Waiting for the Last Bus Read online

  How did this obsession with our appearance start? Was it there before mirrors and cameras were invented? Would we be bothered by what we looked like if we couldn’t see ourselves as others see us? However it started, our self-image seems to have obsessed us for centuries. The first-century Roman poet Ovid adapted an old Greek myth to explore the subject. Narcissus, the son of a river god and a local nymph, was famous for his beauty. The blind seer Tiresias warned his mother that Narcissus would have a long and happy life only if he never saw himself. Unfortunately, he caught sight of his own reflection in the waters of a spring, fell in love with what he saw and died of unrequited love.

  If an experience has been developed into a myth like that, it is because its theme is universal. It expresses a reality that troubles the human community. This one suggests that we’d be better blind than obsessed with how we look, because it’s a compulsion that can never be fully satisfied or appeased. Freud took the story further and coined the term narcissism for anyone suffering from an overpowering degree of self-esteem, a condition he diagnosed as a form of emotional immaturity. It is captured in the caricature of the egotist, usually a dominant male, who pauses in his narrative of self-glorification only long enough to say to his listener: ‘But enough from me; tell me how you rate my accomplishments?’ Narcissism in both its classic and Freudian forms has become a prevalent disease in late-modern societies obsessed with image and the screen technologies that promote it. It supplies the energy for one of the main enterprises of modern capitalism, the Anti-Ageing and Postponement of Death industry, what we might call the AAPD complex. We spend fortunes delaying death and the physical dissolution that precedes it.

  And it starts early, with our revolt against the reality of the bodies we were born with. Had I been born sixty years later, would I have saved up for hair-transplant surgery rather than wasting my money on those wee sweeties advertised in Church Illustrated? And would I have missed learning one of the best lessons life teaches: that it is better to accept reality rather than deny it, including the reality of our own bodies and the death that is their only end? Throughout most of history, humans had no alternative but to accept these certainties. In our advanced technological society, that is no longer the case. We spend fortunes trying to refashion our bodies and postpone our deaths. And it is easy to understand why. Anguish is a hard thing to bear, even if it is only the anguish of not liking the way we look. The anguish of dying is harder still, especially if it comes before we are ready for it, and we feel cheated of the time we thought we had left.

  But there is no escape from anguish. It comes with the human condition and the self-awareness that is its key component. The secret is to learn how to live with it. Accepting the reality of the way we look and the certainty of our death, maybe one day soon, won’t make us happy, but it might save us from the greater unhappiness of trying to ignore or hide from these realities. The fleeting pain of admitting our situation is preferable to the constant pain of denying it. It takes fortitude, the most useful of the old virtues. Fortitude is one of the most important lessons life teaches, and ageing may be our last chance to learn it. It is the ability to endure the reality of our condition without flinching. It was defined by the gay cowboy in the movie Brokeback Mountain: ‘If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.’ And there’s a lot you gotta stand when you get old.

  Such as going deaf! It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it has to my wife. What distresses me is that I find it irritating. Much of the time I have to shout to be heard by her, a small price to pay for close contact with someone I love. Yet it constantly annoys me. That says something to me about larger society as well as my own impatience. If we are not careful, we can start resenting the presence of the elderly in our midst and the minor irritations they impose upon the rest of us. Their deafness may annoy me, but the glacial way they move can induce bouts of sidewalk rage in me. The day will come when I’ll walk more slowly too, but I’m still fleet of foot, so I get angered by those who hold up my progress along the street or through the aisles of the supermarket. I mutter to myself that they shouldn’t be allowed out after the age of seventy unless they can pass a minimum-speed mobility test. For God’s sake, why can’t they get a move on? If I can have those terrible thoughts about the old in my eighties, I wonder how the millennial generation feels.

  Worse than losing your hearing or your mobility is losing your short-term memory. Those moments when you can’t find a name or forget what you were just about to say to someone. My wife and I joke that we have one good memory between the two of us. That’s the best way to handle the ageing business – with a sense of humour, the blacker the better. In his nineties, my father-in-law stopped buying green bananas, because he didn’t think he’d live to see them ripen.

  Apart from humour, another source of consolation in old age is that vanity and self-consciousness fade away. In his memoir, the American novelist John Updike mused on how embarrassed he used to be by the hats his father wore when he was old. Then when he reached that time of life himself, he found himself wearing the same battered monstrosities. I too have a shelf full of embarrassing lids that I fancy give me a jaunty glamour. My wife tells me they just look daft. Well, daft it is. I shall embrace my inner scarecrow and agree with the Irish poet W.B. Yeats that:

  An aged man is but a paltry thing,

  A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

  Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing . . . 7

  It is possible to say a rueful ‘Yes’ to our fading energies and begin to appreciate the humour and understanding that old age can bring.

