An age-old question

DEFINING ‘ELDERLY’

What do you want to be when you grow up? This is such an interesting question. And the answer depends on who you are asking. My granddaughter will say, “I want to be like my mommy!!” A seventh grader will want to become either a doctor or engineer. If you ask me, I will say, “to grow old and independent”. Now the issue is, who is “old”? How do you define who is elderly? What criteria do you use to define them?

When National Public Radio (NPR) in the USA referred to a 71-year old midwife in a headline as ‘elderly’, one of the comments was: “Really? ‘Elderly midwife’? She’s 71 and delivering babies! There’s nothing elderly about her, and these days, not even her age!” The other comment was “I was 70 in Feb and I certainly do not feel elderly. Elderly is at least over 80, and as someone else suggested, maybe 95.” Eventually the editors at NPR decided to change the headline. So there you go.

Now the burning question is, ‘When exactly does someone become elderly?’ If you ask me, there is no right answer to this question. ‘Elderly’ is a word that is still in flux. It is gradually becoming politically and politely incorrect, even in Nepal. Even consulting the dictionary is no solution. Merriam-Webster does not help with its definition of ‘being past middle age’. According to Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘elderly’ is an old adjective that goes back hundreds of years, and is derived from a still older noun ‘elder’ that is traced to the tenth century, with a meaning ‘in wider sense, a predecessor, one who lived in former days’.

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As a child, I understood ‘elder’ as someone who is older than me, and that worked fine for me, because everything then was in relation to my age. Back then, no one objected to being referred to as ‘elderly’, because it was taken as a title of honor, of being wise and experienced. We were taught to respect our elders, bow to them. We looked up to them as people knowledgeable in matters of everyday life. There still are people who do not mind being called elderly, but for some, that too has changed. For some now, ‘elderly’ carries a derogatory meaning, representing ‘feeble’ and ‘dependent’. A construction used in a way that sounds very similar to ‘the deaf’ or ‘the disabled’ is objectionable because no one likes to think of themselves as elderly, let alone very old, feeble or dependent.

Use of ‘elderly’ was not always objectionable. During the 20th century, ‘elderly’ was socially preferable to the word ‘old’. In 1918, as advice columnist of Atlanta Constitution, Dr. William Brady observed, “When you are 16 you wonder how an old man of 30 manages to drag himself around. When you get to be 30 you feel that 60 is as old as Methuselah. When you get to be 60 you will think that the ‘aged’ are those in their 90s.” So you see, elderly is relative to our own age.

At this point I remember my father’s narration of one particular tram trip from Park Street to Rashbehari Avenue in Kolkata during the 60’s. When he pulled the rope indicating a stop and started walking towards the door, the conductor said loudly, ‘ahista, ahista, budda admi hai’. My father looked around, but there was no one except him getting off the tram. Obviously the conductor was calling him an ‘old man’. He was 35 years old! This sounds funny, but then again, while in school, we called our teachers old, many of whom were barely thirty.

What is wrong with being elderly? Some might ask. The problem is our difficulty to forgo our obsession with youth.

As I look around, the majority of my friends are on the threshold of sixty, and none of them think they are ‘old’ or ‘elderly’. So what is wrong with being elderly? You might ask. The problem is our difficulty to forgo our obsession with youth. The tragedy is that in our effort to stay young, we miss out on the opportunity to grow old gracefully. Now that I am much older, I am still in the process of understanding the term ‘elderly’. I feel it’s much like a place where the earth meets the sky, which keeps changing depending on where you stand to look at the horizon. The only way out is learning to flow with the tide that age is, and embracing our gradual change, both mental and physical, that comes with age.

That is when we will start to feel comfortable with the descriptions that come along with advancing age, like ‘mature’, ‘seasoned’, and ‘elderly’. As for me, I have decided to go with the tide and accept that it’s ok to be old or elderly. I know that I am as old as I feel. Some days I feel more elderly than others. I don’t flinch anymore when some one calls me ‘elderly’ or ‘old’; I flinch more at terms like ‘senior citizen’.

Finally, for me ‘elderly’ is more a state of being, a feeling, than counting of years that I have already crossed to reach this age. The question for me is no longer if someone thinks I am old, but whether I think of myself as elderly. So for now, I have opted to adopt the tagline of an advertisement for the product ‘Oil of Olay’ that I had seen almost thirty years ago, which said: “Grow older gracefully”, and be happy about it.

The author is an educationist and children’s writer

usha@pokharel.net