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Aging
Rev. Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of Edmonton,
April 15, 2007
In one sense it was a benefit, I guess. I grew up as the youngest child in my entire generation. Among the living in my hometown were one brother, one sister, two parents, a dozen or so cousins, ten aunts, three uncles, two grandmothers and two great aunts… a total of 34 members in my extended family and only two of them less than 10 years older than me. Old and older have never been mysteries to me. I have watched them all my life in all of their stages.
And yet there have been surprises. You see, my clan was a somewhat uniform lot, generally pretty religious, reasonably conservative politically, and deeply influenced in their economic views by the lessons of the Depression. Their attitudes to new ideas like hippies or the NDP, Protestantism or God forbid! Free love! were easily predictable.
But then in my 20’s I started visiting the Unitarian Church. Now, the Montreal church in those days was a kind of Gothic revival stone thing. It had an organ, an aged feel and an aged congregation of mostly well to do folks. I therefore expected that I knew the attitudes of their elders. But then the minister, nearing retirement himself, counselled me to move in with my girlfriend…not marry her, but try living together. I was dumbfounded. Then I had a chat with one of the matronly types who sported yes, a blue rinse, and learned that in her youth she had been a Wobblie and had been thrown in jail for some protest. For those of you too young to know Wobblies, they were members of the Industrial Workers of the World formed back in the early 20th century. They were one of the most radical labour unions and a hotbed of socialism.
It dawned on me that not all older people fit my family profile!
But still, it was a valuable experience watching people age, begin to decline, and inevitably, die. Some did it well, some, well, less gracefully. The duty calls of childhood, the regular occurrence of three day wakes and funerals and receptions taught me early that older people experience life differently from me, and it took away any fears I had of death and dying. The one exception was the few visits I paid to my maternal grandmother. By the time I was four she had slipped into some kind of dementia. On top of that she had been born in Glasgow. Between the incoherence and the accent, I never understood a single word Granny ever said to me.
But it’s all left me with a matter of fact attitude towards living and dying and the decline some experience in old age. Sometimes I can even find the humour in it all. In his last years my dad went blind from diabetes. That first Christmas I gave him a tin cup filled with pencils. My family stood shocked and horrified as they saw it emerge from the wrapping, but Dad, once he figured it out he laughed so hard and long that tears of joy streamed down his cheeks. He loved not being pitied. He loved that his new state meant no special treatment beyond what care demanded. He loved being the butt of a gently teasing joke that was a hallmark in our family humour.
People respond to aging in different ways. Mae West famously denied old age quipping, “You’re never too old to grow younger.” Agatha Christie, an active author into her eighties noted, “I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you.” The advent of groups like Elderhostel and others, the addition of continuing education classes at universities and colleges designed for seniors is affirming that aging need not only be about retiring and declining. A lot has to do with attitude as Thomas Bailey Aldrich asserted, “To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent - that is to triumph over old age.”
So many today view retirement from a career or paid work not as an ending, but as a beginning of a new adventure in paid or unpaid work that first, is satisfying, in creative endeavours, in education for the sheer joy of it. Those with good health and a good attitude grasp the opportunities age has to offer: new horizons glimpsed through the wisdom of experience, opportunities unsullied by pressure, the chance to say yes or no as the spirit dictates.
Advances in medical science coupled with the sheer size of the aging boomer generation have made seniors a demographic to be reckoned with. The result has been a rapid expansion of opportunities, of living options, of political clout and social services. Alongside has been a parallel expansion of expectations that seniors should take advantage of these opportunities, that they should ‘live till they die’.
But what happens when illness does start to creep in and slow one down? Because of medical science these days, fewer people seem to ‘drop dead’ than used to be the case. Most who manage to escape accidental death get to watch it coming from a short and sometimes a long distance. And when that happens, aging presents people, and their middle aged children if they have them, with a whole series of challenging decisions. When is it time to quit driving? When is it time to give up the house and move to a condo, or to independent or assisted living, or into nursing care? Each step represents a significant change in a life, in self-identity. Most of them are seen as losses of freedom, of independence and, perhaps more importantly, of some sense of selfness. Robert Bly once identified getting one’s driver’s license as a rite of passage for the young. It’s fair to say that surrendering that license can be a significant loss for the aging, a tangible milestone on the road to ‘can’t manage anymore.” The transition is not always easy. Sometimes the pressure to ‘age gracefully’ and ‘accept new realities’ comes at a far faster pace than an individual can assimilate.
I suppose the biggest lesson I learned from my youthful observations of extended family is that the elderly and the dying (not always the same) want to be treated with respect yes, but also want to be treated normally. Anyone of any age wants only to be seen as a unique individual with her or his own feelings and values and needs. They don’t want to be categorized or stereotyped. Each echoes the anguished cry from the Who’s opera Tommy: “See me, hear me, feel me, touch me.” I see it in my two girls who want their share of attention, who want to be heard in a meaningful way. And I have seen it in those elders suffering the grief and frustration of lost ability and mobility. When they lose their edge, when the memory slips as often as it grips, when things that used to be easy become more difficult, they want affirmation that their views and opinions still have significance and that their lives still matter. Sometimes learning to adjust to change and to altered skill levels takes time they don’t have, and decisions have to be made for them in order to ensure their safety. That can cause pain and tension and tears and anguish for all involved. It’s like childhood growing pains in reverse…there isn’t much to be done except suffer through it finding support where one can.
The good news is that studies seem to show that aging can offer its own salvation from these frustrations. Several of our readings suggested something I have learned from years of observation: with age comes a tendency to view life differently – to consider more than just the material world of things and status. Many develop a more thoughtful view, and a more spiritual one. Many become more concerned with their inner life and less dependent on their outer life. As the peace of acceptance of circumstances develops, the aging person begins to disengage from the world we know. Said one study, “There is emphasis on internal processes and inner experiences which facilitate expanding consciousness.” I have watched numerous instances where dying people gradually began to let go of things that used to matter: interest in current affairs, communities which had been significant at one time, the outer circles of friends. Each drifts away until when they come to die, there are just a few in the inner circle to bear witness and say goodbye.
Whenever I have watched a life end that way, no matter how old or young the person, I have felt death to be a friend, not an enemy. Life does not end as much as seep away like smoke rising from a fire, gradually dispersing into the air of other dimensions. They seem to expand into death even as they shrink from this life. Death is freedom, not confinement, the next great adventure whether the ‘other side’ holds continuing existence or not. Those are good deaths.
It seems to me, then, that aging is a series of transitions and trade-offs, and that our task as humans is to try to find as much satisfaction as we can in what we have now. Inevitably we have to grieve the losses along the way, for that is also fully human. But if we can grieve them and then let them go, perhaps we can open our beings to new satisfactions of the moment. At any age, life has only three components, the present moment, the embrace of memory and the hope for what comes next. As the memory side grows longer and the cause for hope shorter, we must seek, perhaps pray, for the grace to manage the change well. The best way to do that, I believe, is to practice now, at whatever age we might be, the art of living fully in the present.
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