  ***

  Much more difficult is giving up the prospect of the future. Not so much my own as that of my children and grand-children. Not to be there to see them make their way through life. And not just to see them. To be beside them when they hit sorrow, as they will, for no one misses it. To be someone they talk about, no longer someone they talk to. That’s what the English poet Philip Larkin most hated about death. He described it as:

  . . . the total emptiness for ever,

  The sure extinction that we travel to

  And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

  Not to be anywhere,

  And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.8

  Nothing more true, certainly, but why should it be so terrible? After all, we won’t be there to know we’re not there. When you’re extinct you don’t realise it, so it can’t hurt. The Greek philosopher Epicurus said that fearing the not-being-there that follows death is as silly as regretting that we weren’t here before we were born.

  But it is not the thought of being dead that troubles us; it is the prospect of leaving and losing those we love that grabs us by the throat. And we already know something of what that feels like. Life has given us many anticipations of our dying. We only have to recall the memory of other separations to realise how wrenching the last one is going to be. The frail figure watching our car disappear round the bend before turning in at her lonely door; the moment in the station when we can’t say goodbye because our heart is filling our throat, and we clutch hands and turn away.

  Someone is waving a white handkerchief

  from the train as it pulls out with a white

  plume from the station and rumbles its way

  to somewhere that does not matter. But

  it will pass the white sands and the broad sea

  that I have watched under the sun and moon

  in the stop of time in my childhood as I am

  now there again and waiting for the white

  handkerchief. I shall not see her again

  but the waters rise and fall and the horizon

  is firm. You who have not seen that line hold the

  brimming sea to the

  round earth cannot know this

  pain and sweetness of departure.9

  Painful as these partings are, there may be the promise of future meetings to console us. And there are ways of keeping in touch with
people we love that can compensate us for their distance. In dying, we face the final and absolute separation not only from those we love but from ourselves. Dying not only kills our bodies, it kills our future. I look at my grandchildren now in all their vivid promise, knowing I will miss seeing where their lives take them. And a quiet sorrow touches me. It doesn’t overwhelm me, but as I gaze at them with pride and wondering affection I hear a distant bell toll. And I know it tolls for me.

  In old age, this kind of rumination can make us feel sad about the future we are going to miss. But that shouldn’t be the primary emotion we feel at the end of a long life. It should be gratitude. We won a rare lottery ticket when we were born. There must have been something in our DNA that beat the odds against fusing the sperm with the egg that made our particular existence possible. Millions did not make it off the wasteful assembly line in the great reproduction factory of life. We got through. We made it. For that at least we should be grateful; and even more grateful for the world that received and nurtured us; for the fact that it was there to receive us. I have known people who have died in a mood of absolute gratitude for the life they’d had and the love that was given to them. They were sad at leaving the party earlier than they hoped, but grateful for the good time they’d had while they were there. Their last days became an act of thanksgiving for what they had received.

  There’s an illuminating moment at the end of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, The Line of Beauty, which is set during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in Britain. Nick, the hero of the novel, has just had an HIV test. He knows the result will be positive and he’ll die soon. Hollinghurst tells us:

  [Nick] . . . dawdled on rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed . . . The emotion was startling . . . It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.10

  As death approaches, there will be sorrow for what it will take from us. But that is a mean and grudging way to greet it. If we let it, death will reveal the beauty of the world to us – the fact of a street corner at all! Maybe we have left it late. Maybe we wish we had noticed it before, paid it more attention. Push that thought aside. Don’t fret. Look at it now – so beautiful – and be grateful. And maybe you can arrange your death bed looking out on a street corner you know . . .

  II

  LOSING IT

  In his most famous poem, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas advised his dying father not to give up without a fight:

  Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.11

  It is the rage of the old that I want to think about now. And not just the kind Dylan Thomas was talking about. That was rage at dying, at being dragged away from the party before you were ready to leave. There can be something heroic about that kind of resistance, and it is why some people, almost without being aware of it, fight hard against their own death. I have sat by the beds of many who were dying and marvelled at how long it was taking them to leave. Their relatives would be worn out sitting beside them day after day as they battled the inevitable. But the nurse in attendance always knew what was going on. He’s a fighter, she would say. He won’t let go till the last minute. It won’t be long now. Then the moment of surrender would come: a last sigh and it was over.

