A niece
recently asked me what I meant in my recent blog about “challenging cultural legacies”? There are
a number of those legacies which come to mind but I answered her that one I
want to challenge is our culture’s attitude toward old age and those who are
old. Our culture’s emphasis on youth, trying
to avoid the idea of old age and death and, as we age, our not having learned
to see its opportunities, not seeing ourselves as an important, needed part of
the whole.
With our
rapidly changing and evolving world, I don’t have answers. I am looking
for ways to bring wholistic, healthy ideas together so we find answers, not
just to this legacy but also the issues we are facing as a species.
I first wanted
to write about this particular journey when Don was in the hospital those six
weeks in 2013 and I realized that to the staff, as good care as Don was given,
he wasn’t really an individual, he was an eighty-year-old head trauma
patient. That is how they related to
him, that’s how they based all their decisions. I learned then to be more assertive,
almost to the point of being aggressive, in order that his care be based on who
he was.
Our lives are
a series of passages, from infancy to toddlerhood, and on to old age. Within
those major passages and transitions are many
smaller ones. I have said this before and I continue to experience, we, far too often, (and, I wonder, perhaps
have not been taught how) to look at, to learn from, and then share, about our
passages. How else are we able to support each other? Out of that experience in
the hospital came my conviction that I should share this journey by writing, sharing
with friends, looking for ideas, answers, the wisdom to be gained, eventually
to share with the larger community.
In the
villages I’ve been in, the old people have a most important role. They are seen
as those with wisdom, the teachers, the ones who pray, who best can give
counsel which will support and strengthen individuals, families ~ support the
welfare of the whole community. They are, among other things a window to the
past, its wisdom, its foibles. No matter how old, feeble or ill, they know they have an ongoing purpose in
life. It is felt ~ to word it more strongly ~ it is known ~ their love, a tangible blessing from elder to youth is a
gift, a blessing which the young recipient will carry throughout life.
So, I react
negatively to that word so often used as an umbrella for a variety of
conditions, Dementia. The people I
know, including Don, are NOT Demented. What
a negative word the dominant society uses to describe the symptoms of some
forms of aging.
I remember a
teaching I learned from a Yupik friend. Her father was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s and the decision was made to
send him to a care facility in Anchorage an hour’s jet flight away. There, away
from relatives and friends he was miserable as were the family, so they brought
him home to be cared for. Later my friend wrote a paper for a class we were
both taking. In it she explained how, in their culture, as one ages and grow
closer to returning to the spirit world, some souls purify by become more
childlike, until, like newborn infants they return to God and leave this world.
It is not seen as illness, something bad but a normal part of life which family
and friends go through with the departing loved one ~ who is their teacher in the process. She also spoke
of the words of wisdom he sometimes shared in the middle of that confusion.
I spoke in an earlier post (reference, June 2020, Beginnings cw) of
how, in their later years, my mother and mother-in-law, as their bodies aged
and they could no longer do many of the things they felt gave them worth, they saw
themselves as useless. I tried to share with them their worth, the importance
of the role they had but they couldn’t see it. The society they grew up in ~
today’s society ~ did not and does not recognize that role, that wisdom.
How I have wished Mom could have heard the words of a
younger kinswoman relating how, when she desperately needed them, Mother’s
words, concern, love and wisdom were soul healing manna in the wilderness she
was wandering in.
So, I challenge, I wonder ~ and I look for different ways.
