My daughter Esther is not one to waste words. We were talking recently and I made a passing comment on the joys of being in the full flowering of middle age, which, at 54, despite my longing still to be young, is exactly what I am.
Esther raised an eyebrow and coughed.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Seriously, what?’
‘You’re not middle aged’, she said.
‘You’re late-middle aged,’ she said.
‘Verging on elderly’, she said.
And there it was. The colour drained from my (surprisingly youthful) face. A chill ran through me. My voice cracked.
Elderly? The very idea.
Elderly? Holy cow.
Elderly? Not even on the horizon.
That chill that ran through me, though, was not for nothing: the fear of growing old is very real. We fear the loss of all those things we take for granted; mobility, independence, health, the friends we grew up with.
But there’s another side to growing old.
The bible is clear about how the elderly should be treated: ‘You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old’, or, if you prefer the elderly 17th century version, ‘Rise up before the hoary head’. We are to value the elderly. We are to listen to them and respect them.
In other words, growing old can be something to look forward to.
The thing is, though, not everyone gets the chance.
This week, we remember a whole generation of young men who were robbed of the chance to grow old, a hundred years ago.
The stark fact of their lost years is right there in Laurence Binyon’s famous poem, For the Fallen:
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old”
And it’s good to remember them, those young men who never grew old.
But this week, I reckon it’s also good to celebrate what we have that they gave up: the privilege of growing old, the dignity of growing old – and of growing old without fear, because we have an amazing health system, because we are well-nourished and because few of us are worn out by work at 54.
But most of all, this week, it’s good simply to be grateful for the chance to grow old; because in our generation, miraculously, no one has demanded that we give up that chance in a fight against our neighbours.