Let’s say it right away, the subject of my column has nothing to do with bling bling, nor a media rattle with elements of virile language: peak, record, performance, exploit, conquest, profit. No, I suggest a trip to Vieillistan, this extended region full of enclaves, increasingly populated and precarious. Not touristy for a penny, as this destination has disappeared from the collective imagination. Both the culture of its natives, yet the founder of our current society, is despised.
Old age gets under your skin. Like an insidious burden. Sometimes early, around 50, at work, when you are thrown out, you and your experience, this archaeological waste. Sometimes brutally, faced with the expeditious paternalism of the doctor: «At your age, pain is normal my little lady!” Most often gradually. When unsuspected parts of your anatomy come out of the silence and invade you with unknown sensations. When your life with its obsolete memories, its contemplative slowness, its anxieties, pisses everyone off. When you realize that no one needs you anymore. No more kids to do or babysit. No more back to school to prepare. Just your outing that we urge you to anticipate down to the smallest detail.
“You have to be wary of those who are already used to being bored. An inner life is not invented with age.
Then one day, you look at your new “protected” accommodation, to the north of nowhere, you say to yourself that we would have liked to build a ghetto that we could hardly have done better. Everything seems planned so as not to linger. No frills buildings. A bare tarmac alley, flanked by a few benches, brightened H/24 by the fifty shades of the pressed engines of the vehicles of the delivery people, the caregivers… whose services are timed and whose wages are miserable. They seek their talent elsewhere.
You will have to familiarize yourself with this collection of residents. Learn to cherish your infantilization again. Tame your pain to see X become a shadow, Y and Z become dust. Be wary of those who are already used to being bored. An interior life is not invented with age.
The worst are those who thought they were someone important in their life before. These sublimate their aggressiveness behind their blinds by spying, intriguing and denouncing. There are those you will never see, because they spend their vertical hours horizontally. There are those who cling to their hangover, like a broken buoy. There is the one who comes to lie on the driveway hoping that someone will finally come to take care of her or run over her.
Mutualize vitality
Holding on becomes your cam. So you turn to those who still have poetry inside to put music to their lives. You pool your vitality, to comfort you, distract you and ward off this animal terror of ending up in an EMS, these boxes where winter never stops dying.
And when the heat waves come, which turn your apartment into a toaster, and assign you to an ninth confinement, you pray not to suffocate. Sometimes you pray that dawn doesn’t come again. If you have the strength, you take the bus and wander around the Migros to find some freshness and greenery in the Garden department…
Why not rehabilitate Vieillistan as a destination of the future, cool and deliciously vintage, where from now on habitats, social life, care cease to be a spreading field destined for low-cost liberal recovery?
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– Switzerland is hurting in old age
Virginie Oberholzer takes a corrosive look at the twilight of life.
Virginie Oberholzer
Posted today at 08:17