Waiting for the Last Bus. Richard Holloway

she would say. He won’t let go till the last minute. It won’t be long now. Then the moment of surrender would come: a last sigh and it was over.

      This defiant resistance of death seems to be stronger in some people than in others, part of their character. And the will to live can persist in them long after they’ve lapsed into a coma. I’m always moved when I see this happening. It suggests to me an event in the boyhood of the writer Leonard Woolf when he was told to drown five new-born puppies:

      When he plunged the first tiny blind creature into the bucket of water, it began ‘to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws.’ He suddenly realised that it was an individual, an ‘I’, and that it was fighting for its life just as he would, were he drowning.¹²

      Like those blind puppies, death’s resisters struggle against the forces that are shutting them down. It’s hard not to be moved by this. It is probably the energy that kept them going as long as they did. But they all have to give in at some point. Death gets everyone in the end. If it didn’t, life would soon become unsustainable on our little planet. And there are worrying trends already pointing in that direction.

      One of them is the way the medical profession has wheeled formidable new artillery onto the battlefield and spends vast amounts of money and effort delaying death’s victory. I don’t apologise for the military metaphor because it is the one favoured by doctors themselves. With the best of intentions, they have taken control of the lives of old people today, and they fight hard to keep them in the field as long as possible. The result for many of them is a medicalised existence whose sole purpose is staying alive long after any joy in doing so has fled.

      Keeping most of us alive well into our eighties is one of the successes of modern medicine, but there are signs it is having a profoundly distorting effect on the balance of society as a whole. In Britain, the care of the elderly is close to swamping the resources of the National Health Service, turning it into an agency for the postponement of death rather than the enhancement of life. We don’t have to go back to the fifteenth century to find a more balanced approach. Not that long ago, before they had this colossal armoury at their disposal, most doctors were willing to acknowledge death’s approach. They saw their role as helping death in with the minimum of distress to everyone. Nowadays they are more likely to call in the medical engineers to dig a moat and fortify the door against death’s entrance. But there are signs that the more thoughtful among them are beginning to challenge this siege mentality. The American physician Atul Gawande has recently suggested that while medicine exists to fight death and disease, it should learn how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t. And doctors need to understand that the damage is greatest if they insist on battling on to the bitter end.¹³

      Old age can be bitter if it is experienced not as a period of calm preparation for death but as a grim battle to keep it at bay. It can even breed resentment in the old against the very doctors who are working hard to keep them going. Visiting the elderly can be a dispiriting experience if they spend the time rehearsing their ailments and complaining about the inattention of the local health professionals who are run off their feet trying to care for them. The reality is that death has rung their bell, and peace will come only when they open the door and say you got here sooner than I expected, but come in and sit down while I get my coat on.

      ***

      If the refusal to accept the imperative of death is a relatively new phenomenon, an older affliction is the anger of the old at the young for being young. At its root this is one of the many forms of the sin of envy. Envy has been defined as sorrow at another’s good. Sometimes it is confused with jealousy, but there’s a world of difference between them. The jealous want what other people have, and it may provoke them to work hard to achieve it, which is why ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ is a proverb. Jealousy may drive us to action, but envy only makes us depressed. Rather than rejoicing in the happiness of others – their youth and vitality and beauty – it makes us sad. It can prompt bitterness towards the young for being young, revealed in the snort of contempt at how they colour their hair or tattoo their bodies or collide with you in the street because they’re always on their bloody phones. It’s an ugly picture, the face of angry, envious old age. We often see it on television during interviews with the public on the issues of the day; and it can have a solid impact on government.

      Elderly voters are a powerfully reactionary force in politics both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. They are more disciplined and consistent than the young in voting, so as they increase in size as a cohort of the population their envies and resentments are bound to have an increasingly distorting effect on political processes. There is already a lot of evidence that they have had a profound effect on recent elections and referenda in these two countries. If these trends continue, in a few years a number of western democracies will have transformed themselves into gerontocracies – governments of the old, by the old, for the old. Geriatric resentment is a dangerous disease to catch, so it’s worth examining ourselves to see if it has infected us.

      The chances are that we’ve caught it, if only a mild version, because it is hard to avoid. Each generation has to learn how to take a bow and leave the stage. And we have to do it at the time in our lives when we are least resilient. Old age is a poignant business, a continuous series of losses, which is why Bette Davis said it wasn’t for sissies. One of its saddest moments is when we realise we are no longer at home in the world and are baffled at how it operates. When we were young and the future was filled with promise, it was thrilling to celebrate the constant shift and change of history and embrace every fad that came off the assembly line, as well as being impatient with those who resisted the new and clung desperately to the old and outworn. It is a different matter when you realise that, almost without noticing it, you have joined the ranks not only of the old but of the old fashioned; and that the crazy shifts of change you embraced so eagerly when you were young are the very energies that are now carrying you into the past, along with steam trains and quiet Sundays. So it is hardly surprising that the old can begin to feel like strangers in their own land.

      But it’s a mistake to think it’s a modern disease. The bitter old person is a constant in history. It seems to be age that corrodes the spirit, not change as such, which is why growing old can be spiritually dangerous. Go back as far as you can and you’ll hear the old grumbling about the young. In the century before the birth of Christ, the Roman poet Horace heard an elderly man at it:

      Tiresome, complaining, a praiser of the times that were when he was a boy, a castigator and censor of the young generation . . .¹⁴

      The tone of these attacks on the younger generation is not always as angry as Horace’s old man. Sometimes it is reproachful and weary, a wry shaking of the head at the excesses of the young. This is the spirit of Alec Guinness’s memoir, A Positively Final Appearance. The famous film star even complains about the length of movies nowadays:

      What good stories were told in the cinema in those days, swiftly, directly and without affectation. And how blessedly short they were when compared to the three-hour marathons that we are now expected to sit through, with aching bums, fatigued eyes and numbed ears.¹⁵

      Behind these complaints and reproaches there is hurt and sadness at the way time sweeps each generation aside, famously expressed by Isaac Watts in his hymn, ‘O God, our help in ages past’:

      Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

      Bears all its sons away;

      They fly forgotten, as a dream

      Dies at the opening day.¹⁶

      That it is a Christian hymn that best describes the rush of remorseless time is no accident. Religion is one of the few institutions that keeps the thought and fact of death steadily before us. It is what intrigued the poet Philip Larkin about churches. That so many dead lay round them, he thought, made them ‘proper to grow wise in’.¹⁷ But you don’t need a burial ground round a church to be reminded of death. There are reminders inside as well. Being a member of a congregation is to watch chairs emptying, as death accomplishes its work. In John Meade Falkner’s poem, ‘Christmas Day: The Family Sitting’, an old man in church meditates on Christmases past: