Steve Braunias: Lessons on how to survive old age

You can teach an old dog not to fall over. Photo / 123rf

Those of us in early old age – late-50s to mid-60s with a cut-off date when the Gold Card drops at 65 – regard actual old age with horror. We fear the worst. We have seen the worst, in our friends and family – people who lived lives of great vigour and good sense, but then gone ga-ga, gone to physical hell, gone down the rabbit hole of stupid ideas.

Terrifying! Death is one thing, the dark inevitable; actual old age is another, more challenging thing, a game of chance. Many win it. They remain alert, mobile. Many others through no fault of their own, through genetics and illness and misfortune, lose it. “The horror,” Kurtz whispers in The Heart of Darkness. “The horror.”

Three of us in early old age gathered at my house late one night recently to discuss the issue. Our combined age was 189. The next morning, each of us felt at least that old. There was considerable alcohol involved but no drugs were consumed – no one had any, and the only dealer any of us knew was a friend of a friend of one of our kids.

This is how actual old age begins: isolated from the wider community, unable to rely on tenuous connections. Robert Lowell’s famous poem about his mother, “afraid of living alone till eighty”, ends with an image of the poor old soul sitting by the window, “as if she had stayed on a train / one stop past her destination”.

Those of us in early old age are not yet regulars at the funerals of friends, and many of us are now too old to be regulars at the funerals of family on account of the fact they died years ago. We are between funerals. We think about our own, sometimes, but not in any great or morbid detail – we merely wonder about the guest list and the playlist. Something classical might be regarded as too pompous. Something funky might be regarded as too lively. As for the guests, our only concern is: what if no one turned up? “Nothing happens, nobody comes,” wails Estragon in Waiting for Godot. “It’s awful!”

Three of us in early old age drinking at my house past midnight – shocking! – approached the issue of actual old age after I mentioned that I had read something by an octogenarian writer which expressed considerable intolerance for the poetry of Tusiata Avia, in particular her poem about wanting to stick Captain Cook with a knife. “Racist,” grumped the 80-something. Oh for God’s sake. And so the three drinkers came up with the first rule of how to cope with actual old age: don’t turn into an actual old fool. Resist prejudice and bias and intolerance. Keep your wits about you. “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow,” beamed Louis Armstrong, although the version by Nick Cave in a duet with Shane McGowan is even better. “They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.”

Those of us in early old age are, for the most part, upright. That’s a really good place to be. The alternative, not so much. And so it was that the three drinkers came up with the second rule: don’t fall over. Falling over in actual old age means there is quite a high chance that you won’t be able to get back up again. “He lay there quietly a while longer, breathing lightly as if he perhaps expected the total stillness to bring things back to their real and natural state,” writes Franz Kafka in his short story about a clerk who wakes up one day imprisoned in bed on account of the strange fact he has metamorphosed into a bug.

Three of us in early old age were on a roll with the helpful don’ts of actual old age. Don’t become stupid. Don’t fall over. Don’t just sit around on your arse, walk places. And: don’t get fat. I think that was my contribution.

Those of us in early old age are on the doorstep of actual old age, grateful and a little bit stunned to have lived this long, curious and a little bit afraid at the prospect of living a lot longer. There are great role models all around us, some of them famous (Sir David Attenborough is 97!), most of them just going about their obscure business with grace and good humour. That way lies the future. May we all live to see it. And after it ends? “I enjoyed it on Earth”, writes C.K. Stead, 90, “but am looking forward / to seeing you, old friends.”