Once we enter midlife, it seems everywhere we look there are signs pointing to the future. Advice about retirement strategies, property and housing, superannuation (if we’re lucky enough to have it), how to age well, be healthy, adjust to life’s “third act”.
But we less frequently reflect on the emotional and spiritual aspects of ageing, or watching our parents age and become dependent on us and on carers.
Review: How to Dress for Old Age – David Carlin and Peta Murray (Upswell Press)
How to Dress for Old Age offers deeper points of connection across generations, and insights into these slightly more ephemeral and troubling concerns.
Despite its title, How to Dress for Old Age is not a book about clothing or fashion. Nor is it a guide to ageing well. But its authors, David Carlin and Peta Murray, both creative writers and academics at RMIT, do want us to take lessons from their experience of caring for elderly parents.
Reading their personal reflections on “being old” and their accounts of helping their parents navigate the aged care system, we can learn much about our readiness to face ageing, and how we might better present ourselves to old age.
For many readers, the book will touch a raw nerve. This period of older life, often disguised behind the word “retirement”, was once seen as peaceful, less weighed down by the stresses of parenting and ambition at work. Yet the closer we each get to this future state, the more it seems to throw up gnarly and complex questions.
Episodes in ageing
These uncomfortable questions sit at the heart of How to Dress for Old Age. The book tells the story of the authors combining forces to help Carlin’s mother Joan and Murray’s father Frank settle positively into an aged care facility they refer to as “the Place”.
Joan and Frank both enter aged care in Melbourne, as they can no longer be supported in their home communities of Adelaide, and Wamberal on the NSW central coast. Carlin and Murray, each partnered and living their own lives professionally and personally, find a creative kinship in their experience of supporting Joan and Frank. Having perceived some common ground, they plot to bring their parents together at the Place to provide some social connection and, possibly, friendship.
Carlin and Murray assume the voice of the author in turns. Carlin’s voice opens the book to ask how we might “show up” and connect with others in old age. He has been reflecting on his path through life, especially his professional life as an academic. His mother Joan, he reckons, might be a useful guide.
Murray offers Frank’s story as a “cautionary tale”, though it is a story many will relate to.
The stories are woven together in overlapping narratives. The two authorial voices each give an account of what happened and grapple with the big themes: the family decisions taken to enter aged care; questions of health and illness; friendship and sociability in the Place, as well as outside of it.
The COVID pandemic provides some comic relief in interludes. But illness and death confront both writers, along with questions of their own mortality.
Frank’s story of a stressful transition into aged care is, sadly, a common one. Murray describes the way she and others notice his intransigence, his resistance to help, and his new helplessness. Frank falls and is found in the garden, alone. He has a series of hospitalisations. He can no longer cope.
But of course, there must come, after serial crises, the climax, the point of no return. Even so, it was a shock to get a call from his neighbour, and to hear he was in hospital again. Her tone carried the gravity of the situation. This time, the medicos were not convinced they should send him home to an empty house.
When the family leaves Frank in his new room, it is like “abandoning a six-year-old at the gates of a boarding school”. I know from experience the feeling of leaving a parent in care and trying to make it as cosy as possible, setting up the television and remote, worrying about food options and tastes.
When Joan leaves her home to enter aged care, she has a send-off from her community centre, complete with a cake, photo book and speeches. That experience of community is contrasted with her birthday in April 2020, with COVID an imminent threat to aged care homes. Carlin and his family have to make her a banner she can see through the window, while they sing to her on the phone.
Joan and other residents of the Place find the COVID protocols bewildering. They go “on the loose”, Carlin writes, admiring their “bolshie” resistance.
Clothing as motif
Throughout the book, clothing operates as both metaphor and motif for ageing.
Before he entered the Place, Frank, as an older man in a new relationship, had adopted a “landed-gentry-meets-shabby-chic” aesthetic. He and his partner “embraced the chunky knit … the well-worn corduroy strides”. One sign that Frank was no longer thriving in old age was that he began to look like he cared less about his clothes and wore “tired shirts and shapeless windcheaters”.
Joan had once been a stylish woman, but, living in the Place, she too develops “a kind of wardrobe blindness”, wearing a “red zip-up cotton jumper for days at a time”.
Such indifferent clothing choices, which Carlin and Murray interpret as a loss of self care, also speak to the problem of individuality in aged care environments. Entering a facility occasions a loss of control over clothing and personal items, especially in dementia care settings. Clothes must be labelled, which is infantilising for older people. Even labelled, items still frequently go missing.
This theme resonates with my experience of visiting an aged care home to see my mother. One well-dressed resident continued to wear pearls and carry a handbag. She was always immaculately turned out for lunches and everyday activities, until she could no longer maintain this appearance.
How to Dress for Old Age offers a serious reflection on how we might work together as a community to care for our elders. Carlin and Murray’s book offers personal, up-close testimony about watching their parents negotiate older life; it is also about how they are working together, acting as mutually supportive friends and colleagues, and collaborating as writers.
Along the way, their insights into the confusing, nonsensical and frustrating aspects of ageing tell us about the opportunities we have in our own lives to prepare and create meaningful futures and relationships. The authors suggest we need to consider ageing and care together, and reflect on how we might tackle the issue communally.
Creative support
Three elements in these stories stand out. The first is gender differences in coping strategies among older people, such as patterns of friendship formation, which many men find more difficult than women. Frank, for instance, “was never a joiner”. Joan, however, seems to enjoy community, making it slightly less confronting for her to feel at “home” in the Place.
The second is how we address isolation among older people. The theme runs through the book, as Carlin and Murray try to provide forms of entertainment and company for their respective parents.
Finally, while it is not a major theme, I reflected on the increasingly alarming “digital divide”, with the COVID pandemic revealing the way devices such as iPads and mobile phones are not easy for many older people to manage.
How to Dress for Old Age alludes to the report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which was released in March 2021, just a year into the pandemic. The report was damning about systemic problems across aged care facilities. It recommended a range of improvements to aged care, including research-based service provisions and innovative approaches to building design, as well as listening to older people themselves.
Many advocates for older people, such as poet Sarah Holland-Batt, have spoken forcefully about the failures of aged care. Holland-Batt was featured on ABC Radio in August 2020, speaking about how her father’s experiences gave her insight into these issues. Her beautiful poem The Gift, first published in The New Yorker and later in her Stella Prize-winning book The Jaguar (2022), was written about her father, who had lived with dementia. The poem ends:
I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,
every day I will know it opening in me.
We will all need to face these experiences and their lessons. Carlin and Murray offer hopeful, poignant and personally informed responses to ageing and mortality, as they consider the roles of adult children and families in supporting older people. The message is to embrace life and forms of creativity, including in how we model aged care for residents.
On the cover of How to Dress for Old Age, Carlin and Murray style themselves in bright tailored suits. They stand in a pose perhaps indicative of the unsteady ground they found themselves on in writing their book: each on one leg, slightly tipped to one side. Or maybe the image depicts a balance test, so important as we get older, to identify our risk of falling. Whatever the case, their confidence in clothing represents a choice we can all make as we age.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
