I don't just bleat about older age bringing a wider perspective & deeper understanding of our lives - I live it, every day. It's my great joy to be able to look over the past sixty years, seeing how my here & now is rooted in the accomplishments & disappointments, the happiness & the difficulties, the achievements & failures of my distant & recent past. Work that means the world to me in this moment would have been impossible for me to do even at fifty. Lacked sufficient overview.
When Mom was reunited with her O! Best Beloved, it seemed I could fully break out into my true life's work. I was footloose & fancy free, without the need to factor in an "ancient" parent.
Took me all of three weeks to realize life might have wondrous surprises in store for me.
My thirties were spent wandering an emotional wilderness, seeking a stronger sense of my crumpled self, something I stumbled across literally just before John came into my life. Fast forward to my fifties. Back to wandering, this time around a professional wilderness where I'd been unceremoniously dumped by the very company that had named me Employee of the Year just eight months earlier.
Fifty to sixty - an amazing ten years, literally kicked off with first 9/11, then Mom's death, then getting the boot out of my job. Opportunities came up that seemed just right for my interests, talents & skills. While each of them brought enriching lessons, new insights, expanded skills, none seemed just right.
Friends lamented that I needed to make do with what presented itself, that I was being irresponsible, that I needed to just settle down & do whatever job came along, if only for the benefits.
What a weird premise - that securing sufficient benefits is more important than finding the proper work.
Over my years, have dedicated myself to work that brought a level of personal reward & pleasure, whether teaching privileged elementary school children or at-risk high school students, coordinating a team of regional health care writers or providing support to brokers & human resource heads, taking on direct marketing remarkable cookware & skin products. (More on the benefits of working with a direct marketing company in a to-be-written posting.)
Found myself wondering if I was some sort of unintentional entrepreneur; every time I'd gleaned new skills & awareness from a job, an opportunity to move onward & upward arrived at my doorstep.
From what I can tell sense perceive, everything about every moment of my life was leading me to elder care anarchy. Our American culture's approach to aging is about as messed up as it can be, inverted from what it's been for millennia.
Where people once sought mastery in the workplace, what's most highly valued now is an ability to wipe out what's been learned & becoming proficient in a new skill that will, in short order, be itself outdated.
We live much longer than our great-grandparents, but older people are valued far less than any previous generation.
We live longer, but our earning power has declined, as more & more companies urge employees to take early retirement.
We are retiring earlier, but there are more & more calls for the government to raise the age for receiving Social Security & Medicare.
Our health care field has made great strides in lengthening our days, but typically at the cost of expensive medications & procedures that reduce our risk of dying without increasing our ability to live the full, vibrant lives of our younger selves.
Science has reduced the risk of sudden death from heart attack & many forms of cancer, leaving us with the aspect of longer lingering deaths from dementia & dwindle.
Retirement communities, originally designed to provide an active life for people in the last ten or twenty years of relatively good health now have reconfigured to offer a continuum of care within one facility, ranging from active seniors to olders suffering from dementia & Alzheimer's to ones in the final days, be it in hospice or an in-house medical center. "Full-care" communities, considered by many the ultimate in senior care, strikes me as ghoulish. Certainly a far cry from living in the ancestral home, welcoming visits from grandchildren, dying in your longtime home instead of in a one-bedroom apartment or in a hospital room.
Children & relatives are caught in the vise of a family model that's never existed before. Single-parent households are the norm, with neither parent available to care for aging olders. Spinster aunts who swap care of aged relatives for a home & security are virtually extinct.
At the end of the 1800s, most families lived within a few miles of each other, able to give support or offer a home; now, those days are long gone. Situations like we experienced, where John was able to give his mother enough help that she could continue living independently until her sudden death at 87 & mine lived with us - to our mutual benefit - until her slightly longer death at 91, is a rarity these days. Only one of my nieces lives relatively close to her parents & even she is over an hour away, not just around the corner & down the road.
It occurred to me several weeks ago that the best way to make a fortune in senior care would be to develop a tablet that the elderly could take every day that would make them feel like an asset to their younger loved ones. I'd formulate an roll-on lotion that children could apply as they dressed in the morning that would leave them feeling guilt-free about aging parents.
Alas, my great strength isn't in distorting or numbing our nation's sorry state of aging but in overturning it, in helping to restore the inversion to a more whole, healthy state. Not the sort of thing that beckons wealth & power, but which offers rewards beyond imagining when things click. And it can't be done enmasse, production-line style ~ that's what helped get us in this mess in the first place.
It takes doing it one grannie client at a time, believing that something I do will touch someone else who will touch someone else.
It takes letting one family know that all they can do is their best in a situation where the cards are stacked against they feeling good about their best efforts.
It takes helping maybe just a few older men & women dwell less on the problems of aging & more on the joys it offers, the broader perspective they have due to a long life, the unique opportunities they have that younger folks can imagine.
I am a good messenger because I live it every day. It took me almost sixty
years to find my great calling. I wasn't some sort of funky entrepreneur, seeking new challenges as soon as old ones were mastered - turns out thos those previous jobs were training for my true calling, one I couldn't hear let alone answer until now.
My experience is not, as many protest to me, the aberration. I am the unrecognized norm. What is true for me, is true for all. We're all created to
live every day of our lives in some form of celebration, in being the best
version of our current self. In this day & age, it's frightfully
difficult to convince an older person of the truth of that statement.
What they can accept intellectually seems light years from what they
believe in their hearts.
A couple days ago, at dinner with a grannie client & her friends, someone asked about my summer plans. After hearing about the five workshops & conferences I'll be attending between now & the end of October, she said, "Well, you'll sure know a lot about the problems of getting older." She listened in apparent disbelief to my reply, that my great talent isn't in helping aged friends navigate the problems of old age but in embracing the amazing perspective only available to the elderly, in seeing the advantages that come with significantly advanced years, in accepting the opportunities that arise from being unabashedly old - in helping olders accept & live, rather than just talk about, the wisdom of old age.
Is it a challenge? Much more than most people will ever know. But am egged onward by the story of the star fish. You may be familiar with it. A couple walking along a beautiful stretch of beach, just before sunrise. The air bracing & clear as it only can be after a storm. Far off, they see a man, walking close to the the edge of the crashing waves. Every so often, he leans over, picks something up & tosses it into the ocean. As he gets closer, they realize they are star fish, strewn by the storm along the beach. As he comes up to them, bending over to pick up another & toss it into the ocean, they ask him why he is bothering with such a Herculean task - there were countless star fish stranded on the sands. He can't save them all. He smiled & explained, "The sun will be up soon. Its warmth & rays will kill the star fish." The younger couple were shocked & disturbed at the futility of his task - "There are thousands of star fish on the beach - your best efforts won't make difference." Leaning over, the older man picked up a star fish, smiled at it, then flung it far out into the water - "I made a difference to that one."
The reality is that between now & my own last days, I might not be able to restore sanity to my country's whacked-out attitude about aging & olders. I might not touch more than a dozen older friends & their families, might only reach a hundred or so people with my message of helping olders become elders. But I'll make a difference to each one, however few. Living my message - having been there & now doing this. That is everything..
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