Respect — this is what it means to me
Not every letter was critical . . . just most of them! Recently, I responded to a couple of retired physicians, both in their 80s, who were miffed because their new, young doctor addressed them by their first names. I rebuked them for their “misdiagnosis” of the situation. And then you, dear readers, rebuked me!
You weren’t all in “give ’em hell” mode. One man wrote, “I wish you could have been a fly on our wall. I howled. Spot on!” Another wrote, “Sir; or even Dear Sir; or may I call you Ken? I was mightily amused by your comments to the old geezers. We geriatrics have to get a life.”
Then there were the rest of you. One reader summed up the dominant view thus: “The physician should defer to her patients’ senior status and refer to them as Mr. and Mrs. X.”
I understand the point you all make. The premise is that “elderly” people deserve “respect” — two words you used often — simply because they are old. I get it. But I beg, respectfully, to differ. For most of history, attaining elder status required exceptional survival skills. To get old, you had to be smart, strong, resilient, or skilful; those without those qualities didn’t make it in significant numbers. Against that background, the idea of the “wisdom of the elders” made good sense. And, with wisdom comes respect — as perhaps it should. But there’s no trick to getting old in mainstream society today. All you have to do is wake up in the morning and failing that, there’ll be a paramedic at the door in four minutes to zap you with the paddles. Sure, it takes good luck to make it into your dotage — but while luck is something we might envy, it’s not a ticket to respect. I work a lot with older people. Some are brilliant, others not the brightest crayons in the box. Some have worked hard all their lives, others have done no more than necessary. Some are generous, some stingy; some are kind, some nasty. Some still accomplish great things, others sit on their butts waiting to die. I’ve also learned that, setting aside change caused by disease, nasty old people were usually nasty young people. The generous have always been generous, the stingy mostly stingy. And people whose personality has been changed by illness aren’t old people — they are sick people.
Treating people deferentially simply because they are old is like assuming women need a seat on the subway simply because they are women. It’s not chivalrous — it’s prejudicial.
I know it can be tough to be old. But it can be tough to be a child, too. Or a young parent. Every age has its struggles. That is not a human tragedy, it’s life.
We disrespect people when we define them as old — rather than as people. A good car is defined not by clicks on the odometer but by whether it starts in the morning. A good person is defined not by how many candles are on the cake, but by whether he or she is kind, generous, loving and faithful — qualities that can be present, or absent, at every stage of the journey. Send your questions to ethical@rogers.com