In the last years of her life, my mother grew increasingly frail. She seemed to get tired faster, move with less confidence and agility, and walk more slowly. I began to worry about trips and falls: she sometimes seemed more breakable.
She began to do less. “I’m too old for this nonsense,” she would sometimes rail. She began to think herself old, which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As we get old, a doctor told me, “we expect less of ourselves, so we do less”. And in doing less we become less able.
The Oxford Dictionary defines frailty as a condition of being weak and delicate, and uses advancing age as an example: “the increasing frailty of old age”.
Dr David Ward, a research fellow in Ageing and Geriatric Medicine at the University of Queensland, in Australia, defines frailty as a health state “reflecting how people are ageing”.