  This defiant resistance of death seems to be stronger in some people than in others, part of their character. And the will to live can persist in them long after they’ve lapsed into a coma. I’m always moved when I see this happening. It suggests to me an event in the boyhood of the writer Leonard Woolf when he was told to drown five new-born puppies:

  When he plunged the first tiny blind creature into the bucket of water, it began ‘to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws.’ He suddenly realised that it was an individual, an ‘I’, and that it was fighting for its life just as he would, were he drowning.12

  Like those blind puppies, death’s resisters struggle against the forces that are shutting them down. It’s hard not to be moved by this. It is probably the energy that kept them going as long as they did. But they all have to give in at some point. Death gets everyone in the end. If it didn’t, life would soon become unsustainable on our little planet. And there are worrying trends already pointing in that direction.

  One of them is the way the medical profession has wheeled formidable new artillery onto the battlefield and spends vast amounts of money and effort delaying death’s victory. I don’t apologise for the military metaphor because it is the one favoured by doctors themselves. With the best of intentions, they have taken control of the lives of old people today, and they fight hard to keep them in the field as long as possible. The result for many of them is a medicalised existence whose sole purpose is staying alive long after any joy in doing so has fled.

  Keeping most of us alive well into our eighties is one of the successes of modern medicine, but there are signs it is having a profoundly distorting effect on the balance of society as a whole. In Britain, the care of the elderly is close to swamping the resources of the National Health Service, turning it into an agency for the postponement of death rather than the enhancement of life. We don’t have to go back to the fifteenth century to find a more balanced approach. Not that long ago, before they had this colossal armoury at their disposal, most doctors were willing to acknowledge death’s approach. They saw their role as helping death in with the minimum of distress to everyone. Nowadays they are more likely to call in the medical engineers to dig a moat and fortify the door against death’s entrance. But there are signs that the more thoughtful among them are beginning to challenge this siege mentality. The American physician Atul Gawande has recently suggested that while medicine exists to fight death and disease, it should learn how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t. And doctors need to understand that the damage is greatest if they insist on battling on to the bitter end.13

  Old age can be bitter if it is experienced not as a period of calm preparation for death but as a grim battle to keep it at bay. It can even breed resentment in the old against the very doctors who are working hard to keep them going. Visiting the elderly can be a dispiriting experience if they spend the time rehearsing their ailments and complaining about the inattention of the local health professionals who are run off their feet trying to care for them. The reality is that death has rung their bell, and peace will come only when they open the door and say you got here sooner than I expected, but come in and sit down while I get my coat on.

  ***

  If the refusal to accept the imperative of death is a relatively new phenomenon, an older affliction is the anger of the old at the young for being young. At its root this is one of the many forms of the sin of envy. Envy has been defined as sorrow at another’s good. Sometimes it is confused with jealousy, but there’s a world of difference between them. The jealous want what other people have, and it may provoke them to work hard to achieve it, which is why ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ is a proverb. Jealousy may drive us to action, but envy only makes us depressed. Rather than rejoicing in the happiness of others – their youth and vitality and beauty – it makes us sad. It can prompt bitterness towards the young for being young, revealed in the snort of contempt at how they colour their hair or tattoo their bodies or collide with you in the street because they’re always on their bloody phones. It’s an ugly picture, the face of angry, envious old age. We often see it on television during interview
s with the public on the issues of the day; and it can have a solid impact on government.

  Elderly voters are a powerfully reactionary force in politics both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. They are more disciplined and consistent than the young in voting, so as they increase in size as a cohort of the population their envies and resentments are bound to have an increasingly distorting effect on political processes. There is already a lot of evidence that they have had a profound effect on recent elections and referenda in these two countries. If these trends continue, in a few years a number of western democracies will have transformed themselves into gerontocracies – governments of the old, by the old, for the old. Geriatric resentment is a dangerous disease to catch, so it’s worth examining ourselves to see if it has infected us.

  The chances are that we’ve caught it, if only a mild version, because it is hard to avoid. Each generation has to learn how to take a bow and leave the stage. And we have to do it at the time in our lives when we are least resilient. Old age is a poignant business, a continuous series of losses, which is why Bette Davis said it wasn’t for sissies. One of its saddest moments is when we realise we are no longer at home in the world and are baffled at how it operates. When we were young and the future was filled with promise, it was thrilling to celebrate the constant shift and change of history and embrace every fad that came off the assembly line, as well as being impatient with those who resisted the new and clung desperately to the old and outworn. It is a different matter when you realise that, almost without noticing it, you have joined the ranks not only of the old but of the old fashioned; and that the crazy shifts of change you embraced so eagerly when you were young are the very energies that are now carrying you into the past, along with steam trains and quiet Sundays. So it is hardly surprising that the old can begin to feel like strangers in their own land.