The poverty of old age is forged in youth

She knows she's old and expresses it. She theorizes on the matter and advises her peers on it. Anna Freixas (Barcelona, ​​1946) has written for people like her, those who are not afraid to combine the first person in adjectives that are as real as they are stigmatized by society. This writer and retired university professor publishes 'Yo, vieja' (Captain Swing, 2021), a kind of manual full of survival notes "for free beings" in old age, as the subtitle of the work says. Casual, Freixas covers in her work the fears, uncertainties and certainties of modern old age, the experience of wrinkled skin; and it also traces the reality of economic independence in this age range, care, loss of ties and, of course, death.

Do we value the experience as something positive throughout our lives until we get old? From there, it seems that the knowledge is no longer worth anything.

It's like a semantic leap. In old age is when you have more knowledge, experience and ability to focus on a subject, not when you are young and you lack keys to interpret it. It is one of the various blindnesses of society that prevents seeing and taking advantage of something that is enormous capital. Just as the work of sustainability of life that women do is not valued, neither does society value the knowledge of old men and women. I already said it once: if the old women stop, the world stops. If not, imagine that all people over the age of 65 stop doing all that stuff that they do productively to keep the world going, so that young people can go to work, have their food prepared or not be seen in the office. obligation to care for other people. It is a work of enormous value that goes largely unnoticed.

You speak in your book about being able to "live old age in peace." As a veteran, as a senior, what would you say is your particular war?

I don't have one in particular, but some elements that guide my desire in old age: freedom, dignity and respect. I want my ability to be the one who manages my entire life to be respected: my body, my spirit, my money, my relationships, my affectivity. Until I can. The moment that changes, I hope that all the values ​​that we old women are now preaching will finally turn to us.

Do you feel that your wishes are respected on a day-to-day basis?

I follow the principle that the patriarchy is dead, and therefore the principle that this oppression does not exist. Everything you pay attention to crystallizes and appears as real, so I behave as if it didn't exist and I demand that the people around me do the same. When this collides with reality, then I say: "Hey, I'm here, it's me, it's my life."

He defends, in fact, that “freedom in old age is called money”, and that they can be poor, but not stupid. How do financial resources interfere with the freedom of a veteran?

Money is essential throughout the life cycle. When I taught, I always emphasized to my students that they take into account the choices they make throughout their youth and early adult life, to the extent that they may be forging their future poverty. That is what happens when you withdraw from the labor market so that someone else can get ahead. The poverty of old age is forged in childhood, in adolescence, in youth. That's where we make the big mistakes, because money is power and freedom. Sometimes we are seen as an expense, when in reality children and youth are the real expense. The concept of productivity should be reviewed, because old women have enormous material productivity, we participate in sustaining life every day. We supply the State with an enormous number of functions that it should carry out, such as home assistance, direct help to our children, food... even the prevention of suicides thanks to the fact that we build support groups. Who supported the country in the 2008 crisis? Old men and women with their pensions. We've even paid our children's rent. How much of our pension is directed, in the end, towards those younger generations who do not believe us to be productive? It is something that cries out to heaven.

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In a context like this, it seems that the longest-lived people are that 'past' that modern society denies.

They miss out. We are interesting old men, what happens is that you have to know how to listen and be close to know how to take advantage of this wealth. We are not illiterate, we have gone to university, we have been pioneers in all social movements with enormous experience, and we have obtained all the rights that others now boast about.

In the 'tricks' that he gives in the chapter dedicated to bonding with other people, he argues that we must get rid of toxic relationships, "including those of your family: blood does not oblige us." How much damage has the family institution done to women?

The problem has been the patriarchal order, because the institution is made up of all of us, but under what order? In the family we are men and women, and we have transmitted the values ​​that have historically taught us until feminist epistemology arrived. The merit that we have is, perhaps, the entire process that we have elaborated for the patriarchal deconstruction of the family order.

But this deconstruction has not reached all women, nor the most veteran.

We cannot blame women for what they have not received in their lives. They have not had the opportunity to participate in a new vision of the world, but those that do have clearly been deconstructed. One of the fundamental elements is that we have received many mandates, many of them perverse, and some of us have been lucky enough to have networks and training to be able to dismantle those mandates and question them. I am not going to blame other women for not having had the same opportunities that I have had.

Old age also comes now with big changes: children who become independent (when they can), retirements and deaths of loved ones. How are new links established in this way?

With an open attitude to conversation and participation. Friendships will not come knocking on your door, but you can open yourself up to the many spaces in which it is possible to participate. It is a way of establishing new ties at a time when some of the most important ones are disappearing.

Now care is very much in vogue, especially who gives it. He argues that the old women must feel the legitimacy of claiming them.

Many years ago, El País published a survey asking men and women who they thought would take care of them when they grew up. They answered, mostly, that their wife, sister or daughter. They knew that someone was going to take care of them. Instead, they said they did not know. We have given away our time and care as if we had plenty of it, without demanding reciprocity. We know that care is essential, and giving it is a source of satisfaction, but what cannot be is that it only comes from women. The problem is when we give care to people who can take care of themselves, because in this way we prevent them from learning to take care of themselves and, whoever does not know how to take care of themselves, cannot take care of others either. That is the knot of care.

In the last moments of her life, she proposes to write «a text that serves as a legacy to be remembered». Has she begun to write it?

I have written a little piece of a text that I have called 'Wishes for later'. I have to change it because my partner died a year ago and my life has been transformed. For now, the first thing that comes to my mind is that it would be a text of thanks to all those people with whom I have traveled pieces of my various lives, who have made me who I am now. My mother said that I was the spirit of impertinence, so I would show my gratitude to all those people who have helped me turn impertinence into freedom and, above all, love for my son.