It’s a sign of the season of life I’m in that my nightstand and Audible account are both full of books with titles like The Art of Dying Well, Embracing Elderhood, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, Elderhood, Being Mortal, and When Breath Becomes Air. Books on longevity and the defiance of aging such as Young Forever and Super Agers are recommended to me quite often, but I’m not attracted to them. As a historian, I have been conditioned to think about the limits of human life. As a daughter and friend, I would rather spend time thinking about how to live well in the life that I have rather than concentrate on lengthening life.
Those who have been reading some of my posts this past year are aware that I have a mother with Alzheimer’s, that I think about the necessary role of grandparents and elders in our families and communities, and that my 90-year-old father-in-law recently died after a 15 months on hospice. As someone without children who has retained what I’d like to think of as youthful energy, I have missed some of the regular markers of midlife—that is until menopause hit with a vengeance. But the loss of the covering generation of folks who mentored me and set the standard for what a virtuous adulthood might look like has been abrupt and jarring.
Aging has long been something that is both coveted and bemoaned. When few people were able to live into their seventies, a long life was seen as a blessing. Philosophers and scientists from Galen to Francis Bacon and René Descartes observed that there were tactics for delaying the bad effects of aging, which was occasionally discussed as if it were a disease. Even when the inevitability of death was accepted, great amounts of money and scholarship were spent on trying to hold off any reminders of mortality. A paradox has developed around aging and longevity—at the same time that people are living longer and wanting to do so, they are rejecting any embrace of what the actual experience of the last one third of a long life will involve.
The more time I spend with my aging parents, aunts and uncles, the more I realize the longevity we are experiencing in the modern world is only as good as our health, finances, and community ties. My faith tradition contains wisdom for trusting God in that more vulnerable late season of life: “Even to your old age I am he, even when you turn gray I will carry you” (Isaiah 46:4). However, like so many Gen X folks who are facing down the decay of the Baby Boom generation and becoming care givers while dealing with their own transitions to elderhood, I need to help from people who invest their life studying these issues.
Tracy Gendron, Chair of Gerontology at Virginia Commonwealth University and Executive Director of the Virginia Center on Aging helped provoke my thinking about “Elderhood.” At a recent workshop I attended, she asked what words we associate with “Elder.” The attributes of experience, wisdom, confidence, community carer, or spiritual leader are much more attractive than the attributes we associate with “aging” or “old.” She reminded her audience that our modern world’s agism is one of the last acceptable prejudices. In her workshop, I was confronted with my own assumptions about aging and how my desire to avoid death might be poisoning my thoughts about those who are older and about my own movement out of middle age and into the “elder” season of life.
As a Christian, I am called to see people of all ages and abilities as fully reflecting the imago dei. But I am part of a culture in which it is more and more desirable to hide one’s age. Because we have so many ways of treating diseases that once killed us at young ages, we have a hard time deciding when ease into our last years versus work to stave off death. As medical care has become increasingly institutionalized, many of the challenges of aging have been put into the category of health care and outsourced to professionals.
For many high performing adults, all too often defined by their occupations or familial roles, there is a dread of the season when we aren’t in the thick of things. But the shrinking of our worlds and the slowing down that we experience in our final decades could be seen less as a loss and more as a well-deserved rest. Just because more of our life is behind us than in front of us doesn’t mean we don’t have things to look forward to. And the more that I look at the elders around me with curiosity and appreciation for what they bring to the table, the more I can welcome the years I am given with gratitude. Being pro-longevity need not mean that I’m anti-aging.
Rob Moll’s The Art of Dying has provided a truly useful trove of vocabulary, theology, and experience for Christians who want to live well, with the expectation that we will all die. Moll’s work with hospice (before his own untimely death at 41) gave him many beautiful descriptions of how to intentionally live, even when our years are shortened by when disease or a long gradual decline strips us of many of the attributes that may have been core to our identity. He warns against avoiding discussions of the end of life, reminding Christians that at the center of our faith is an intentional death. The decline of the communal traditions around dying, Moll posits, contribute to a dearth of capacity to face our mortality.
We want to be remembered, we want to make a difference—and we want our loved ones to be remembered. But we also know we are a spec in the universe and that is also its own value. We are like the grass here today and gone tomorrow—and also we live forever. Both are true. The stacked volumes on aging and dying are remarkably positive and inspiring. It turns out that confronting our mortality and facing the changes in our later years need not be depressing. It is in being aware that we will age and eventually die that we have the best chance of living well and with intention.
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