The Endgame

Newsletter #76 - The language of old age

Port Medway, Nova Scotia, August 11, 2024

The language of old age

Language goes sideways when people talk about the aged. The words used are often condescending, patronizing, insincere, and pejorative. Those who speak this way forget that they are describing their future self. Sometimes there’s what looks like an agreeable description of old age, e.g., the bafflegab bullshit found in supermarket greeting card aisles (“you're not getting older, you're getting better”). This is especially loathsome because of its deceptive and shallow nature.

I was at a charity fundraiser recently, chatting to an important (so he told me) businessman, when a distinguished-looking well-dressed older man came up to us, politely said hello to my companion, and moved on. “Who was that?” I asked. “Oh,” said my new friend, “he’s a neighbour of mine, lives up the street, I see him walking his dog all the time.” “What’s his name?” “I don’t know,” he said with a chuckle. “On the street we call him The Old Geezer.” (Dictionary meaning of geezer: “informal, humorous or mildly disparaging: an odd, eccentric, or unreasonable person…)

Old geezer?

This past July the new U.K. prime minister, Keir Starmer, met Joe Biden in Washington at the NATO summit. After the meeting, Starmer told reporters that Biden was “in really good form.” (Collins Dictionary: “If you say that someone is in good form, you mean that they seem healthy and cheerful.”) The 61-year-old Starmer might have added (he didn’t) that Biden was “spry,” “feisty,” and “full of life.” He did not, of course, call the president an “old fogey,” “geezer,” “dinosaur,” “gramps,” or say that he was “over the hill.” Other people took care of that. Donald Trump, aged 78, recently described Biden as “a broken-down old pile of crap.” 

One of my favourite essays about old age is Roger Angell’s “This Old Man,” published in 2014 when he was ninety-three. Angell recounts how acquaintances react when they bump into him: “‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, ‘Holy shit—he’s still vertical!’”

Roger Angell - still vertical

“How great you’re looking… Tell me your secret!” is an echt example of how to be patronizing and insincere towards the elderly. When it came to his insincere interlocutors, Angell had the last laugh. He remained vertical for quite some time after he wrote his fine essay. He married his third wife when he was 94. He died in 2022, aged 101.

Roger Angell was fiercely realistic about old age—no euphemisms for him—and stubbornly hopeful about life’s remaining promise. In his essay, he quotes Casey Stengel: “Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up.” Angell then writes: “We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.”

Look it up!

Viva Angell! All old people should embrace his no-nonsense realism and sweet hope for the future. They should repudiate casual stereotyping of the elderly and silly bromides about aging.

That’s me being feisty. (I’m not getting older, I’m getting bitter.)

Some further reaction from readers of Newsletter #74

Comments on my observations about melancholy continue to arrive.

One reader wrote: “I've never found it difficult to be angry about various things but I find it strangely difficult to weep. I think it's because it's unalloyed grief, and thus so difficult to allow. Anger shields you from it, but anger is pretty much a useless emotion… But weeping is possibly something to be welcomed when it comes to loss, as painful as it is; the denial of such a powerful feeling is infinitely worse. Clearly, this is something that goes to the heart of what we are and what it means to live fully.”

Another reader referred me to the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver: 

…Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

And a dear friend who lives in France wrote impatiently: “How do you dare complain? …You are a spoiled brat! We still love you.”