Vol.
1 Issue 4, Winter 1997
AGING -- REALITIES AND POSSIBILITIES
by Bill Schaefer
How different might it be if we could truly accept aging, if we could accept the angers, work through the losses? How different would it be for us as individuals and for our human community?
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I once knew a man who was seventy-seven. He had been a lawyer in what his culture perceived as his "productive period." He had been a victim of polio as a child, and his right leg was bound in a steel and leather brace. He was tall and lean. His face, when I knew him, was gaunt and his hair was white. His eyes were clear and bright. He was dying of cancer.
He approached his death as I am sure he approached a particularly difficult case before the bar. He looked at the facts. He weighed alternatives. He made choices. He controlled what he could and let go of what he could not control. He exercised his articulate and precise mind.
But he also exercised his loving heart.
He drew to him his children and grandchildren. They responded. He had been an integral part of their lives, and he became even more connected.
He moved into his daughter's house and, rather than be bedridden in an out-of-the-way bedroom, lived open and involved in the family room.
Those of us lucky enough to become part of his support system were drawn in, too. "Here I am," he seemed to say. "Can you help, can you come close, can you feel the love?"
He didn't hide the pain or the frustration when he felt the struggle would never end. He shared it. He made no excuses for the times when the pain and the losses and the struggle made him angry and depressed. He shared it.
In times of balance, when the pain was absent or controlled, he would share laughter and stories of the old days, or he would talk just as seriously as a man could talk about "this dying business." He taught with words and by example. He taught with love.
Once, very near the end, I told him how much being with him the last months had meant to me. "I hope when my time comes I will have the grace to do what you have done. And the courage," I said.
"Come over her and help me with this brace," he said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his bad leg making little clanging sounds from the metal brace bands tapping on the bed-frame.
I kneeled on the floor and began to loosen the straps and buckles.
"You're going to be just fine, you know." He spoke softly, and when I looked up from my position on the floor, he seemed so high up that I felt like a little boy. "You're going to be just fine," he repeated.
I don't know. Sometimes it just seems to be too much."
I carefully freed his leg from the brace. I looked up at him again.
He looked into my eyes for a moment and then laughed a happy, hearty laugh. "I'll tell you what," he said as the laugh wandered lightly between the words, "When the time comes, I'll come back. I'll help you over." The laugh bubbled new and bright.
I looked at him with his head thrown back, hands spread far to each side, bracing himself against the rumbling power of that love-laugh, and it felt like a caress.
When the laugh was completed, he looked down at me and his eyes were serious. "No," he said, "I won't be able to help you over. But I promise, at that moment, at that dying moment, I'll be waiting."
He lifted both arms out and away, palms out in a gesture of welcome. Then he reached down and patted my cheek. Twice. For a moment both his hands held my face; then his eyes brightened again, and he said, giving my head a little shake, "You're going to be just fine."
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As we grow old in our technological, production-oriented culture, the denial of aging and death that exists at all levels of our society directs our path from one of cultural integration to one of isolation. Because we fear death, we reward ourselves for denying aging. We idolize youth and youthful beauty while failing to recognize the deeper more holistic beauty of the old.
Because we give no value to age, we make consuming a value. Rather than an appreciating system where value increases with age, we make a value out of that which is disposable. We do this with our material world and we do it with people.
Our personal progression from youth to old age too often leads us from a world where we perceive ourselves as being strong, involved, and in control to a narrow, isolated, lonely existence in which we believe we are no longer of value. I is in this context that we begin to experience the unavoidable reality which we have gone through such pains to avoid facing -- our aging bodies begin to breakdown, our lives approach their inevitable end -- death.
We can no longer produce in the way we could when our bodies were young. We can no longer pretend that time leaves us unaffected. Because we are enmeshed in a society that believes as we do, that has, in fact, taught us to hide from the reality of our own mortality, our decreasing sense of self-value is reflected by those around us. Most tragic is that we lose the sense of, or make much more difficult, the final and culminating stage of our existence.
Old age is a time meant to be our final stage of growth. We can only experience that growth if we recognize our own value -- what our life has taught us, what we have become. And it is almost impossible to maintain that perspective if those around us fail to recognize our value.
It is not an easy time. It is a time of struggle, loss, and letting go. The newest saying is "Old age ain't for sissies."
Along with the struggle and loss it can be a time of most powerful learning and fulfillment. It is also a time when the potential for teaching is perhaps higher than at any other time of life. The lessons of remarkable depth and of critical value. But they can be shared only if we come together.
Our cultural and personal denial stimulates increased isolation which makes that final growth process much more difficult and keeps the young from sharing the experience. The separation guarantees continued denial, unfulfilled growth, and unnecessary pain.
What a shame. What an unnecessary shame.
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How different might it be if we could truly accept aging and death?
Very, very different.
My dying friend was a special man, a special teacher. His most powerful lesson to me was helping me to remember that I was special in the very same way.
He taught me that it wasn't just him and me.
It is you, too.
©Bill Schaefer, 1997
"Dawn Past" by Robert B. Campbell©1998 All
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