Western society has become hysterical about growing old

I’m cat-sitting Lola in Leixlip while my sister is off winning bronze in the Masters Canoe Marathon World Championships in Vejen in Denmark. It’s an 11km race for 65- to 69-year-old competitors on Lake Jels, and Breda’s third place means she was less than a minute behind the Swedish winner and the Danish runner-up.

Meanwhile, I’m barely able to make it up her rather steep driveway on my arrival by train from the wild west.

Other than the compounding weight of my new case – my cat-sitting duties are bringing me straight to Cork for another family feline mission – I’m recovering from Covid.

So halfway up the hill, with my heart pounding like a snare drum, I stop and wait for Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love to stop playing in my chest.

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I’m scared, to be honest. I’m scared of how easily my daily walks on the greenway in Westport or around the boggy boreens out on the island suddenly stopped. I’m scared of how this respiratory affliction made me feel so decrepit, like a wizened leaf.

Even though I am on the road to recovery now, I’m scared of how it took me a full month before I found the energy to look fitness guru Karl Henry in the face – albeit from the safety of my I-pad screen – and attempt a forward lunge.

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So, as Lola and I do some light yoga stretches on the couch, Breda and Mick are pulling strokes of the K2 variety at another race in Denmark. I feel so proud that all their months and years of discipline and training are paying off as a picture arrives of them standing on a podium being presented with more bronze medals.

During the summer, Mick (71) paddled the annual Liffey Descent with his old partner Gerry Collins and took bronze in the Touring Doubles category.

Surely women getting boob jobs or butt implants or men heading off to their local private clinic to have liposuction on their love-handles is a form of self-inflicted ageism?

Down from the starting line there was carnage at a frothing Straffan weir as novices and newbies were pulled from the surging river by rescue boats and divers. Not the case for the two Salmon Leap Canoe Club veterans, who slid down the wall of water like Bolshoi ballerinas. No wonder Breda called them Liffey Legends as they crossed the finish line beyond Chapelizod.

Former president Mary Robinson might call them Canoeing Elders. Their experience and knowledge would be revered in traditional societies where ageism was not the dominant narrative.

You have to laugh at our cultural ambiguity about growing old. I’m a Baby Boomer (born between 1946 and 1964) with three Millennial daughters (born between 1980 and 1994). Being a midterm Baby Boomer means – in traditional parlance – I’m effectively on the far side of the hill now. However, our post-religious society no longer comforts us with sermons of everlasting life if we say enough novenas, genuflect to the patriarchal power of the church. Instead, it brainwashes us with the age-defying miracles of collagen and botox, lip fillers and eyelid lifts. The insidious algorithms on my social media account shine a light on how the market forces view me. Other than a barrage of keto diets and intermittent fasting apps, exercise and weightlifting regimes, it seems it is way past time for me to have a consultation with a cosmetic surgeon.

Wow! Hasn’t western society become hysterical about growing old?

Surely women getting boob jobs or butt implants or men heading off to their local private clinic to have liposuction on their love-handles is a form of self-inflicted ageism?

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What exactly does cosmetic surgery, in all its fake iterations, say about us? Clearly: that we are afraid of the ageing process. We don’t like wrinkles. Loose skin reminds us of our mortality.

By my logic, we have managed to become slaves to anti-ageing.

Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn at this stage of my life.

However, don’t we owe it to Gen Z and Gen Alpha to have an honest debate about it?

After my sister won her medals at the Masters in Denmark, a friend remarked: “Well, aren’t you great for your age?”

Breda’s response was typically nonchalant: “We are just doing what we have always done since we were teenagers.”