A GENERATIONAL ABYSS

This is a story of the gulf between a young and helpful physiotherapist and an elderly woman who is determined to walk. The young therapist, I don’t think she’s even thirty, comes to our house once a week to supervise Shirley’s recovery from her hip replacement operation. She is startled and amazed by the speed of her recovery! And we see what the generation gap means. Sadly, it reflects the notions of the young about the ailments of the old. (By the way, Shirley is home recovering because she hated the thought of spending a week in a rehab hospital.)

“It has been only two weeks and you’re walking.”
“She was walking the day after the surgery.”
“But this is unusual for anyone who had had a hip replacement, especially for a woman who is over 80.”
“Well that’s the secret of being old.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that when you get older you can expect to have aches and pains. You can choose to crawl into bed and hope it will all get better. It rarely does. All you get is older. Then there is the futility and frustration of thinking magically you will wake up and be thirty years younger.

This was more or less the conversation I had with a wide-eyed twenty-something, a physiotherapist who works with many cranky elderly people who moan about getting older and letting it turn them inwards. She says she has never come across anyone like Shirley. I assure her that we have many friends who are as old as we are, and they work and play through whatever pains and slowing down occurs naturally, One thing we, and most of them do not do, is complain about getting older. She tells me that if she asks what many of her patients want it is always – with a long self-pitying sigh: “To be twenty years younger,” or advice: “Don’t ever get old.”

She has been seeing old people and hearing their laments. Her own father, she says, who is only in his 60s, is already heading for the ash heap. He has no interest in going, in doing, and perhaps in being. Maybe he simply doesn’t know how. Maybe this young physiotherapist has more to teach than body-healing exercise.

She told me she had never heard this approach to aging before. She has never heard anyone tell her that people like Shirley look forward, not to a sedentary life, but to more going and doing and being – more traveling, walking the streets of strange cities, seeing new sights, reading new books, enjoying big fat books of Sunday Times crossword puzzles. (By the way, has anyone visited “Cricklers.” Log on. It’s better than television.)

She is completely surprised. She wishes she could have more of this for many of her older patients. Then she had to leave and as she left she said: “You’re young at heart.” I said: “That’s an ageist comment. My heart is not young. It is the same age as the creaking. aching rest of me. What you have just said is that somehow you can only enjoy life if you are young, or persuade yourself that you feel young. I hate all the platitudes like: “Age is just a state of mind,” The hell it is! The fact is that ageism prevails among the elderly because they don’t know how to square getting older with continuing to enjoy life. I am also getting a little tired of all those ads promoting “assisted living” where people who are descending into their so-called “Golden Years” can still be active, even if it is just semi-somnolent exercise and wheelchair athletics. I am not against “retirement living” but first everyone should try adventurous living. If not adventurous, at least more than the sedentary resignation that seems to come with aging. By this I don’t mean you have to go sky-diving for your 90th birthday.

She was startled by my words. But I meant them. For them (the rising generation) to share our lives they have to learn understand us. We also have to learn to understand ourselves. There is a huge gap, an abyss that separates us from the young. It is real and I for one don’t regret it. I have things to do and places to go, and “miles to walk….”

P.S. I told Shirley about writing this piece. I told her I also thought that unconsciously she was willing herself to walk without assistance so that we can get our lives back.