Mold Age: The Curse of Modern Medicine by James Jackson
“I’m ninety-one years old, you know?”
Bravo. Now have your diuretics and your hot milk drink, take your heart pills and blood-pressure tablets and your fistful of other prescription drugs, then we’ll provide an enema and influenza jab, change your dressings and diaper, bind your leg ulcer, and do fuzzy-felt shapes to counteract the Alzheimer’s. One thing we will not do is let you die.
God, it is so undignified. Visit a respite home or a modern cattle-pen for the aged, and you will be struck first by the rolling banks of urine fumes and then by the absurd pathos of it all. Here, an old man exposing himself; there, an ancient woman flashing her knickers at anyone who notices. I know people who, having placed their mother in a home, returned from doing the paperwork to find her being dry-humped by some old pervert (talk about settling in); I know another whose grandfather—a distinguished former general—was spotted running crazed and naked down a provincial town’s High Street.
And someone is making money, turning the elderly into bewildered cash cows, milking them of every dime, dollar, and ounce of dignity. The beneficiaries are the caregivers, the medical profession, and the pharmaceutical giants, those who have a vested interested in putting in the cannula and the drips and keeping their medicated and vegetative charges clutching to this mortal coil.
We should be ashamed, but our fear of death and obsession with longevity make it otherwise. An American comedian once suggested that his elderly grandparents become stuntmen in a martial-arts movie, arguing it was nobler for them to get their heads removed by a well-aimed roundhouse kick than to fade to grey nothingness in a care home.
Of course, luck and genetics play their part. Some elderly people do fine: Three of my great aunts were completing The Times’ daily cryptic crossword until their deaths in their nineties, while a friend’s eighty-something father continues single-handedly tending his cattle and flock of six hundred sheep right through winter’s depths. They are an inspiration, but they are rare.
Sure, not every octogenarian wants to drag straw bales and sacks of animal feed through a snowdrift. But what society has opted for is the other extreme, where the sick and demented and doubly incontinent are maintained, patched up, and placed on life support as if a heartbeat at any cost is all that matters. The Who once sang of hoping to die before they got old. That same generation now expects to live way beyond old age, to defy death even if control and faculties are gone. Life—rather than quality of life—is the new tyranny.
It is why people have begun to take matters into their own hands, traveling to Switzerland’s Dignitas clinic to bring forward their passing. Many observers feel uneasy and squeamish at the concept of accelerating one’s departure via assisted suicide. Yet they remain strangely silent on the current practice of artificially sustaining existence beyond a reasonable term.
We all have a shelf life and a sell-by date. Modern medicine and mores keep us around far too long. A friend of mine’s grandfather recently took his own life. A widower and WWII veteran, he simply decided a prolonged decline was not quite his thing. He cleaned his home, set his calendar, put a plastic bag over his head, and secured it with a scarf. It was his decision and moment, the act of a profoundly brave man.
Scratch the surface of most men and you will find a Beau Geste element that wishes to die whilst charging an enemy with a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other. This is precisely how one relation died in the Great War; sadly, he was only 21. In previous eras, death’s closer presence gave life its definition. Today we feel aggrieved and cheated if death should even intrude. In the same way that nips, tucks, and facelifts have transformed celebrities into grotesque and plasticized shadows of their former selves, so medicine has postponed death and dehumanized existence. We claim that life is sacred and then go about devaluing it. Nature is kept at bay and the Grim Reaper sits in reception at every care home growing bored, flicking through the magazines, and gagging on the smell as we insist on clinging on to complete another jigsaw.
How totally bloody depressing. There must be a way to swallow-dive gracefully to eternity rather than be carried there on a litter with dementia and soiled underwear. An old friend of mine once suffered a heart attack in her garden. As her daughter rose to call for an ambulance, the old lady ordered her to do nothing. She fully understood her time was up and had no desire to be revived, to be probed and prodded, to join the endless queue of geriatrics constantly shuttled between home and hospital. She passed away in the garden she loved with her family and dogs at her side.
This is our life and it should be our death. Both have been hijacked. The Anglo-Saxons believed that human existence was akin to a bird flying through a great hall’s open window and spending a short while in the warmth and light before heading out once more to the darkness. They would be perplexed at how their descendants have allowed that bird to flutter aimlessly and crawl toward the end.
When her elderly mother is being particularly obnoxious, a friend of mine takes Mum in the car and slowly circles a roundabout in front of a local nursing home until the warning is understood and the old lady says tersely through gritted teeth: “Get me out of here.…”
Infirmity and old age should never become a reason to be forced off the planet. But we would never unleash on our beloved house pets the indignities we foist upon our elderly. In extending life for the sake of it, we conspire to cheapen it and remove all meaning. DO NOT RESUSCITATE should be our creed.
Count me out of this bullshit. When my mental faculties and bodily functions go, I wish to be chloroformed.
xo em
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