One of the things I enjoy most about my work is the variety of stuff I get to read.

This past week, for instance, I worked on a set of guidelines for youth leadership training, a report on co-operative housing, and a particularly nasty Excel catalogue that I mention only because it made the other two more enjoyable.

Last year, a manuscript landed in my inbox. On ageism.

I’ll cheekily borrow a blurb from the back of the book to explain its insides.

Silvia Perel-Levin, a highly respected international expert and leading advocate on human rights and ageing, has brought together contributors from around the world and from different disciplines to reflect on ageing, human rights, and oppression in its many forms. The book offers provocative, moving, and powerful stories and analyses of marginalization in older age and the interaction of age and other forms of discrimination in the denial of human rights. The book demands of its readers that they reflect deeply on their own ageism, prejudices, and complacency. A must-have for anyone interested in ageing, human rights, law, and structures of power in our societies.
—Andrew Byrnes, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

And reflect I did.

Deeply.

I worked on it around the time we were having THE CONVERSATION. The conversation that some kids deal with better than others. I didn’t deal so well with it.

Before reading the book, I thought a nursing home would be the more sensible option for all concerned. Boss, having turned 97, was a victim of the pandemic. Not medically, but mentally. A year of cocooning – something I’ve come to regard as the worst possible thing that could have happened to our elderly – took its toll. Pre-COVID, he’d been golfing, driving, gardening. He was a fit, active man with all the zest life could have asked for.

Post-COVID, now used to staying home, he continued to stay home.

His world had shrunk.

Illness beset him and for six months he moved from hospital to respite to hospital back to respite.

We wondered what to do. A nursing home seemed the obvious choice as neither of my parents would have taken well to having someone live in at home. My brother and I had our own lives, neither of us in a position to up sticks and move home for an indeterminate period.

But then, I read the book.

Kate Swaffer’s contribution, About Us Without All of Us: The Elephants in the Room, made me examine my attitude to dementia. It was a slap in the face. Swaffer’s assertion that people with dementia have rights, too, seems like a no-brainer, but look at what we do to them – we segregate them inside nursing homes in secure memory wards and dementia villages. And yes, often it’s because we can’t cope; few of us tap into the strength it takes to look after someone with dementia at home, or indeed have the financial resources to do so. Swaffer talks about ethical loneliness, i.e. the experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.

I dread dementia with a passion. The thought that someone I love would have to care for me when I’m no longer mentally with it scares me. I’m no nearing finding an answer but my complacency has been shaken to its core.

And if Swaffer’s rocking wasn’t enough, Liat Alayon’s contribution, Mental Health, Physical Health, Older Age, and Oppression, was really a wake-up call.

When we put our ageing parents in nursing homes, we separate them from everything they’ve loved. Perhaps they’re hoarders. Maybe they’re fashionistas. They might even have a thing for kettles. Whatever. In moving them, we compress a whole house or apartment into one room. Then, say, they were night owls or early birds; we take that from them, too. To make the institution work, there’s an institutional schedule. For everyone. That’s how it works. So, my penchant for sleeping in becomes a thing of the past. My midnight trip to the fridge is a no-no. My choice to shower or not to shower is made for me. No wonder both my parents were adamantly against nursing homes.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good ones out there. Like anything, you get what you pay for. But even in the poshest of posh, unless you can afford your own cook and PA, you do as others do.

I was inspired by Larraine Lari’s account of Viva La Nannalution! Overcoming Ageist Sexism in Environmental Activism: The Australian Older Women’s Knitting Nannas Against Gas and Greed.

I thought the nannas today when I heard that Bill Anders had died, at 90, in a plane crash – he was the pilot. My first thought was ‘What a way to go’. Insensitive of me? Perhaps. I’m sure he had a good few more years in him; it was too soon. His last moments may well have been terrifying – and yet I can’t help thinking he would have preferred it to being institutionalised later.

Adolf Ratzka, in his personal account of Living and Ageing with Disability, talks about prejudices about age and disability. We all have them.

I remember shopping with mam when she was in her 70s. She was off to some dinner or other and needed some shoes. We went our separate ways in the shop, me subconsciously picking out something I thought age-appropriate. When we met up, she looked at my offer saying with emphasis:

I will NEVER be old enough to wear those shoes.

Her pick: rose-gold metallic strappy things with 3-inch heels.

As both my parents aged, I had to constantly remind myself that they had agency over their lives. And much and all as I wanted to do everything for them, in doing so I was taking that agency from them.

Other chapters, I remember too: Michael Adams’s piece on LGBTI Elders Advancing and Alex Kalache’s Growing Old Among Inequalities in Brazil.

I posted a while ago about not letting the old (wo)man in. I’m determined that will be me. But there is a danger that my juniors, however well intended, will open that door for me.

Wait!

I have no kids.

There are no juniors.

Whatever will become of me?

I’ll have to find me a Marigold Hotel.

Until then, though, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, grateful for the variety my working life offers.