we had been subjected ourselves.
It was something of a revelatory moment. You go for ages enduring the complications and stresses – willingly of course, despite the ‘duty’ element of the task – of looking after your own aged family members, alighting as you do upon a half-formed theory or two as to how and why the process all seems so difficult to cope with. Sometimes the views and conclusions you come to are sufficiently harsh or dispiriting that you are reluctant to admit them to yourself, never mind to anyone else, less you give an unfavourable impression of yourself as a person.
And then – as happened this weekend for me – you come across someone else in the same position and who comes clean about how he (or she) feels about its complications. And suddenly you feel a welling-up of recognition and agreement that prompts you to gush forth with your own experiences – and then others do as well. And suddenly you realise there’s a universality about life and mortality in every family.
That statement seems facile and simplistic when I read it back. But then it’s a welcome and life-enhancing act to talk and share tales about such things. It’s not so much a case of “There’s always someone else worse off than yourself …” as that the process of sharing experiences with other people tends to bring home to you (if nothing else does) some of the fundamentals of the human condition.
