I heard a really sensible Thought for the Day this morning. It was the Rev Angela Tilby and she was talking about this week’s horrific report from the health service ombudsman on care of the elder care benefits. The report, you’ll remember, cited appalling cases of cruelty – such as the elderly man who was left sitting for hours in pain, desperate to use the lavatory, and so dehydrated that his tongue was “like dried leather”. Or the old lady who was never offered a bath or shower, nor did anyone change her wound dressings and she was denied food or drink. Her husband was said to have “died of a broken heart” after witnessing her treatment.

Ms Tilby made the point that this problem, of mistreatment of the elderly, affects the whole of society. It does not simply boil down to nurses being overworked or
there not being enough of them. There’s more to it. It has to do with a fear inside all of us – a fear of old people. She’s right, even though this in no way
excuses the disgusting cruelty uncovered in the report. Many people are starting to feel overwhelmed.

Once upon a time a man would retire at 60 or 65 and then drop dead not long after. His wife would die a few years after. I remember as a boy visiting my grandfather in hospital. He was in his seventies. Then, not long after, he died. This is no longer the pattern, though. One in four boys and one in three girls born today will now live to 100. Children who are themselves grey-haired and well into middle age are seeing their elderly parents suspended for decades in a state of steadily advancing decrepitude. In increasing numbers, our elderly relations will develop dementia. Their very personalities will change, and we will no longer recognize people we have dearly loved for a lifetime. Quite naturally, this frightens us.

Partly we fear our own mortality. The elder care benefits remind us of what’s in store for us when we get older. And we’re terrified of madness. We’re appalled by
the deterioration of the mind and the breakdown of personality. But it’s not just fear. There’s a sort of repulsion too, I think. Old people disgust us. The physical
decay – as well as the sheer weakness and neediness – repels us.

This is an instinctive response. That’s why in traditional societies you have systems and customs where the elderly are accorded special respect, as Trilby pointed out this morning. The trouble is, in our supposedly civilised nation we have abandoned these old attitudes. And we witness this atavistic disgust in the nurses and caseworkers who commit acts of cruelty against old patients. Their anxieties get the better of them. Not that that excuses them. A society is judged on how it treats the weakest. And, by this measure, our society can scarcely be called civilised.

By the year 2024, it is estimated that one in five people will be of pensionable age. We need to accept the elderly in our society, and, as Tilby says, come to terms with our own mortality. This is in all of our interests. After all, most of us expect to get old one day.