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A Hymn To Being Old In America

Good Lord. We’re living longing and surviving better in the 21st Century than ever before. But Lordy it is not always so easy for folks with disabilities and questionable financial resources.

A Hymn to Being Old

Now, in no way is this any sort of complaint. Rather, it is a kind of hymn to those of us with physical challenges negotiating with svelte and vibrant young things (often loud) standing in the grocery line. They know nothing of such conditions or experiences as I did not when I was their age.

Most bodies move fast until, of course, they don’t. I’m having flashbacks of Tim Conway doing his really old man routine, shuffling r-e-a-l-l-y slowly, hands dangling, slack jawed, making growly noises as he proceeds at a snail’s pace to wherever he is going. It was so very funny then; not so much now!

Really, I’m nowhere near that bad! Nowhere, no how. The image still brings a smile and a tickle to my face. And, yet, and yet!!! Actually, I walk pretty fast, especially when I’m out with my hiking poles. But here’s the thing: the world is still flying by me! Part of me doesn’t give one whit. Part of me does, ambivalence writ large.

The Art of the False Start

You have to start somewhere, and so I have. Impulsive and a bit brash at times, I shot myself out of the running-away-from-home cannon and only later have I realized the problem of flying without a net. When I was a little girl (age five) we had a trapeze in our basement. I loved to swing on it, fantasizing about being a trapeze artist performing all kinds of tricks as a circus performer. 

One day, I decided to stand up and swing. After pumping my little legs, and after reaching a lively speed, I released my hands from the bar handles, imagining a skill I did not possess. As night follows day of course I fell. On the concrete basement floor, flat and splat prone! Mercifully, my mother had been in the basement across the room, doing laundry. 

OMG!

To this day, the rest of the memory is equally vivid and hazy, both. Mom picked me up, carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed in my parents’ bedroom and called my dad asking him what to do. I remember crying and gasping, gasping for breath. At some point, she picked me up again, carried me to the car, laying me on the backseat.

I continued crying.

Living on an acreage about five miles from town, we finally arrived at the hospital, I’m rushed inside (by medical professionals,) X-rayed, diagnosed and installed in a ward, flat, prone, with a phenomenally boring view of the ceiling! I had five (or was it seven?) fractured vertebrae. I remember being told I had to lie only flat, could not roll over or move in much of any way, or they would put me in a body cast!

There were other patients on the ward, mostly adults, though not a lot as far as I could determine, with only their voices and slight dips to look out the sides of my head. I think I remember my mother and even father at the bedside at some point but they were eventually shushed out by nurses so I could rest.

The Metaphor Is Not Lost On Me

So here I am now, flying without a net, at age 71, after escaping from what, for me, was an immobilizing and painful “bed.” However many years I have left, I cannot lie flat and constrained, as long as I have five neurons left in my brain to accompany my unlimited spirit. Years ago when I was in college, I heard a description very apt for me: “she is an active verb.” Breathing makes me active, thinking and articulating thought makes me active, and I can do no other thing with my nature. In essence, I’m at a stage now of renegotiation. 

I’ve had two remarkable examples —Bennet and Magie—who serve as north stars for me. I did not, could not, have appreciated their importance in such a way now, even though they’ve served very different examples. Without a doubt, I was privileged to have them in my life earlier. But each, while springing to my mind and heart at such a time as this, are metaphorically whispering something delicate yet solid, sturdy in the face of challenge, encouraging an indescribable certitude in the very face of uncertainty. 

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What Loss Personal Freedom

One just can’t know the loss of personal freedom, how it feels, what it lives like until you get older and feel the slow leak of capabilities shrink. I sure didn’t. I watched my own mother’s loss and instead of looking closer at what was going on (or God forbid, asking her) I got frustrated with its outcomes instead, and her along with it—as if she were to blame for aging!

WHAT GOES AROUND BOOMERANGS

I’ve given this whole topic considerable more thought after having a conversation with a friend recently—about value and worth as bodies age and we shed our productive and professional identities. And after sobering up professionally, I have to admit there remains a sense of diminishment in me. While I make fun of my place in the aging category, I am reminded too of its emotional costs.

Given this small “come to Jesus” moment, if mom were here now, I’d apologize prostrate and profusely, for being so dense and dismissive with her, not paying attention. But how could I have known then what I could only learn once it began in me? Seriously. The aging thing; The slack disregard, the dismissal by others, as if you’re no longer a credible person, which implies less value, less worth. Half a person, really, with a lesser-than ability to even think!

