"I held him and said, 'please, George, don't die - if you die on me, I swear I will kill you!'."

On any view, George Langley snr - one of Ballarat's most beloved locals - is a far-cry from what society ordinarily, but erroneously, deems a 'typical' 78-year-old person to be.

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The retired sound technician is neither doddering nor dementia-addled; and still less has the long, intangible creep of old age resigned him to a depressed life devoid of adventure.

Indeed, this is a man who's taken 16 trips up to Queensland on his motorbike in recent times; once returning home via a trip around the continent for the simple reason "it was there", as he put it.

And so it was, to all appearances, another ordinary day in the life of George snr on 16 March 2022 when the keen motorbike enthusiast - out on a morning coffee ride with the Central Highlands Ulysses Branch - lost control of his motorbike as he sprinted down Moonlight Road, near the historic rural township of Berringa, some 40km south-west of Ballarat.

"My sidecar hit some gravel and quickly slid - I tried to correct it, but I hit a red mailbox and the weight of the sidecar made the bike tip and I flew into a big tree," George snr said on Saturday afternoon, as he celebrated his return home to Sebastopol with friends and family.

"I remember seeing the tree and thinking, 'shit, this is going to hurt', and I was right - I took nearly all the brunt; the bike took bugger all."

The resulting force of the impact fractured all but one of his ribs, along with one arm as well as his sternum. He also suffered internal bleeding on the brain, a ruptured spleen, a slipped disc and nerve damage to his shoulder.

His cherished BMW motorbike conversely emerged with little more than a scratch and a dent.

Long-time neighbours and close friends Wayne Morgan and Ms Davis, who witnessed the horrific collision, said the ensuing scene defied easy description.

"When I got to him, he was doing the gurgle and everything - I thought he was going to die; far out, I was frightened," Ms Davis said, adding that she remembered removing three or four broken teeth from his mouth as he lay there, struggling to breathe.

"It really was terrible," Mr Morgan said.

Death, as a general rule, rarely announces its exact arrival. And, unknown to all in that precise moment, it was only to come knocking for George snr some weeks later, as he reckoned with the dangerous assumptions society casually assigns to older age.

"He survived the accident but then he had to survive hospital," said Leesa Langley, one of George snr's daughters.

After being air-lifted to a Melbourne hospital, what followed was weeks of return-trips to the ICU ward as George snr continued to cheat the long shadow of death.

"Some of the doctors at the hospital sent me down that road twice, but thanks to my family, they decided to work on me a bit more and save me," he said.

"Without my family," he added, as he motioned to everyone around him, "I'd be buried now."

After being moved from the ICU ward the first time, hospital staff soon discovered the internal damage to his spleen had caused around one and half litres of blood to flow into his abdomen, thereby warranting his immediate return to ICU.

From there, George snr was put into an induced coma and underwent surgery. Nine days and four operations later, doctors had finally closed his spleen, and he was taken out of the induced coma and returned to the general ward in the days that followed.

But before long he was, once again, returned to ICU, after suffering acute dehydration caused by prescribed anti-fluid medication.

"That was, 100 per cent, his lowest point," Leesa said. "He looked like he'd been out in a desert for ten days; he was unrecognisable."

"I even offered the nurse $10 for a drink of water," George snr quipped.

On no fewer than four occasions did George snr find himself in ICU, and on no fewer than two occasions did hospital staff call his family in the early hours of morning to come in to say their goodbyes.

"Dad also called me a couple of times at midnight saying, 'please, Leesa, come and get me - I'm scared'," Leesa said - something which prompted George snr to quietly weep while murmuring an apology.

"So, I rang the ward and said, 'my dad's scared - what's going on?' - I was so worried about him."

In the end, Leesa and her sisters said they forced hospital staff to keep George snr in the ICU ward until he was plainly on the mend.

"Every time you let him out of ICU, I told them, he's not ready," Leesa recalled. "I said to them: 'over my dead body will you move him out of ICU again before he's ready; unless he's bomb-proof, you don't move him'."

When asked what coloured the hospital's repeated decision to - in the family's view - prematurely move George snr from the ICU ward, the resounding answer was subconscious ageism.

"A big part of the problem was I felt they'd look at him and think, 'well, you're doing well enough for a 78-year-old man'," Leesa said.

"I had to tell them: 'look, he's not whatever you think a typical 78-year-old man is - he restores and rides motorbikes, he's business savvy, he's not sitting in a rockin' chair all day, he's got worth - you cannot just give up on him'.

"After everything, they said to me, 'your dad really is lucky he had you to advocate for him - most old people who come here don't have a voice'."

As Leesa spoke, more tears rolled down George snr's cheeks. It later transpired that he'd been crying on and off nearly all day.

Whether those tears owed their existence to sheer gratitude or relief he felt at having survived the unthinkable was unclear. But at least some of his tears seemed to be borne of the remarkable, yet unedifying, reality that it was the stereotype of old age which sheeted home the prospect of death far more closely than the accident ever did.

"My dad is a superhero - even the hospital said it was just phenomenal he pulled through after everything," Leesa said.

This, it bears emphasising, wasn't lost on George snr, who said he would - in spite of (as opposed to because of) the totality of his experience - continue to epitomise the direct antithesis of what society deems old age to mean.

"Our motto here is to grow old disgracefully - and that is exactly what we'll do," he said.

To that end, George snr is surely a one-of-kind superhero for us all as we trek that inevitable road which is old age.

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