Respect to the Elders

Madeleine Thompson - 11 Apr 16

I read a headline this week about a lady of mature years (100 to be exact) who responded to a pregnancy announcement in an adorable way. On the face of it, this sounds like a lovely story but when you drill down to the language used, why the word ‘adorable’? I might use that word to describe a baby or a small child, or perhaps a cute animal. I’m not sure I would use it to describe an elder.

Language fascinates me and I think we can learn a lot from the language people do and do not use. I have noticed a tendency in our society to sometimes refer to people of older years in much the same way as one might refer to an infant, in the use of words that give an impression that we are looking down in a patronising way at our older people. As if they now a bit less because they are in the later years of their lives. If you look at it on a basic level, how can a person with 100 years of life behind them be described as ‘adorable’? Amazing, yes, but adorable? Patronising.

You may be wondering why this bothers me. It’s harmless, isn’t it? Except I don’t think it’s quite so harmless. I think it points to a wider problem we have in our society where we quite literally don’t respect our elders. Now I don’t mean that if somebody is older than us we have to automatically respect them. Of course we don’t. I mean that we should recognise the experience, lives, challenges, knowledge and general wisdom of those who were here first and regard them in a respectful way.

I wonder how many readers grew up visiting grandparents and elderly relatives who maybe said very little that interested you and you sometimes wondered why you couldn’t just go home, read Smash Hits and stick on a Take That CD? And I wonder if in later years you saw just what you were missing because you never truly listened to what they had to say. You may have learnt a lot more about them since, from your own parents and realised how full and interesting their lives were.

In my family, three out of my four grandparents passed away when I was a child. The fourth, my dad’s mum, lived until she was 84. Towards the end of her life, hers was a familiar tale. She had Dementia and died following some years in nursing care. She forgot many things, her physical health deteriorated, and the feisty, sharp, sometimes scary woman that she had been was lost. But the woman I will tell my children about, for they are too little to remember her, is the woman who had her first child at 19, went on to have three more children, and raised them in hard times. When my Grandad died, Nanna was still only in her fifties and from then she carved out her life, Part Two. She began teaching dance classes, she made so many new friends, she looked after ladies much older than her and even in her seventies she described them as elderly. She started the first Ladies Darts League in her local town. My Nanna was a feminist ahead of her time, and she never knew it. This is the woman I will tell my children about. She wasn’t some little old lady to be patronised and disregarded. She had previous. She had history and she had life.

We should tell our children about their elders, living and passed. We should use language with the same respect as we would if we spoke about our peers. We should teach our children that the people of mature years in our lives have so much to teach us and huge stories to tell. We should respect the life that comes with age, learn from it, and save patronising words like ‘adorable’ for the comments pages on Facebook photos of puppies.

image: lovethispic.com

Madeleine Thompson

I am mum to my little chicks, Aisha, 6 and Abel, 4. Originally from Yorkshire, UK, I now live in a little town in the North West. By day, I work for myself as a freelance PA. By night, I indulge my passion for writing.

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