us. I have known people who have died in a mood of absolute gratitude for the life they’d had and the love that was given to them. They were sad at leaving the party earlier than they hoped, but grateful for the good time they’d had while they were there. Their last days became an act of thanksgiving for what they had received.
There’s an illuminating moment at the end of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, The Line of Beauty, which is set during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in Britain. Nick, the hero of the novel, has just had an HIV test. He knows the result will be positive and he’ll die soon. Hollinghurst tells us:
[Nick] . . . dawdled on rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed . . . The emotion was startling . . . It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.10
As death approaches, there will be sorrow for what it will take from us. But that is a mean and grudging way to greet it. If we let it, death will reveal the beauty of the world to us – the fact of a street corner at all! Maybe we have left it late. Maybe we wish we had noticed it before, paid it more attention. Push that thought aside. Don’t fret. Look at it now – so beautiful – and be grateful. And maybe you can arrange your death bed looking out on a street corner you know . . .
II
LOSING IT
In his most famous poem, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas advised his dying father not to give up without a fight:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.11
It is the rage of the old that I want to think about now. And not just the kind Dylan Thomas was talking about. That was rage at dying, at being dragged away from the party before you were ready to leave. There can be something heroic about that kind of resistance, and it is why some people, almost without being aware of it, fight hard against their own death. I have sat by the beds of many who were dying and marvelled at how long it was taking them to leave. Their relatives would be worn out sitting beside them day after day as they battled the inevitable. But the nurse in attendance always knew what was going on. He’s a fighter, she would say. He won’t let go till the last minute. It won’t be long now. Then the moment of surrender would come: a last sigh and it was over.
This defiant resistance of death seems to be stronger in some people than in others, part of their character. And the will to live can persist in them long after they’ve lapsed into a coma. I’m always moved when I see this happening. It suggests to me an event in the boyhood of the writer Leonard Woolf when he was told to drown five new-born puppies:
When he plunged the first tiny blind creature into the bucket of water, it began ‘to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws.’ He suddenly realised that it was an individual, an ‘I’, and that it was fighting for its life just as he would, were he drowning.12
Like those blind puppies, death’s resisters struggle against the forces that are shutting them down. It’s hard not to be moved by this. It is probably the energy that kept them going as long as they did. But they all have to give in at some point. Death gets everyone in the end. If it didn’t, life would soon become unsustainable on our little planet. And there are worrying trends already pointing in that direction.
One of them is the way the medical profession has wheeled formidable new artillery onto the battlefield and spends vast amounts of money and effort delaying death’s victory. I don’t apologise for the military metaphor because it is the one favoured by doctors themselves. With the best of intentions, they have taken control of the lives of old people today, and they fight hard to keep them in the field as long as possible. The result for many of them is a medicalised existence whose sole purpose is staying alive long after any joy in doing so has fled.
Keeping most of us alive well into our eighties is one of the successes of modern medicine, but there are signs it is having a profoundly distorting effect on the balance of society as a whole. In Britain, the care of the elderly is close to swamping the resources of the National Health Service, turning it into an agency for the postponement of death rather than the enhancement of life. We don’t have to go back to the fifteenth century to find a more balanced approach. Not that long ago, before they had this colossal armoury at their disposal, most doctors were willing to acknowledge death’s approach. They saw their role as helping death in with the minimum of distress to everyone. Nowadays they are more likely to call in the medical engineers to dig a moat and fortify the door against death’s entrance. But there are signs that the more thoughtful among them are beginning to challenge this siege mentality. The American physician Atul Gawande has recently suggested that while medicine exists to fight death and disease, it should learn how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t. And doctors need to understand that the damage is greatest if they insist on battling on to the bitter end.13
Old age can be bitter if it is experienced not as a period of calm preparation for death but as a grim battle to keep it at bay. It can even breed resentment in the old against the very doctors who are working hard to keep them going. Visiting the elderly can be a dispiriting experience if they spend the time rehearsing their ailments and complaining about the inattention of the local health professionals who are run off their feet trying to care for them. The reality is that death has rung their bell, and peace will come only when they open the door and say you got here sooner than I expected, but come in and sit down while I get my coat on.
***
If the refusal to accept the imperative of death is a relatively new phenomenon, an older affliction is the anger of the old at the young for being young. At its root this is one of the many forms of the sin of envy. Envy has been defined as sorrow at another’s good. Sometimes it is confused with jealousy, but there’s a world of difference between them. The jealous want what other people have, and it may provoke them to work hard to achieve it, which is why ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ is a proverb. Jealousy may drive us to action, but envy only makes us depressed. Rather than rejoicing in the happiness of others – their youth and vitality and beauty – it makes us sad. It can prompt bitterness towards the young for being young, revealed in the snort of contempt at how they colour their hair or tattoo their bodies or collide with you in the street because they’re always on their bloody phones. It’s an ugly picture, the face of angry, envious old age. We often see it on television during interviews with the public on the issues of the day; and it can have a solid impact on government.
Elderly voters are a powerfully reactionary force in politics both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. They are more disciplined and consistent than the young in voting, so as they increase in size as a cohort of the population their envies and resentments are bound to have an increasingly distorting effect on political processes. There is already a lot of evidence that they have had a profound effect on recent elections and referenda in these two countries. If these trends continue, in a few years a number of western democracies will have transformed themselves into gerontocracies – governments of the old, by the old, for the old. Geriatric resentment is a dangerous disease to catch, so it’s worth examining ourselves to see if it has infected us.
The chances are that we’ve
