Turning 70

 Turning 70

 

When I look back on significant anniversaries, my main impression now is that I had a sense of relief that nothing had suddenly changed overnight. A 40 I still looked and felt young. I had a young family. At 50 I looked youngish and felt reasonably young. In that decade I would take up triathlons. I enrolled for, and successfully completed, a philosophy MA. I was still working steadily and confidently. 60 felt okay – advanced middle age rather than old. To prove that, a celebratory last Olympic-length triathlon, and in the next couple of years, 2 half marathons.

 

There was the transition from more or less full-time work to part-time freelance employment, and then to full retirement around age 65. This is one the most difficult thresholds to cross. The mundane tempos of work routines knitted together many epochs of my life. Whilst I was still working, travelling to the same office over a period of 30 years, there was an institutional present tense that smoothed the passage of time. The closest imaginative analogy is being endlessly at the same school, so that school day youth never changes much.

 

It is no wonder that, now, my staple dreams inhabit a world that is an amalgam of secondary school and adult workplace.

 

Ian McEwan, the novelist of dark mistakes and insinuating threats, used to say, some 6 or 7 years ago when he entered his mid 60s, that he was in “the toddlerhood of old age”. On this reckoning, I suppose that 70 marks the beginning of maturity. Alas, there’s unlikely to be a vigorous adult phase. Surely what comes is the Old Age of Old Age..

 

Turning 70 means, more than ever in this time of pandemic, becoming officially old. One is designated such, and therefore per se vulnerable, but with the advantage of moving up the vaxx queue.

 

The 60s are an ambiguous decade, as McEwan captures with his metaphor. The 70s are not. We are elderly, even if not ancient. We may still be active; even very active in the case of US presidents and judges. But our active term does not stretch into an indefinite future.

 

It may be that, in the prosperous countries of the world, to die in one’s 70s is generally considered a little premature. But less than 10 years hence lurks the 80s, and on the whole, you don’t, yet, die before your time once you get there.

 

Timor mortis me conturbat. It’s a phrase from Catholic funeral liturgy, and may be translated as “fear of death does my head in”. the “fear” is the religious one of dying in sin and exiting to Hell. General fear of death, fear of dying is not so confined. Many would agree with Woody Allen: “I am not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens”. Some go much further into fear, like the poet Philip Larkin, who was truly and wretchedly afraid and wrote of waking at night when “the dread of dying, and being dead, flashes afresh to hold and terrify”.

 

Larkin in fact died of cancer, fairly wretchedly, but sedated beyond fear.

 

David Runciman, the political philosopher, writes in the London Review of Books of 4 February 2021 about his father, Garry, who died in December 2020 aged 86.

 

Runciman says that Garry was also fearful of death, sometimes “waking in the night gripped with a sense of utter terror at what was to come”. This was in Garry’s mid 40s.

 

Garry corresponded with Larkin after reading his poem, quoted above, agreeing that their shared fear was a fairly rational response to the inevitable annihilation (both being atheists).

 

They also speculated about anecdotal evidence that timor mortis declines, rather than increases with advancing years. Runciman writes that this seems to have been true of Garry: “I can’t remember him mentioning it after about the age of 70”. 

 

Timor mortis has not been a preoccupation of mine. I’m not of Larkin’s party. But there’s no doubt that ageing does raise the questions that don’t really have answers..

 

Do you have to be terrified in earlier years in order to lose terror later? Or have I, too, now reached the age of consolation or indifference. “Timor mortis? Me? Conturbat? – give over!”

 

Having children may partly explain this phenomenon, for those that have them. Young children may be more a worry than comfort for anxious, still young, parents. Adult children may, on the whole, be more a comfort and less (but never completely a lack of) a worry for older parents. They can discern, or at least hope for, a familial continuation that mitigates the ending of self. Perhaps.

 

March 2021