The cover of How to Dress for Old Age is a photograph of its authors, David Carlin and Peta Murray: a straight man and a queer woman, trim and nattily dressed, gazing earnestly into their futures. Both have one leg raised off the ground, in defiance of conventional portraiture. This co-authored book is just as compelling as the off-kilter photo. Interweaving memoir, reflections, and social history, How to Dress for Old Age is an intelligent, engagingly written, bracingly honest and sometimes wryly humorous exploration by two “old” friends of the ageing process.
In short, the book is not a self-help manual bristling with banal advice and inspirational slogans. Rather, it acknowledges that the unwanted destiny for many contemporary white Australians is an aged care facility; and as Carlin rather brutally describes it, ending up in “care” can be analogous to that of the Japanese folktale in which elderly people no longer able to contribute to their village are carried to a remote place and left to die. Murray, too, while insisting she has “no plans to enter “care”, ever – who does?”, concedes that “what else will there be for folks like me — privileged, comfortable, white — as we reach for the extended longevity we are now promised?” At the heart of this thought-provoking book, then, is the question of what might make for a meaningful life as we face the likelihood of a loss of independence and physical and cognitive decline.
The book initially focuses on the authors’ widowed parents as examples of how to live, and not live, with encroaching old age. Carlin writes of his Perth-born and raised mother, Joan, as courageously “re-inventing” herself after the death of two husbands, and her commitment to political activism and social justice. He pays tribute to her stoicism and concern for others as characteristics which enabled her, after a period of decline, to accept the need to move into an aged care home. There, she remained relatively active and sociable, her bright scarves a symbol for her determination to live happily; to be mischievous; to have fun.
Murray’s father, Frank, a working-class boy transformed into a prosperous builder, also lost his wife, but unlike Joan’s happy second marriage, his relationship to a domineering second partner became increasingly fractious. After her death, he retreated into isolation and irascibility; his eventual malnourished, dehydrated and deeply depressed state left his children with little choice but to place him in care. But there he refused to take part in outings, took pleasure in mocking other residents, and withdrew from activities when he discovered that other participants had better skills. While Carlin’s portrait of his mother is tender and full of admiration, Murray is ruthlessly dismissive of her father as a “man in all his meanness, his snobbishness, his superiority, aloofness and odious timidity.” This counterpointing of such difference is a salutary reminder of the importance of one’s state of mind in the later years of life. We can choose to dress for old age with optimistic flair, like Joan, or become like Frank, stuck in ugly tracksuit pants, mired in what his daughter calls “his stubborn attachment to the glum.”
And how do Carlin and Murray contemplate their futures beyond what has become known as “the third age”? Like Joan, both authors were impelled to re-invent themselves after a series of disappointments and crises. Carlin became increasingly disillusioned with the consultant-driven managerialism and jargon of contemporary academia, while the unexpected death of a younger colleague heightened his awareness of the precariousness of life. Feeling the need for a new and more fulfilling form of expression, he finds pleasure in making pots: he writes beautifully about the ways in which the practice became a means of experiencing physical and existential satisfaction. A different metaphor for embracing the new is Carlin’s acquisition of “daring” hand-tailored suits; a pursuit which he wonders might be related to his potentially “queer-adjacent” identity.
Murray’s crisis of meaning was precipitated by the deaths of friends, professional pressure, and a series of serious health problems; she writes with an intelligent rawness about her bouts of depression, culminating in the anguish of a nervous breakdown. Her recovery, like Carlin’s, is shown through the metaphor of clothing: she commissions a tailored suit in the white, pink and baby blue of the transgender flag, and dresses in drag, assuming the hilarious names Wanda Lusst and Buster Loose so she can freewheel her way through different alter egos. Murray’s commitment to making it new also assumes a more immediately practical form: she co-founds a not-for-profit organisation called GroundSwell, designed to improving death literacy, and as a way of sharing material resources and escaping the loneliness that too often burdens the elderly. But for both Carlin and Murray, despite their different social and economic circumstances, what matters most as they age is embracing a joyful sense of creativity: what Murray delightfully calls a “sashay[ing] through life.”
How to Dress for Old Age goes beyond personal stories to consider the Australian aged care system as a whole. Carlin is particularly scathing about its systematic failure — chronic government underfunding, the lack of proper healthcare, the physical abuse or neglect of elderly residents — which he rightly identifies as the consequence of the privatisation in the 1980s of the aged care system by the then conservative federal government. Carlin also attacks the ageism of Australian culture, which either mocks the elderly or consigns them to irrelevance, while Murray offers a withering critique of the structural sexism that disadvantages women trying to forge a career. While the authors’ social commentary is passionate about the need for justice and equality, the book’s emotional and psychological power stems primarily from its narration of personal experience.
How to Dress for Old Age will resonate with many readers grappling with the logistics, economics and guilt of placing elderly relatives into care. The book will also encourage you to reflect on your relationship with your parents, and the psychological legacies they leave you. Without resorting to pop-psychological truisms, it will urge you to nurture your imagination and friendships. You might also you be moved to tears as you read about a son’s loving recollections of his mother, and a daughter’s vigil at the bedside of a dying father she was unable to love.
How to Dress for Old Age is now available in the Lane Bookshop. Don’t wait until you’re old, or getting old, to read it.
When adult children take up the labour of care for absent fathers and stoic mothers, when contemplating their own futures, things can get complicated.
Room 306. Level Three. In inner city Melbourne, David Carlin's mother, Joan, is settling in. Five doors away, on the same floor of the same institution, Peta Murray's father, Frank, is halfway through the statistically ordained 18 months he is likely to live after entering "care". Each is 86. He-an ex-builder and sometime bon vivant-has shrunk inside his grey marle tracksuit but still fits proudly into his Sixth Form blazer. She- a widowed mother of three since the age of 31, turned activist, community leader and doer-of-many-things-is throwing on colourful scarves and preparing to re-invent herself again.
This book is a work of love and reckoning, as Frank and Joan's adult children take up the labour of care for absent fathers and stoic mothers, while contemplating their own prospects for a "third age". Murray, a playwright and teacher, is 60 and becoming an early career researcher in a late career body. Carlin, a writer, artist/scholar and, at 55, newly minted professor, is thinking about escape. Each is yet to fully imagine what comes next. Tender, funny and confronting, the book's dual voices unfold along parallel and intersecting tracks, queer and straight, female and male. Part valedictory, part costume parade, it charts the complex dance steps of Father and Daughter, and Mother and Son, as they try on countermoves to the diminishments of elderhood and the pervasive forces of ageism, inside and out. Weaving memory, anecdote and reflection, How to Dress for Old Age asks what it takes to live a meaningful life all the way to the finish line.
