ROZPONSE
We Aren’t The Same Kind Of Old People We Used To Know
Or are we?
Roz Warren claims she is old, at 66. What’s old, and why is being old, young, or in between such a big deal?
My mom died six years ago. Her legs went cold first, you know. In three minutes she went from alive to dead, and suddenly she wasn’t alive anymore. She just lay there, indifferent to everything she cared so much about just moments ago. Including me.
She never really started to use a smartphone. India in 2015 wasn’t all digital.
As long as you’re alive, you are all there. Your legs are warm, your heart is beating and pumping blood to every part of your body. Pinpricks will hurt. Feathers will tickle. Real and metaphorical.
My dad, at 78, says, I am so old, I am indifferent. I don’t think he’s indifferent. His maid had cooked a sambar, a lentil based dish, to which he said he was “indifferent”. The sambar was terrible, and he was still hungry after lunch because it was so bad. Being old didn’t kill his capacity to appreciate good food or get disgusted by bad cooking. If he were to lose a lakh of rupees, about $1370, in the stock market, he wouldn’t be indifferent! He’d be vague about why, but he would be sad.
When we say we’re old, we’re saying we no longer want to do some things which we never liked doing very much in the first place. Sometimes diabetes, blood pressure or arthritis don’t let us eat or drink stuff we’d like to, or let us run or jump. That just means we care enough not to want to be disabled or dead, sooner than our time — to go.
The people in elder care — the dependent old, I think there should be a distinction between them, and the ambulatory old person who’s able to fix themselves breakfast. As a dentist I see 86-year olds with better teeth than 36-year olds. Who should I consider older?
Our time to die is not fixed by us.
Our legs are warm and we aren’t indifferent, are we. We’re just older than the average person who watches superhero movies. We’re older than the teenager eating the entire pizza. We’re older than the children spending their childhood tapping away at a screen, a screen we started being obsessed by only recently. In our old age.
We are the old people of 2021, who use the internet and social media, not the old people of the 1970s, who were lucky to own both television and a landline phone, and who sometimes had party lines in their telephones. Even if we do exactly what they did then, we’d blog about it. So even if we are old, we aren’t the same kind of old people we used to know.
This article was written thanks to Medium Sherpa and Writing Coach Roz Warren. When Roz shares lovely stories from her giant brain, it inspires me to write one, too! So I am calling them, Rozponses.
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