Out of the Shadows

By Ed Magnuson

NOBODY EVER DIED OF OLD AGE by SHARON CURTIN 228 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $6.95.

"The ideal way to age would be to grow slowly invisible, gradually disappearing, without causing worry or discomfort to the young." So writes Sharon Curtin in understated outrage at the many ways in which contemporary American society tries to shun and shut away its older members.

Author Curtin's anger is no novelty in recent literature, though her descriptions of how old people are often treated can be memorable. Observing the impersonal way in which aloof aides at a California convalescent hospital bathe their charges, she writes: "They might have been sisters doing dishes. Lift, scrub, rinse, dry, put away. Lift, scrub, rinse, dry, put away." But unlike many writers on the subject, Sharon Curtin, who is 33, refuses to lump all old people into a faceless category as a "problem" susceptible to some mass solution. She does feel that by ignoring individuality, the institutional machinery established to help them destroys their capacity for selfhelp, which might--properly reinforced by society--allow them to carry on much longer by themselves.

She began pursuing the elderly in all of their individuality five years ago, when her marriage was in ruins and she sought "someplace where a deep, ragged sigh would not sound unusual." She found it in a rundown hotel peopled by pensioners in an unnamed American city. She was both fascinated and appalled by the unfeeling, single-minded pursuit of sheer survival shown by Al and Harry, two panhandlers in their 70s with whom she trudged the streets. They spent their days, she writes with compassion, "scurrying around the city, like chiggers under the skin of civilization."

In a book as spare and a style as poignant in its restraint as many of the lives she describes, Curtin brings old folks out of the blurred social shadows. She does not love them all. She finds one woman she met in New York City "a real old bitch, hating herself and the world with intensity."

This particular woman slashed with her cane at any child bold enough to bounce a ball on her block. Yet she showed a certain genius as she regularly feigned senility in department stores, knocking down piles of goods in her awkwardness--and slipping items slickly under her clothes in the confusion. Author Curtin also appreciates the defiant spirit of Letty the Bag Lady, who carried all her possessions everywhere in two sacks, terrified that they might otherwise be stolen. Letty knew that "this face of mine pulls and tugs in all different directions like an old sweater sagging." But she scoffed at those who stared. "Stupid bastards, I say, someday you'll be old and ugly and hungry --all of you with your wrinkle cremes and diet soda and wigs and paint. Dead before you live, I say."

One of Sharon Curtin's close friends is Miss Emily Larson, a skilled bridge player at 96, who became ill and was placed in a hospital for the old. There she "sundowned"--experienced hallucinations because of strange surroundings. Miss Larson had the sense--and means--to refuse to join other patients in "the parking lot," a drab room in which they were expected to sit mutely in wheelchairs or, as a special treat, were asked to sing childish songs. There was also Charlie, who had stuck his head in his gas oven, and who complained when rescued: "But a man has a right to die, don't he? He don't have to just sit and wait, sit and wait for death?"

Yet much of society treats the aged as an undifferentiated group whose only function is to await death. The author took one feisty woman to pose as a pro spective resident of a retirement community. Here, purred the salesman, "you are free from worry. We have a security patrol, 24 hours a day, just looking after your welfare so you can sleep in peace." Replied Mrs. Duffy: "Thafs exactly what the man said when I bought a plot in the cemetery."

Curtin attacks the whole concept of forced retirement. She tells of a retired furniture salesman, who had wanted all his life to be a carpenter. Finally he had the time, offered to work free as an apprentice to learn the trade, but was told the unions would object, or insurance could not be had to cover the risk at his age; he was even too old to join a trade school carpentry class. Instead, he was directed to a hobby shop where, rather than build furniture, he could learn to burn homilies into pieces of wood.

Sharon Curtin holds out little hope that books such as hers will work great changes in the attitude of the young. She pleads instead with the elderly them selves to "turn their energies toward discovering their common oppression" and to revolt. Essentially, she seeks the same kind of consciousness raising that has propelled the Women's Liberation movements. Yet her clean, unsentimental prose makes a valiant effort to ex pose, and perhaps modify those murderous attitudes toward the aged which, she claims, kill just as surely as do accidents and disease.

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