There’s so much beauty to be found in old age

IN JAPANESE, there’s an old-fashioned word, sabi, that means a beauty that comes with age. From wear and tear. Like when the ephemerality of life is etched in deep ravines and age-spot islands across a wizened face.

I came across sabi in Howard Rheingold’s lexicon, They Have a Word for it, about terms missing from English that we could poach from other languages. But in sabi’s case, we don’t even have that concept. Youth and beauty are almost synonyms here. We mostly ignore the over-80s, pushing them into a limbo between this world and the next. And, afraid to acknowledge that will be us one day, we certainly don’t find beauty there.

Being old, though, is an accomplishment, one ever more of us will be able to tick off the to-do list. Yesterday, a new study published in The Lancet predicted that the biblical three score years and 10 could become four score years and 10 by 2030 — at least for female babies born that year in South Korea.

Every non-scientific article I’ve read on population ageing proclaims two claims to be self-evident: it’s fantasi-doodle that we’re all living longer but society can’t cope. The elderly are painted as a burden. They’re medical quagmires who block beds in the NHS. They’re our societal flotsam.

This enrages my mother, a recentlyretired geriatrician. She says we overlook the unpaid contributions the elderly make with childcare and volunteering. My late grandfather — the very best of men — used to pick my siblings and me up from school and coach students in classics too. Many of our elderly are still healthy. And if being old can mean a catalogue of miseries — loneliness chief among them — is it not then our duty as a society to try and ameliorate them?

Every old people’s home I’ve visited has felt similar. Residents sit with blankets in their laps in over-lit rooms with stagnant air and the smell of disinfectant. These weren’t bad places. They weren’t full of life, though: they were sterilised waiting rooms for death.

In Atul Gawande’s excellent book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, he describes an alternative. A young doctor, Bill Thomas, took over the running of a US nursing home. Concerned that its residents were bored, lonely and felt helpless, he suggested putting plants in every room and introducing pets. He didn’t just mean one dog, though, but two. And four cats. And 100 parakeets. A colony of rabbits and a flock of laying hens join later.

It was pandemonium initially but bursting with life. And the effect is profound. The number of prescriptions required halved compared with a controlled nursing home. Deaths dropped 15 per cent. Patients who the staff believed couldn’t speak began to talk.

The broader answer is to involve the elderly in our world. I once had a threehour conversation with one of my mother’s patients. I learned more that day than I would in an ordinary week.

We should think more too about what we want in our old age. My dream is to live on a crepuscular commune with my friends, where there will be cake, gin and rescue greyhounds. See? As the quip goes, “given the alternative, getting older doesn’t seem so bad.”

@RosamundUrwin DONALD Trump’s male cabinet picks reveal so much about his notions of masculinity. To be a Trumpian promoter of the patriarchy you must be filthy rich or have killed people — millionaire or military man. One is the basis of his inflated ego, the other a source of his inadequacy.

What message does this send to young men in America? That their value comes from their wallet or by

wielding a weapon? It’s a recipe for male misery as much as machismo.

There’s a consensus that this administration will be disastrous for women. I can’t help thinking it will be deleterious for men too.