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.
