People my age shouldn’t be upset by the amount of time our political leaders spend talking about child poverty during this election campaign.
They might not understand why parents today need places to park the kids while they’re slaving away in a shop or a bank or down a mine. They might not see why, by providing jobs for parents, governments have to provide child-care so that parents can fill them.
But they shouldn’t make a fuss, or the younger generations who have to work harder than ours to support themselves and their families and have to pay higher taxes while doing so, will be reminded that we’re a pretty cossetted lot, really.
Some old folks seem determined to keep going in high gear.
But many are at a dead stop, as if waiting for a red light to change that never will.
There’s a comforting feeling behind whatever aches and pains these idlers suffer that they’ll be looked after.
Those who’ll fill this heroic role — usually sons and daughters, spouses or the fashionable equivalent — are called caregivers. But they’re also caretakers. They remove the worry by being close.
Amazement has been expressed that so many aging folk underestimate how much long-term care they’ll need as they get older, and how so few are readying themselves for what’s to come.
What’s more puzzling is that so many caregivers are realizing — when it’s almost too late — that they, too, have underestimated what long-term care must be provided for a loved one, and are ill-prepared for what they have to take on.
They don’t know until they have to how many chronic diseases they’ll have to help cope with. They don’t know how to deal with mobility problems, or worse, the falls that can break more than bones.
They’ll have to learn on the job how to deal with dementia or depression. They’ll try to keep a light heart, hold their temper, hide their frustration.
But there may come a time when they wonder whether it’s worth visiting someone who really isn’t there any more.
When the loved one is gone, they might feel relief — and guilt that they feel relief.
It’s the inevitably of decline that makes a report last week sound depressingly hopeful. Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York think they may have found a way to extend life by manipulating a tiny part of the brain, the hypothalamus. They discovered that it’s possible to alter the signalling in the hypothalamus of mice to slow the aging process so that they live 20 per cent longer.
This might only mean longer-living mice. I hope that’s all.
I hope it means no more than silly suggestions to stop wrinkles by drinking eight cups of water a day or ingesting bee venom, or hooking oneself up to electronic devices to monitor organs, count footsteps, watch weight and record general decay.
I’m one of 50,000 Canadians who’ve been invited to participate in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. I’m told I’ll be prodded and poked, scanned and measured, made to squeeze things and stand on one leg every three years for the next 20 — which, at my age, is a bit of a laugh.
What I and others reveal as we fall apart will be used by researchers for the next 40 or 50 years to study the varied mysteries of getting old.
I hope, though, that it won’t be used to follow the advice issued last week by the International Monetary Fund. It said that because people have fewer babies and live longer themselves, adults must work longer “to contribute to economic life,” rather than become dependent, as my generation has become.
Older folk are supposed to keep their dripping noses to the grindstone so that their kids’ kids and theirs can have more education, more job training and — you guessed it — more child care.
This ridiculous suggestion is what the IMF calls “healthy, productive aging.”
There’s nothing healthy about aging. Asking it to be productive is inviting system failure — both physical and technological — and other serious accidents.
I prefer a warm bath.
