I’ve just been reading a very interesting article in the quarterly Journal of Psychoanalysis by a very old retired psychoanalyst. I don’t know his exact age but he’s clearly in the mid 90s, if not the late 90s, but is... is wonderfully intelligent and eloquent, writing about extreme old age and... and how people face old age and the notion that they have a very limited time left. He is a man who has been a... a rationalist and a sceptic all his life, but he has been very shaken by the death of his wife of 70 years and... cannot help wondering if there is any sort of... of post-mortem existence or survival. He brings this up very, very delicately, and I think perhaps more importantly he talks about a ‘mystical’ view of life, which is one to some extent removed from time and temporality, and competition, and other people, and a feeling of... of oneness with the universe.

And now I am getting up there myself – although I think someone close to 100 can have a radically different view of life from someone close to 80 – now I’m getting up there myself, I... I think that, like him, I’m beginning to taste certain advantages of... of old age. I think one of them is that I can, to some extent, see life, or my life, as a whole and... and experiences and feelings are organising themselves, and there's... there is some sense of completion, whatever the completion of a life means, and the wholeness of life rather than the feeling that while there’s time I must still make use of the pleasures that remain, although of course that... that feeling is also there.

I... I don’t entirely dislike being old now. It’s not a feeling that I’ve had for that long, I don’t think I started to have it until I was 73 or 74, and then it was connected with getting a cancer in my eye, and... and the prospect of... of illness and death associated with that. In fact the cancer hasn’t acted up, but who knows?

I’ve also had all sorts of orthopaedic problems in the last two years. I’ve had operations on knee, hip and back, and I’m somewhat less mobile than I was, but... but I think the inner organs are sound. But I... I do begin to have a certain sense of serenity and leisure, which I don’t think I had before. I saw this very clearly in my father when he was in his 80s and... he said that he had a feeling of time and leisure in his 80s, which he didn’t have in his 60s or his 70s. He continued as a busy general practitioner, in fact, until his dying day when he was 94, but some... something easy and spacious and far-sighted and... and serene got into him. I think I can see that in a lovely photo I... I have of him, and it may be all nonsense about… I think it is all nonsense about the golden years and senior citizens, these odious, odious fraudulent American phrases, and... but there... there can be something real and positive about... about aging, and maybe I should write about this, I don’t know.

Most of my professional experience, alas, is of... is of aging gone wrong and Alzheimer’s and illness. Though having said that, working with the Little Sisters of the Poor, who... who came together in the 1840s in Brittany and then spread all over the world, opening homes for the elderly, I’ve been going to the Little Sisters as a neurologist for... for nearly 40 years and I see every sort of medical and neurological problem, but I also see some very old people who wish to live in community, who have outlived their.. .their friends and neighbours and may not have any family. I see a lot of healthy and serene old people in their 90s, often as... as distinct from ill and frantic old people in their 70s. The... a lot of people in their 90s don’t seem to fear death, at least this is so with, I think, the Catholics in the home. They... they say that they have had a full life and Lord when, you know, when the Lord wants to take them, that’s okay.