In less than two weeks I’ll be another year older. It’s not a landmark birthday, but has resonance for me because I’ll be further along the linear path towards the inevitable, growing old and decrepit, and I’m feeling afraid.
My fear doesn’t come from the thought of death; that state of existence (or not?) we’ll all reach one day. But from the regrets that I might have in my life when I’m older. Should I be doing something now that I’ll regret later if I don’t? These questions make me wonder about my life as it has been and my life as it is and will be. Confusing, I know. However, these are questions that I’m sure most of us have pondered over at one time or another when we are struck by a thought or a fleeting view. And the answers don’t come along easy, if at all.
Coincidently, I visited a sheltered accommodation for older people last week as part of my work. It was a pleasant place, with the pastel colours that one equates with a hospital and a medicinal shade of green that I presume is supposed to make one feel at ease and safe in the faded surroundings, faded just as much as the residents within. It was warm also. Baking. I haven’t felt temperatures like that since the height of summer. It was like sitting in a cocoon, and while I’m not referencing the classic 1980s film, there was an essence of Cocoon about that place — without the beneficial effects of the mystical rocks. When I mentioned the stagnant heat of the room I was greeted with looks of derision that pointed me out as an outsider who knew little of the world of the aged. The cold is a cruelty that should not be endured by them for reasons of health and comfort. But I guess it depends on how you were raised. My mother always had to have a window open in her bedroom, despite the snow falling in and on top of her bed.
Being immersed in the lives of older people living in a place such as this made me hyper aware of my own life and that I might one day be sitting with a group of other septuagenarians pondering over life and wondering what the end will look like.
They were an endearing bunch of women — they were mostly women in the communal room — and one quipped that she should be sent to the knacker’s yard (a Yorkshire term that refers to the scrapheap). I chuckled and thought to myself, perhaps you should, before berating my ignorant younger self for completely failing to grasp the consciousness of the elderly. Another referred to herself as the walking dead, which did make me laugh out loud. She was heading to buy the newspapers (see, some people still do). But for the most part, the women sat listening to the radio, chatted and read the newspapers all the while simply existing in their own worlds, having lived their lives and played their parts in the intricate web of lives that make up the fabric of our history.
I wondered, would I be sitting there one day, hoping for a visitor and reading about all the life happening around me. Or do we change as we get older? Do we want and need less? Do our minds change with our bodies and adjust to accept the limitations and the slow descent into obscurity? I hope so. But I fear the opposite and the earning for youth and more life. How do we come to terms with our decay? The grey hairs are already making themselves known on my head and refuse to be hidden.
Maybe we never do come to terms with our decay. But this year on my birthday, I’ll rejoice in the youth that I still have and enjoy the fact that I’m still on this earth and that there is still cake. Lots of cake. Happy birthday to me.
Christina Curran is freelance journalist based in Northern Ireland.
