Dealing with the aging of loved ones

September 28, 2007

I’ve written about death before. It’s a topic you can’t avoid sometimes I suppose. It’s a topic worth exploring. Though I feel like my own death might be a ways off, being only thirty, I suppose you never know. Over the past few days, I’ve had a couple experiences that started to seem like a pattern. Noticing it, I began to desire to put it into words. This is just a short exercise, so bear with me.

Over time, we’ll have loved ones that grow old and die. When you are close to them and have been for some time, you’ll see the changes in front of you. One experience I had was thinking about my wife and I. We are still young and active. We are as sharp as can be in terms of mind alertness and personality. But eventually, we won’t be as sharp. One of us will get to the point where we notice the other starting to fail at certain things. It’s strange, but the thing that was most sad was thinking about one day having to tell someone else about how that loved one used to be, before they started getting old. Saying the words felt the most scary. “Yes I remember when they used to be so witty, and now s/he’s really lost a lot of that, really faded in the last three years.” I don’t know why, but it really gets me emotionally to think of that.

Another experience was I was watching this movie called “American Movie” about this guy my age who desperately wants to make a film. He feels like it’s his way to get out of being poor, or to be somebody. It’s a wonderful documentary. In it, he has an older uncle that he’s always trying to convince to fund his projects. The uncle is pretty old, his speech is slurred, his mind seems dulled. Sadly, the uncle dies sometime during the final production of the documentary, as it’s mentioned in the credits. At one point, the filmmaker’s dad, brother to the old uncle talks about him and how he used to be. The father is older, but still very sharp. He’s lived through seeing his brother grow up, become a scholar and then grow old and become senile. That might have been the brother that taught him to play baseball or tennis. That was the brother he might have looked up to, the one he wanted to grow strong like, or emulate. Now he’s a tired, old and dying man. How would you deal with that?

The third experience was today. I was helping my friend move a couple pieces of furniture in his new house. He had a photo of his mother on the window sill. He and his siblings are going to make a trip with mom in the coming months. An Alaskan cruise. They have an urgency to go this year because mom is starting to show signs of aging. Some frailty, even senility. They want to create this trip and experience it, as well as have the memory of it while mom can still do it. She deserves to experience it with all the senses she can. Everyone else too. How will they feel on the plane ride back from that trip? Once it’s over, it’s not the end of her life by any means. But they will have some feelings to contend with perhaps.

I don’t want any loved ones to die, certainly not my close family and my loving wife. But it’s going to happen isn’t it? This mindscape I live daily, lost in thought not nearly in the moment as I should be, it’s happening to all of us though. We can face it now, keeping it close to us, or face it later. We will have to face it. A popular writer I recently read about decided to estimate how much longer he has left to live. From that, he’s started a running countdown clock on his website. He wanted something he would see every single day. He’s done this to completely face that fact of his own death and to deal with how much there is to create, to accomplish before his own passing day.

I guess I don’t have an exercise on this as I thought I did. Writing this article has been the exercise. For you, maybe reading it will be. I ask that you take care of yourself and loved ones. Have many special and exerting experiences to stay sharp to live fully and enjoy others around you. Drink good red wine, do crossword puzzles and math problems, engage in new conversations, meditate. Or just be you for as long as you can.

Posted in family, philosophy