It started slowly – listening to other people’s medical reports and comparing them to mine, wondering just how old friends were when they died, counting the years I might have left. Other people’s bodies, complaints, and illnesses began to measure my vitality and longevity. What did she die from? How old was he? Can I drive at night? What does it mean that I can’t remember names? The questioning went on and on. How do I feel each morning? What is aching today?
It took me a few years to realize that underneath, the questions weren’t about my body at all. The questions were about my wobbly emotional infrastructure. They were about my emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual questions, not how my body was doing. I was asking the wrong questions.
Aging has a will of its own; it proceeds at its own pace and doesn’t need my help. It’s not something I can ultimately do anything about. Aging was different. I could do a lot about that, I imagined. That turned out to be true.
Instead, I began thinking of the fundamental and real issues: What did I think the rest of my life was all about? Was it all about loss, or was it also about gain? Was it the end of something, or could it be the beginning of something? Did attitude matter? All that old talk, the sorrowful looks friends gave me on the streets as if I were minutes from passing away, had begun to dispirit me? Did I need to share my intimate health care with people who barely knew me? Did I need to think about it a dozen times a day?
And most important to me: “What can I do now to become what I was meant to be finally? Did my faith and spiritual clarity give me strength, health, and purpose? Or were all those questions beating me down??
Where I landed was this: I came to see that the primary task of life in this period, the final period, most likely might be very simple.
Don’t fear the fear.
Every single sign of change in me—the stiffness, the loss of energy and memory, the health issues that popped up repeatedly—was something I began to see differently. My fear of aging and the things I feared to lose—the long walks I loved, the peaceful sleep, the doctor’s visits, the pills, and the medicines—also called for new beginnings, gain and loss, and new ways of thinking.
The glass may be half full sometimes, but that is a lot of water.
The exciting ideas came one after another. Could you take good photos of birds and flowers? I am finding new and challenging good works to do: helping refugee children, finding news to use my minor celebrity and blog meaningfully, like teaching meditation to older people, and using the range and weight of my blog to support a food pantry.
In a way, I was suddenly free to be who I wanted and live as I wanted—to be me.
As the theologian Joan Chittister wrote, “The task of every separate stage of life is to confront its fear so that it can become more than it was.”‘
The tenor of my life changed. My life is not about diminishment; I realized that aging was something to accept, respect, and not just complain about. I could use it as an opportunity, not a decline. I could use what I had learned for good and give it richness and meaning. It wasn’t the end of my development as a human; it was about accepting and exploring a new kind of development. I learned that was much more than my body; my decline did not define my life but my growth.
I might be invisible to people of different ages, but I was suddenly becoming clear about myself. Nobody was going to define me but me.
My danger was giving in to the fear of invisibility, uselessness, and losing our sense of self and human obligation. Fear, wrote Chitisster, tempts us to believe that life is over rather than simply changing.
My obligation was not just to exercise and take a lot of pills but to stay as well as I could, to remain intellectually and socially active, to support my wife in any way I could, work on my blog with even more complexly and more creatively than before, take pictures of flowers and landscapes and farm life that were better than before, and could help others to do the same things I was doing that worked.
I embraced a new moral obligation: to work to be a better human while it still mattered, to respect my life, and to enrich the love of those around me. My life is not over. It is, in so many different ways, just beginning.