THE TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT

I see my son and daughter-in-law react the same to me, or at least similarly as I did towards my mother, hence I’m on the receiving end of the spectrum now. The up close and personal feel of “less than” that is subtly reflected in their eyes staring back at mine as an imprint is painful. They won’t have kids so will not know the personalization of it when they get old. Although, since this is a societal problem also, they’ll still likely feel it’s sting to some degree.

Not-so-oddly, some aspects of aging I gladly surrender while other losses I resent like hell! I think of handicapped people (which I’ve come to include myself loosely in the category) and the grief they must feel in this regard. But aging? In some respects it’s a different kettle of fish altogether because unless you die young, everyone goes through one or both categories to some degree. And as a foot in each camp of aging and body breakdown, I feel some of the sting in each.

IN THE END

In more general terms, I look at others in my age group and often see similar patterns of personal freedom either denied or forfeited. Some individuals seem less affected or maybe I don’t look close enough because the symptoms are less obvious, more nuanced. Maybe they don’t consider it much, let alone express it. But the prospect and likelihood of each of us getting some humbling learning opportunities in a youth prized culture is unavoidable, at least to those who seek learning about such things. Ultimately, as the eyelids drift closed for the last time, rumor has it “all will be presented” in a flash for which both accounting and sweet liberation will occur—deliverance in its own time and place where value and worth are redefined by a greater and more generous authority.

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All Of A Sudden

How is it that one can feel such gratitude in a moment followed by immense sorrow? The whole slow leak of a body, and dare I say, perceived sense of human spirit, is almost interesting when you just observe it. And yet to be swallowed in a moment’s mood can be equally disorienting, confusing. 

Is the body’s slow disintegration a glorious opportunity to reflect, refine, recover from one’s earthly errors? Can it be that it’s golden in the very fact of mature preparation for one’s earthly departure? I simply cannot know at this juncture.

REFLECTION IS AS REFLECTION DOES

What I do know is that for me at least, reflection is unavoidable when backed into a proverbial corner. How others approach their own valuations of a life, I cannot know. But for me, it nags at times, insisting on some sort of owning and accountability. While I’d really rather not do it, somehow it seems unavoidable.

“Don’t look away” my spirit whispers. How horrible and wonderful I see I’ve behaved at times. How complex the “human” experience is. Or should I say how complex the soul’s expression is in having a human experience!

Are repeated lifetimes a mere opportunity for growth? Can earth school afford such incredible opportunities? A nun once told me the early Church used to “believe” in reincarnation, but then later scrapped it for the concept of Purgatory. 

While nearly disbelieving, I looked it up and low and behold, Platonic Christians early on incorporated a belief that included physical rebirth as part of spiritual rebirth. For me, a continuation of a soul in some “form” is wholly consistent with everlasting life. How could it not be?

AND YET

We humans are such literalists in so many ways, trapped in duality — a this OR a that — is a mental juggernaut. It seems we have been binary thinkers long before computers. And regardless, of what the rightness of one’s chosen belief system is, I’ll leave it to the great beyond to inform me later where the truth actually lies.

In the meantime, an accounting or reflection of a life is what is most valuable to me and dare I say, inescapable. How others live “on the inside” I do not know. What seems important is to take responsibility for and learn from one’s errors in life. But this process does not include condemnation, rather must include reflection, forgiveness and an “aha” opportunity to see more clearly— a pathway out of seeing “at first dimly but then face to face.”

AND SO I SIT

And so I sit in this discomfort, reflecting on a life where I have made errors, accounting for those I’m prepared to see, forgive and forgive again without condemnation but instead, transcend to a greater understanding. In the end of course, the process for me includes sorrow, an “I did not know any better” perception that resulted in pain inflicted on myself and others. As my old friend Bennet used to say, “I did the best I could.” Or put another way, I didn’t know any better at the time!

It seems a mature regret is what is warranted, nothing more. After all, if I “crucify myself,” savage myself for not knowing better, is that not incompatible with compassion and forgiveness so prevalent in the New Testament, Jewish and and other Eastern traditions?

Whether I live 20 more minutes or 20 more years (highly unlikely,) it seems inescapable that sorrow and gratitude can coexist as part of this reflection, this accounting. How else can meaningful recompense occur? Yet the sorrow must be transcended in the end. 

The body, this communication device, this temporary container for the soul, is a miraculous machine when working well, one we take for granted. But I have come to believe in the weirdly divine gift of its slow demise as well, one that facilitates reflection and accounting however messy it may be.

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