At 87, Gillian Tindall had had enough of old age. She died of cancer on 1st October, days after writing this piece
I’m now 87 – and I’ve lived too long. What is it really like for someone who has felt more or less fit, active and in control of their life ever since student days, to find themselves really old at last? Well, in short: it is horrible. How I envy all those people just a bit younger than I am – or the ones who’ve had a bit more luck in not getting some nasty illness that wouldn’t have mattered a couple of years before, but now seems to have had a lethally degrading effect. And how I envy in particular those people, whose obits I frequently read, who have had the good fortune to die ‘just a bit too young’ or ‘suddenly’. Often an obit will recount that So-and-So was giving an important talk admirably on such-and-such a date ‘and then died suddenly three days later’. Rare is the...
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