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October 30, 2003
Glad to be grey
Encouraging our parents to enjoy an active retirement forces us into tough choices over their welfare. But, says Talitha Stevenson, we mustn’t use their later years as a dry run for our own
I think I began torturing my mother about potential hobbies six months before she actually retired. It started with the photographs of muscular octogenarians. Casually, I would place cut-out magazine articles beside her cereal bowl. “Look, Mum,” I would say. “Isn’t it amazing: this man ran the marathon aged 80?”
She would look at me, slightly pained, and nod. And I would think: ‘If I don’t keep this up she’ll lose all sense of purpose and sink into deep depression and isolation, the very moment she retires.’ That was when I got into promoting the Ramblers.
At all stages of life we are both in love with and terrified by the idea of unscheduled time. We picture a secret garden and a whistling prairie at once, and we imagine we could either find or lose ourselves there, depending on the perception we chose to fulfil.
In this sense, retirement and gap year fall prey to the same forces of emotional anarchy. And, just as parents swap horror stories about kids who stayed on in Goa, missing their university places, those children (now lawyers and bankers), eventually come to swap retirement nightmare scenarios.
My friend Kate’s mum, for example, retired and went shopping. She took one look at all that free time and threw money at it — continually. Once she had got into terrifying debt, she packed up her new wardrobe and went on a cruise she couldn’t afford either. Kate received Polaroids of her mother draped over furiously blushing cabin boys.
It’s not that she was puritanical about it, but Kate and I were left with a fear that this was, well, not actually fun. Kate wondered if her mother was trying to fill time up with the things she bought.
When my ex-boyfriend’s mother retired, she worked harder than ever before. She volunteered like mad. She read to hospital patients, managed a charity shop, ran the church choir, rescued donkeys at the weekend. And her gardening habit got so out of control you would see her outside in high wind and rain: a tree under one arm, a wheelbarrow under the other.
Of course, being public spirited is admirable, but her children suspected that Helena felt guilty about doing anything purely for herself. All those novels she had bought before she retired, the water-colour paint set, the Italian language tapes... She looked exhausted. I remember my ex putting his head in his hands, saying, “I thought older people were meant to be wiser than us.”
Of all retirement stories, the worst is the one about the parent who became depressed. How a litany of small ailments came to fill the conversation of the articulate businessman. How pottering in the garden dwindled into daytime TV.
But six months into my campaign to find my mother a retirement purpose, I realize that I’ve been getting it wrong. I have stepped, with a colonial air, into another person’s context, bringing all my own values with me, determined to sort out the native mess.
When I assured my mother she would ‘meet new people!’ through the Ramblers and ‘go to parties!’ she looked at me and said, “Don’t you realize, I genuinely don’t want to go to parties any more?” I didn’t. But then, like everyone else, I am hazy on what the post-Cold Feet demographic want from life.
Despite the fact that, according to UN figures, there are around 20 million people over 50 in the UK, Age Concern notes the proportion of people over 60 appearing on TV fell from 10 per cent in 1998, to 7 per cent last year.
Our obsession with youth has led not only to a paucity of TV representation of older people, but, until recently, they were barely addressed as consumers. Twenty-, thirty-, forty somethings have the constant reassurance of seeing their lifestyles represented and affirmed in the media and in advertising. We know we matter, because people are trying to sell us stuff.
Naturally, the first people to cotton onto under-representation are those who will make money out of rectifying the situation. A recent marketing survey by Datamonitor coined the term ‘WOOFs’ (Well Off Older Folks) and advocated exploitation of the ‘grey pound’. Officially recognizing that older people want and deserve a lifestyle will inevitably promote a positive psychological shift in us all.
One company addressing this most comprehensively tailors holidays, insurance, even car sales to the over-50. Retirement, from this company’s perspective, is about joining a vast, involved, active interested and significant community.
Unfortunately, there are almost no specific resources for those psychologically affected by retirement. For those who are perfectly fit and healthy, retirement at the mandatory age must make you feel like someone has switched the lights on halfway through the party. As Gordon Lishman, Age Concern England’s director-general, said: “The date on a person’s birth certificate should never be used as the excuse to hand someone their P45.”
All major life shifts leave us in need of support and advice, and it is surprising that Age Concern, while offering useful financial and health advice, does not address the psychological issue of retirement.
Relate does offer counselling for retirement-affected couples, but had my single mother wanted them, there were no specific counselling services for her. This seems to be a telling, though probably not very lucrative, gap in the market.
Recently, we have replaced the fear of death with the fear of ageing, and we fixate with superstitious horror on each point along the way, be it developing wrinkles or reaching the retirement age.
In one sense, my instinct for promoting muscular grandads was only a desire to break this spell. It was a selfish move: my own mother is the nearest I come to being in my 60 and it makes me scared. I’m ageing, too. I’m both perpetuating and suffering from society’s heightened ageism. Ultimately I know I must leave her in peace — or I will never get invited round for supper.
So, finally, Mum’s big retirement day arrived. There was a cake, there were speeches to commemorate a working life. I learnt that in her time as a state-school nursery teacher, she taught over 600 children to read. I bit my lip, and stopped myself co-opting her latest life stage as an expression of my anxieties. And I didn’t mention the Ramblers once.— Dawn/Observer News Service
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