The poetry of ageing 

As I approach 50, I realise, while it’s not really old, it has the sense of entering the ‘third age’

I was so nerdy when I was a teenager that I had a scrapbook which contained all of my favourite poems. They were of course heavily influenced by Soundings and Exploring English, those austere literature compilations of our time. Where else would we access the literary world? It is not as if I was going to walk into the library and stand in front of the poetry section – I was nerdy, but that was beyond the bounds.

I was particularly fond of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot. For many years I would find myself muttering under my breath, “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.” The notion of advancing age being liberating rather than disabling appealed to me.

As time moved on, I discovered that other poets existed besides the four Irish lads (one of them always came up in the exam, so you might as well learn them all), the paltry compilation of English chaps, and even fewer women.

I came across Jenny Joseph’s Warning: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.* She devotes the entire poem to the wonderful things she will do to “make up for the sobriety of my youth”, including spending “my pension on brandy and summer gloves/And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.”

When I was diagnosed with a life-limiting disease, these poems took on a new meaning for me. Not only was I facing the grief of abandoning my young children and husband and inflicting the unspeakable pain of a child’s death on my parents, I was also going to miss out on reaching the age where I could “sit down on the pavement when I’m tired/And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells/And run my stick along the public railings.”

But time and I have managed to move on together. Years have passed, a decade even, more.

I have gone from the haggard intensity of mothering three children under six to the haggard tolerance of ‘there-there-ing’ through Leaving Cert panic attacks. 

Just one year left of primary school in our house now. Everyone can go to the shop by themselves. They can be left together unsupervised for hours on end. They know how to use the major appliances in the house, though will rarely do so without strong encouragement.

My friends and I are turning 50 this year. When we were kids, 50 was as good as 70 in terms of proximity to the grave. Local community groups advertised over-50s bus trips and pilgrimages. Women over 50 all had that short old-lady haircut, with brutally obvious dye jobs and permanent waves. Here’s a fact – the women in The Golden Girls were all in their 50s and not in fact 97, which was the impression the show gave.

There is so much negative publicity about ageing, especially for women. Count the number of ‘anti-ageing’ creams on the shelf in the chemist. The ads for Tai Chi that promise to make an 80-year-old look 40. We are all conditioned to fear getting older, to be embarrassed in some way that we have had the audacity to live this long.

Now I realise that 50 is not really old, but it certainly has the sense of entering the ‘third age’. For someone with an average life expectancy, it probably feels like a halfway point. Time to reset, rethink, recharge and, if they can fight the incessant negativity, get back out there to slay for another few decades. For me, it is a milestone that was statistically entirely out of my reach when I was diagnosed with metastatic cancer in my 30s.

And yet, I now find myself with a pair of varifocal glasses. I’ll be expecting my BreastCheck invite. I have been advised by my daughter that I am “too old to be pregnant”, when I try to style my ascitic belly as a more socially acceptable baby bump.

I may now, in fact, be old.

Halle-fecking-lujah.

I am off to buy a load of purple trousers.

*This poem was included in the anthology Tools of the Trade: Poems for new doctors (Scottish Poetry Library, 2014). A copy was given to all graduating doctors in Scotland in 2014.