What causes sadness when you are over 50? Harm to a child obviously, or to a spouse. Perhaps the diagnosis of an illness, or the sound of distant thunder at a summer party, as Philip Larkin called impending old age. But there is another source – and more and more of us face it.
A wave of desolation came over me the other day when I passed a shop on a slightly down-at-heel street near the centre of the city of Bath. The shop sells computer games; they are displayed on wooden shelves. The same dark wood has been used on the outside, crenellated to make it look like a stone column – the kind of stone column that the Romans built. To modern day passers-by the effect is mildly odd – we are pretending to be Roman! – but to me the wood has meaning.
Decades ago this was the headquarters of one of Bath’s best-known companies: Roman City Coaches. Once upon a time, Roman City Coaches were my whole life.
Well, Roman City Coaches and mum.
Every year, Roman City Coaches would bring out their brochure for the summer day-trips, and every year I would go into the shop with my mother to pick up the brochure from the dark wooden shelves and circle the trips we would make instead of a summer holiday. My home circumstances were odd, being the only child of a single mother, and we were hard up, but this was no meagre substitute for fun: to a solemn little boy who wanted above all else to be a coach driver, and a mother happy to sit with him to Swansea and the Mumbles or Plymouth via Dartmoor (I think that was the best: only an hour in Plymouth before the trip home), well, this was heaven.
So it saddened me in a shocking way to see the shop again and to feel what I felt: not just nostalgia but a raw pain at the loss of my mother. Although I shared it with no one at the time, I must say I also felt, mixed with the grief, more than a hint of embarrassment.
Is it acceptable, when you are fully grown up yourself, to be distraught for so long at the death of your own parents? It seems somehow self-indulgent. Fine to be sad as they say their goodbyes, to feel a pang as you clear out a family home, but, once the loss is recognised and dealt with, time to be, well, adult about it yourself.
My mother died five years ago this summer. There we are: time to be the responsible person that you want to be – the person to whom others turn for comfort.
And yet. A friend’s father died recently, and it left him cut up in a way he found similarly shocking. My friend had reached middle age, married and with children. He noticed, though, that the loss hit him even harder than the loss of his mother, who had died when he was in his mid-twenties.
The difference he put down to his own place in the journey. He had missed his mother but still been imbued then with the sense of possibility and potential that his own life represented. He might still have been a coach driver – or whatever. Years later, with his own life set in stone and not the huge success he had half-imagined when young, the death of his father seemed far more viscerally affecting. Here we go, it seemed to say to him. You’re next. Soon.
I wonder if there is a whole generation of us coping with this added psychological burden in later life, a burden born of older parents and the medical advances that keep those parents alive for much longer. As a nation, we have been debating recently how to pay for care in later life, but it seems to me that this is only one aspect of the change in our society that longevity has brought.
The other big change is late-onset grief. In what my children call the olden days (the 1960s or earlier), your parents generally popped off while you were still young and vigorous. Now they are saying their goodbyes as goodbyes, or at least retirement, starts to weigh on your own mind. I remember leaning over my mother’s deathbed and finding it quite difficult to straighten up again. Death, in these circumstances, sucks more from your life than it might have in years gone by.
“Our society isn’t very good at dealing with grief; we have a tendency to rush people,” says the clinical psychologist Dr Sylvia Dillon. “Often we allow ourselves a couple of weeks to get over losing a loved one, when in reality it can take years. Grieving a loved one when you’re older is particularly difficult, partly because we’re supposed to be grown up, and partly because when we are young, we are so busy exploring the world that we get distracted and don’t allow ourselves time to grieve.”
And my mother’s death was relatively pain-free and relatively fast. Many families are dealing with the stresses of degeneration that does not quite finish someone off, a grief that must seem endless. A cruel sense – for those left behind in their late middle age – of the grim proximity to their own fates.
Being 50 does bring its privileges, however, and one of them is the right to admit finally that you never really understood what Immanuel Kant was getting at. But one thing he said I did grasp in my student days, and it seems relevant to the condition I describe. Kant called The Enlightenment a moment when mankind became mature; we were able to think about life, the universe, everything, without seeking guidance from God. While your parents are still alive, however much you might sublimate it or ignore it or pretend it is not there; however much they might seem now to depend on you, you are still young. Or younger. Only once they go are you fully mature. And what you discover is what the human race discovered post-Enlightenment: great freedom and great sadness.
We should get help from the EU. Or some kind of big-society grant. Or maybe just recognise the fact that our generation, fiftysomethings and above, have had a pretty good deal, but face in later years a hurdle we had perhaps not expected.
After lives free of world war, educations paid for by the state, and (relatively) generously funded pensions, we face the hurdle of finally growing up, long after the idea seemed remotely attractive. Granny is dead or dying, and Dad is upset, and this is the way of the modern world.
Justin Webb is a presenter on Radio 4’s 'Today’ programme
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