What is later life for?
It feels a bit ridiculous to even pose this question, since it's hard to imagine it could have any straightforward, or even useful, answer. Yet the question hangs about. Perhaps because so many of us living on into our 80s, 90s and beyond is still so new, we can't help wondering 'what's it for?'.
Life course psychologists have asked the question 'out loud', as it were. They assign meaning and tasks to earlier stages of life so, surely, later life - late life - should have its share. This is not to make light of the ideas they have put forward. It is demonstrably the case that, as time appears increasingly finite, older people often do review their lives, become more spiritually engaged, try to pass their accumulated knowledge on to younger generations.
There is an unfortunate tendency for these descriptions to become prescriptions. These are what old people should do: be spiritual, be self-reflective, give to the next generations, construct an identity that matches this stage of life. But that is an issue we will turn to in the future.
What we want to consider here is the way so many people seem to have unconsciously decided there is an answer to the question 'what is later life for?', It is that later life is not for very much.
How else to explain how few of us are willing to acknowledge that statistically a lot of us have a very good chance of living into our 90s. Ask people, even people in their 60s or 70s, "what if you live to 90?". The answer almost invariably is "I'm not". "Well, let's talk about 90 anyhow." "No, I'm not going to live to 90." End of conversation, despite the odds.
So we've been giving a lot of thought to how that dread of being old might be eased, how being 90 might be seen as a good age to be. Or 95. Interestingly, the majority of the Australian centenarians surveyed in an exploratory study "illustrate a fairly stoic optimism, gratitude and enjoyment toward the life they have experienced and continue to live … at odds with the common misconception that anyone who lives this long must be frail and decrepit" even though these centenarians all do have some serious aches and pains, or even more severe medical problems [1] .
The starting place we've chosen is to think about the way ageing is represented, and where that is or isn't changing. We mean 'represented' quite literally: the 'look' assigned to age and old; the language used in talking about ageing and being old; the assumptions we make when we hear a person's chronological age:
- visually: the way old is shown in pictures, film, advertisements; how 'old' looks; in The Spare Room, pg 27; 60s don't look in the mirror.
- linguistically: the language and words we use in describing ageing older and old people. Example: when does someone get described as 'spry' or sprightly'; we certainly don't use that language about young people;
- numerically: what do you think you can tell me about a person when all you know is their chronological age? Suppose that age is 65? 80? How does that compare with what we can know if we're told a child is 2 or 7 or 15?
What We Are Doing: Observing, recording and thinking.
[1] 'Making the Most of It: Living to Age 10 Years or more in Australia by John McCormack in Lessons on Aging From three nations Vol I , edited by Sara Carmel, Carol A Morse and Fernando M Torres-Gil; Baywood Publishing Co, Amityville, New York 2007