Column | I think people still easily recognize the younger in me

The delayed train slowly enters the station. I’m right in front of the door because I want to get out quickly to get my connection. The people behind me too, everyone is in a hurry. Someone in the queue says, “Come on, Granny.” Or does she not say so? And is she talking to me?

The things that go through your head. You are mistaken young lady! Let me show you what I… Is my hair really that gray already? Is it my attitude?

A mixture of insult, denial and doubt.

There is such a condescending expression that “granny.” As if you’ve turned into a slow, shivering, nuisance creature from the age of 60. Which is crazy, because we are supposed to work until we are 67, after all, people are fit and are getting older (and society needs the money). But from 50 one is at the same time an ‘over 50’. Whatever that may mean. Nothing good.

To be fair, when I was twenty myself, someone in their sixties belonged to a completely different category, to a different world. A world that had nothing to do with mine and that I would never end up in, that is – no. Not.

And now that I have ended up in it myself, I think that people still easily recognize the younger in me. Although young people especially recognize the older in me.

That last one is the point. I have been young, they don’t know anything about getting older and they imagine that being young is a quality of their own.

I also sometimes imagine. “How fast you do those things,” my mother (91) said admiringly as I changed the garbage bag. In this relationship I am always young, that is my quality, and she is old. “Being old is really not fun,” she says, although she is otherwise very cheerful. But how hard you get up, how shaky your hands have become, how foggy your memory, how incomprehensible the devices everyone uses.

How you slowly but surely end up in a kind of solitary confinement, because you are no longer able to go out.

The municipality sends letters about ‘keep living at home comfortably’, but with less home care due to staff shortages, ‘we count on your understanding’. There is understanding, also with my mother, who indeed finds it very pleasant that she (still) lives at home, even though she sometimes sits on the couch staring into space. That may seem sadder than it is.

I ask her from time to time how she spends her days, if she is not bored. No she is not bored and she has no idea what she is doing during the day. Sometimes a solitaire on the computer. Watching television. What to read in a book and immediately forget what she has read. She gets visitors four times a week, which makes a difference. And what also helps, she says, is that everything takes more time when you’re old. So the time will pass by itself.

I’d rather not imagine myself later in such a flat on my own, with only books and music, although everyone always pretends that will fulfill him or her completely, books and music. Not me. I want something that demands all my attention, I want to go out, I want to see and talk to other younger people, I want to have something to do and rejoice, I want to ride the train and quickly open the doors and run to my terminal.

I want, I want. Not being a granny yet.