What does it mean to be old?

When I started writing my doctoral thesis I encountered a problem. Well, okay, I encountered many: the doctoral thesis is a long, solitary process that can be, at times, a kind of struggle with oneself. It is a moment of very high self-demand, in which a lot of time is spent and which, even though it is a process of enormous learning, is shaped by a series of doubts that for some is a milestone, a kind of existential crisis that marks a before and after. At least, that's how it was for me. Moreover, it is (or so I experienced it) a moment of great loneliness.

In my case, after a few turns and conversations with my thesis directors, it was clear to me that I wanted to analyse residential vulnerability in Spain. This "word" came to express what I had been analysing in depth for three years in a project in the city of Madrid called "Social integration through housing". 

Although it had different programmes, this project, led by Luis Cortés, allowed me to get to know situations that, even having grown up in one of those neighbourhoods they call humble (poor is the word that best defines it for me), I had not encountered. During these three years I got to know situations of severe residential exclusion, such as homelessness, but also other situations I had hardly heard of. I visited shanty towns in the city, such as Cañada Real and some others that no longer exist. I also visited or learned about the existence of people in the middle of Madrid who did not have a shower and bathtub inside their homes, who shared the toilet with other neighbours, who had to leave their homes in order to use it. Before that, I had already known about life in the Vallecas farmyards that no longer exist today or that there were homes in a situation of absolute poverty located in buildings that were frightening to enter, where the stairs threatened to fall down, homes without a single piece of furniture due to the economic incapacity of their inhabitants, homes that lacked not only accessibility but also many other things. Even running water. Situations that caused great discomfort and inequality and which I called residential vulnerability (they even published this book in which I talk about it) and about which now, for the sake of space, I will not describe more. 

What perhaps surprised me most about those visits was that some of these people, in the shanty towns, in the houses without running water, were older people. Some of them were very old. I also met a very old lady who was homeless and about whom I spoke in my Master's thesis. What they all had in common was that they were in a vital moment in which it was very difficult to change that situation. Why? How had they got there? Isn't old age supposed to be the stage in which we have managed to accumulate more resources? Why hadn't these people been able to?

So I decided to look at the intersection between housing, vulnerability and old age. If housing vulnerability already seemed like a word that needed to be described very well, something as seemingly simple as "old age" was no small matter. In order to understand and define old age, it was necessary to analyse and understand comprehensive frameworks, which undoubtedly gave me more than one headache. 

A priori, the concept of old age seemed clear, but it turns out that it was not so clear: the concepts of old age, ageing, life expectancy, longevity, are mixed together. If, as Bourdieu said, "youth is nothing more than a word", the same was not true of old age, but things became even more complicated when, logically, it was imperative to refer to the subjects and agents of these states and processes. If the subjects of youth are the young, the subjects of old age would be the old, right? But while young evokes a series of meanings, old evokes very different ones. We simply think about how many are negative and positive in both cases. 

I envied English speakers at the time, who could resort in their academic writings to words like "elderly" "older people" "grey citizens", among others. In Spanish, however, calling someone "ciudadano gris" does not seem the most appropriate. Nice, nice, it is not. So I spent pages and pages trying not to repeat the same word over and over again, although I began by using "anciano" and even tried to reduce the tone that could seem negative on some issues with ageisms of the level of "nuestros mayores" (our elders). The same ageisms that I criticise today were at work in the first draft of the project. If "our elders" was easy to overcome (the elders are simply not ours, nor yours or mine; they have enough to be their own), the word "elderly" raised enormous doubts in my mind. I think until I saw a news item in some newspaper that said something like "un anciano de 66 años..." What? Is a 66-year-old person an elder?

According to the Royal Academy of the Spanish language (RAE), in addition to being a member of the Sanhedrin and the oldest freire of each convent, elder refers to a person of great age. But... how old is very old? My doubts were compounded by those of some of the "affected" people. As I began to talk to people of the ages I was discussing, I found a complete and utter rejection of the word elder.

The newly retired ladies I spoke to did not consider themselves old. I myself did not consider them to be elderly. It occurred to me to go to an association in Vallecas where women over 65 could sign up for different activities, so I went there in gym class to try to talk to them about their residential experience. So there I went to the gym class to try to talk to them about their residential experience. How could I consider this jovial lady of almost 80 years old who was jumping to the sound of music as an old lady? 

Elderly reminded me of something else that referred only to a smaller set of these older people. So that was my tentative choice: old people. What I did, however, was to ask my interviewees: what did they identify with? What did they prefer? "Elderly" elicited a lot of rejection: it evoked fragility. In Spain, the words "senior citizen" and "elderly person" were not liked either, as they sounded too lax and too close to the vision surrounding the word "old".

With the words "viejo" and "persona mayor", however, I found different reactions. Older person evoked respect, and it tended to be liked. In the end one had to choose a word to define oneself, and there were no suggestions of other concepts. I was surprised, however, when one lady claimed the word old for herself. Specifically, this lady had worked all her life with very young girls, with children and adolescents. And what she was telling me was that they were "new" and that she was no longer "new". Nor did she want to be. She was old. And it was okay to be old, because it simply meant that she was no longer new. I was convinced by her way of analysing the concept. I found it very interesting, because it gave a much more realistic view of the concept of what it is to be old. However, another lady told me that she was not old, that her clothes were old, her furniture was old. She didn't want to be old. She didn't want to be old because of the whole negative dimension around the term. Somehow, old and old was...what you were going to throw away. What was no longer valid. What had to be replaced. 

The RAE is not a great help in this sense. By old, it means: "(Said of a living being) Of advanced age". A second meaning states "Existing for a long time or enduring in its state" and another definition refers to "That existed or took place in the past". In reality, none of these meanings seem to me to be loaded with negativity. The problem comes when we come to other meanings such as "used or second-hand" and, above all, "tarnished, spoiled by use".  I leave out other meanings, such as "Fish of the gilthead bream group, common in the Canary Islands and highly prized meat" or the colloquial reference in disuse of old/as as pelillo del cogote and de las sientes, because I don't even know what to say about these.

If the youth-youth association seems straightforward, not problematic, the same is not true of the old-age association. The point, in any case, is that "old", per se, is not something negative, although sometimes we use the word as a negative categorisation, loaded with a meaning brought in from outside and which has to do with a social, shared connotation, but also with more individual issues, more referred to or contained and developed in the group of belonging. If we associate old with something negative (the old witch who wanted to eat Hansel and Gretel, was she bad because she was a witch or because she was old?), the use of the word will be so and will evoke rejectable characteristics. However, if we approach it as this lady said, as a mere "ceasing to be new" (i.e. with experience, with knowledge you didn't have before), is it still negative?

"Old" and "old" are words with connotations that can vary depending on the moment and the context. And they can be re-signified. 

What I am calling for is to eliminate these negative connotations. To stop understanding in that word everything we don't want to be. That we re-appropriate the word old and old to refer to people we love, whom we understand, that they are words that simply identify, in the same way that the words children, adolescents or young people do.

And here I ask for your help: When I write or say old man or old woman, what comes to your mind, is it for you a negative concept? If so, why is it associated for you with something negative, if so, do you think it is possible to reconceptualise this word and strip it of these negative meanings? It would be really wonderful to know your opinion.