Age In Health
The boundaries of ageing are those accepted supinely or self-imposed stupidly.
Introducing Age In Health?
This publication will focus on ageing and all things related to that process that we are all experiencing all the time.
It will be of particular interest to people who are in their senior years and the children, grandchildren, other relatives and friends of those in their senior years.
My interest in ageing has at least five related roots. First, I’m at the point in my life now where I, regrettably, have to admit that I’m ageing - and not just in the sense of just experiencing the process that we all experience. I was born in 1959, I’m one of the young old (see below).
Second, I have a practical and professional interest in the subject. I run a domiciliary care company which looks after people of all ages, but a significant number of whom are elderly. Domiciliary care, incidentally, is care provided in your home, sometimes called home care.
Third, my father, my father in law and my mother in law all died in 2020. They were aged 93, 93 and 90 respectively.
Fourth, I have written in an ad hoc way for the last 12 years on various topics that often were directly or indirectly related to ageing. I currently have a blog entitled Domiciliary Care Matters - a revamp of two previous blogs.
My current blog was going to focus on topics related to domiciliary care; however, I’m increasing being pulled in the direction of writing on topics that are much broader in scope.
Fifth, over the last 12 years or so - motivated very much by the above factors - I have taken an intellectual and academic interest in ageing and have read quite widely on the subject.
Age In Health, is very much a product of those factors.
Let me tell you a little more about my dad He died a couple of months’ short of his 94th birthday. In later life he was a difficult man - but that’s another story.
He was one of those people who died of old age. His body just wore out. This is something quite common today. It was very different once. Ageing, like nostalgia, ain’t what it used to be.
Just after the second world war, most people died before they got their old age pensions. Today, we are raising the age for state pension qualification.
That’s probably a slight exaggeration. In 1948, life expectancy at birth was 66 for men; 71 for women. Men qualified for pensions at 66 women at 60.
We now look at ageing differently. We have the young old (65-74), the old old (75-84) and the oldest old (85+). But the oldest old are no longer the oldest old because we have a group of people who are older than the oldest old!
This group is the centenarians. I like to call these the oldest old squared.
But let’s not stop at 100. Increasingly there is a group of people - the super-centenarians - who are attracting the attention gerontologist. The super-centenarians are people around 110 years old - the older than the older than the oldest old - the oldest old cubed!
I am fairly optimistic that in the not too distant future we’ll be talking about people who are older than the older than the older than the oldest - the oldest old to the power 4. Indeed, just a few days ago the oldest women in America died at the age of 115.
Anyway, back to my dad.
He was in reasonably good health until his late 80s. Then a few things started to show. So this would have been about 8 years or so ago. I was already quite interested in ageing from a professional point of view.
So, I started to read much more widely around the subject. I discovered various things that I could relate to my dad and my experiences with him.
For example, I came across this concept called the fourth age. This refers to the final stage of life marked by increased dependency, frailty, and a decrease in physical ability and cognitive function. In the last 12-18 months of his life, that description applies perfectly to my dad.
For me, my experience with my dad raised such questions about how well we understand this fourth age and how well, as a society, we are equipped to deal with it.
Let’s face it, we have very slowly over the centuries been living longer and then suddenly - suddenly in historical terms - our lifespans seem to have exploded. We are ill-equipped to deal with it. This is something I’ll certainly write about at some point.
What Will Age In Health Cover?
There is nothing off the table. However, what I will say, is that I will very often take a different view of things. My writing has always been heavily influenced by philosophical and esoteric themes. I have been particularly influenced by the writings of existentialist philosophers.
I guess if I were to sum things up in a sentence, I’d say that we are people who share a world with other people and things. We influence those people and things and they influence us. As Jean Paul Sartre put it: hell is other people.
We are a product of our choices - and no matter what our age we have to make our choices and we are, under normal circumstances, responsible for the consequences of them.
I hope you’ll subscribe to Age In Health. And please do comment and let me know your views.
At the moment, Age In Health is free. I may introduced paid subscriptions later. I hope to publish once a week or so.
I look forward to hearing from you