Super Agers (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) avoids the obvious pitfall that comes with exploring the experiences of older people, which is to treat them like huge wrinkled infants. Dónal Moloney, its director, never condescends to the septuagenarians and octogenarians whom he shows living their best lives at the outer limits of the ageing process. These are smart, busy people, and the film never treats them as anything less.
What unites them is a commitment to staying active. Tom Reeves is a former comedian who now drives a taxi. At 83, he dons boxing gloves and hits a punchbag in his shed each day. “I don’t want to go to heaven just yet,” he says. “I want to hang out here for a while.”
We also meet Máire Ní Ainín, an 82-year-old who lives in Dingle, in Co Kerry, and swims in the sea every day. The water brings clarity and a sense of perspective. “You get in and you forget everything,” she says.
Moloney’s thesis is that old age is kinder of some than it is of others. As they advance into their 70s and 80s, many become less mobile and lose cognitive function. Others remain remarkably spry, both physically and mentally. These are the super agers of the title.
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The good news is that we all have a shot at being super agers. What unites the individuals in the documentary is a commitment to physical activity. Follow their example of getting off the couch and out into the fresh air and we give ourselves every possible chance.
“After 50 we should do more exercise every year, not less – and not use the excuse ‘I’m getting older’,” says Rose Anne Kenny, professor of medical gerontology at Trinity College Dublin.
What’s most striking is that none of those interviewed dreads death. “Where do we go when we die?” muses one contributor. “I hope it’s a quiet place.”
Quiet it may well be – and mysterious, too, believes the Trinity neuroscientist Prof Ian Robertson. In death, matter is neither created nor destroyed, he points out. It merely passes from one form to another. “I feel totally consoled. Nothing is lost. It may dissipate. Dissipation is not necessarily a bad thing. You have contributed to the universe in a positive away.”
The picture he paints is haunting. But amid the melancholy is optimism too. We come and we go, created by the universe and given back to it – a thought that is consoling, just like this empathetic portrait of Ireland’s go-getting geriatrics.
