Lear's age of suffering

Kim Myung-hwa

The author is a playwright and director. 

There was a time when I worried that my parents' old age might hold back my own life. After they both passed away a few years apart, aging and death, which had seemed to belong only to them, suddenly felt much closer. I am not yet old enough to ride the subway for free, but I know that day is approaching.

Few plays depict aging and death as starkly as William Shakespeare's "King Lear" (1606). Hoping for security in old age, Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters. Instead, he is abandoned after surrendering his power and eventually descends into madness. The play remains one of literature's most enduring portraits of the vulnerability that accompanies old age.

Lear's tragedy closely mirrors the realities of today's aging society. Once a powerful king, he becomes an irritable old man and finally a destitute figure stripped of both dignity and reason. His decline resembles the path many people now fear: from being the central figure in family and society to becoming an unwelcome elder dismissed as an outdated authority and eventually a person with dementia who depends on others for care.

In a more patriarchal era, audiences may have focused primarily on the ingratitude of Lear's daughters and the king's heartbreaking abandonment. In today's Korea, however, old age itself has become an uncomfortable subject. Television is filled with advertisements for dementia and long-term care insurance. Longer lives are often portrayed not as a blessing but as a burden that drains the National Pension Fund and places growing financial responsibility on younger generations.

Government policies also reflect this imbalance. The anxieties of young people, whose futures are still full of possibility, understandably command political attention, while the concerns of older people whose productive years are often viewed as over receive far less sympathy. Aging is increasingly discussed through the language of cost and efficiency rather than dignity.

Yet old age is everyone's future. If we can acknowledge aging and death as universal parts of the human experience, perhaps we can also accept older people's caution, habits and conservatism without turning them into objects of contempt. A society willing to pursue coexistence and conversation across generations may offer greater security and dignity to everyone facing an uncertain future.

News reports have recently highlighted the participation of many young adults in protests over the allegedly flawed election process. Perhaps they will become like Cordelia, Lear's youngest daughter, who alone refused to abandon her father when everyone else did.