CANADA: Good Time To Grow Old, But It's Not Always Easy

MONTREAL, Quebec (The Gazette), December 31, 2007: Probably you are reading this column on the day before the first day of the new year, writes Hugh Anderson in his column today and asks: What will you be thinking as midnight arrives and the old year ends, assuming you are awake, of course? In contrast to younger folk, for many seniors I suspect it will be a time of looking back at memories, sad and happy, rather than gazing ahead hopefully into the year about to begin. Perhaps there will be new year's resolutions to spend less time and energy looking backward, but these are likely to be mostly in vain. That's despite the injunction of the Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." The lonely death of Rita St. Aubin, discussed in last week's column, inspired considerable reader response. Some readers admitted to a fear that her fate might be theirs. Her body was not discovered in her apartment for six days. One woman writes that in recent years she has lost 50 per cent of her hearing and has suffered from clinical depression, conditions that isolate a person even more. "With depression you just don't have the energy or the concentration to follow through on things. You lose interest in things that once were a pleasure - for me, that was sewing, first and foremost, and going to the theatre." In many ways this is the best time and place to grow old. We seniors are not just living longer, on average, we are staying reasonably healthy longer than ever before. The leading wave of 10 million Canadian baby boomers now turning 60 are looking at life expectancies longer than those of many people a hundred years ago, and longer than the majority of the world's population today. We are better fed, have better medical care and enjoy more comforts than our parents and grandparents ever did. In the area of Montreal where I live, there are more 80-year-olds than anywhere else in Canada. The flip side of this good news is the range of problems that a mass geriatric society is bringing. In the nature of things, some of those problems do not have solutions. They are to be endured, not cured. Baby boomers, raised in a time when many illnesses and injuries once thought incurable have been conquered, will have great difficulty with that hard truth. As my late wife said hopefully several times during her last illness: "They're just going to have to fix it, end of story." They couldn't. How are we to cope with the inevitable departure from our lives of those who were once part of it? One reader wrote about a sad reflection by the mother of a friend who said with some lingering surprise in her voice: "You know, most everybody I knew when I was younger is dead - who can I talk to about my fears now, and who will care for me when I can no longer care for myself?" The hard truth for couples is that very few die simultaneously. One or other of the partners in life is almost certainly going to be a lone survivor at some point, and many will live into old age. How many of those who have not experienced this can comprehend how hard it is? There is no cure for it. Those with a blackly ironic view of life have much to contemplate at a time when we are in greatest need of family doctors and general practitioners - just as they are disappearing from the medical system, that the supports to the elderly provided by traditional families are fraying just when needed most - and just as the traditional family is disappearing. Increasingly we will face in the new year and subsequent years difficult decisions. Is it right to administer antibiotics for pneumonia to the elderly patient who will soon die of cancer anyway, perhaps in acute discomfort or even in agony? Some hundred years ago Dr. William Osler described pneumonia as "the friend of the aged" because it frequently cut short otherwise long periods of physical and mental decay. Similarly, there is a Yiddish proverb: "When the father helps the son, both laugh. When the son helps the father, both cry." Yet reluctance to control the time of dying should be respected as a bulwark against a future society that might, for practical reasons, impose an arbitrary test of utility and a time limit on care for the elderly. What do you think? Write to Hugh Anderson, seniors@unclehughie.com © The Gazette (Montreal) 2007