The Treasures of Old Age are its Many Diverse Challenges that at Least Keep it from Being Boring, But Only If You Have a Sense of Humor.
It’s been ten years since my back surgery. In spite of what I’m about to recount, I promise you that I had been off all pain meds, except Tylenol, for two weeks. I am highly motivated because pain medicine makes my coffee taste terrible for a couple of months after I quit taking it and I am definitely addicted to my coffee. But as usual for someone who loves wondering about conundrums or wonderful possibilities, instead of paying attention to the actual world around her, peculiarities happen.
I got to my doctors for my follow up appointment and as the nurse was taking my blood pressure, I realized I had my blouse on inside out. Of course, me being me, I didn’t keep quiet and just take my first chance alone to turn it right side out. The nurse swore she hadn’t even noticed. Which worried me a bit, because I like my medical support people to be aware of what’s in front of them, particularly when I am it.
Then a few nights afterward when I was still wearing my back brace at night, I awoke to make one of my usual trips to check out the plumbing. But I couldn’t get up because I was unable to move my arms. As I was starting to panic that my arms were paralyzed, my attempts to move my arms made that noise peculiar to Velcro being tugged loose. It happens that the Velcro on the two wrist braces I wear for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is the same as that on my back brace. Somehow, I had Velcroed my arms to my body. I finally managed to get my arms free after laughing helplessly for several minutes.
I admit that the down side is a major challenge because getting old is sort of like being born again. As your physical strength dwindles and remembering words becomes like a game of Whack a Mole, you struggle to keep on being who you’ve been all your life. Slowly you have to face that the self of all your years is gone. At the same time, you realize that best friends of many years have either “left the building” or no longer are able to share memories or even to make new ones.
Parents, spouses, often even siblings are gone. Past accomplishments don’t play a part in who you are to younger people. And everyone around you now is younger. Lonely days and nights stretch out before you, as you try to find a purpose for whatever years remain. The tiny minutia of life devours days broken only by trivial pursuits of fleeting pleasures or paradoxical efforts to stay healthy.
However, in the scheme of things, Old Age is for letting go of ego, pride, pretense, and delusions about both ourselves and others. If as Micah says, we have sought justice and loved mercy, we now begin to learn to walk humbly with our God and the least painful way is humor. If you can laugh at yourself, you will have plenty to laugh about.
My favorite old person story is about a woman at a nursing home who had dementia. The aide who was helping her into her nightgown was still struggling with her own mother’s dementia diagnosis the day before. The woman turned to her and said, “Can you tell me my name. I can’t remember it.” As the aide started to reply, the woman pointed to a picture of Jesus on the wall and said, “Never mind, He knows who I am. That’s all that matters.”
Battles with Perfection
Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Being loving is more important than being right.
Natural gifts do not bear spiritual fruit unless empowered by the Spirit.
Accepting dependency on God yields the fruit of humility.
Need prevents love.
Sometimes our need to be valued limits our ability to love.
God drops “breadcrumbs” in our lives to show us what He is working on in us now.
Humility frees us to forgive ourselves for failures and to not envy other’s successes.
What is the difference between a value and a goal? A value puts what is important first in our choices. A specific goal may sometimes limit recognizing our value’s priorities.
Many of us have sought justice and valued mercy, but in our old age struggle with new dependencies that call us to walk humbly with our God.
Sex and the Different Generations
OK, it’s time to write about sex. At 88 I’ve lived through decades of change in our general attitude toward sex. I’ll share my own early1950’s sex “education” which as I’ve aged, I’ve discovered was pretty much the norm for that time.
At fourteen, which today would be much too late since ten-year-olds now have periods, my mom attempted to explain how babies get here. Her take was to explain that babies came from a husband and wife physically connecting. She said it was a beautiful act to create new life.
I took this as meaning this was something we did only when we wanted to have children.
But I went to a Catholic all-girls high school where we had yearly retreat days where a priest would talk about not letting a boy even put his arm around us because it would give him sinful thoughts and urges. I couldn’t imagine why a teenager would want to have babies, so I began to suspect there was more to sex than just getting pregnant.
Me being me, I became curious about this. As a sophomore I started going steady with a nice Catholic boy who was also having retreat talks about sex at his all-boy high school. He was fortunately either better informed or not of a curious nature and took these warnings seriously, though he did put his arm loosely and carefully around my shoulder at movies. He eventually kissed me goodnight at my door, but it was a very sweet short, closed mouth kiss. I thought it was nice, but it didn’t make me want to have babies.
He went away to college and I started college at Rice in our hometown so we agreed to date other people. Rice was an all-scholarship school.( It cost me $200 a semester for books! That was all since I lived at home.) It happened that it was mostly a science and engineering college so at that time there were 4 boys for every girl. I dated quite a few boys my freshman year and kissed one good-bye at the end of the year when he was graduating and going into the navy. Again, a sweet, closed mouth kiss. I remember one good looking football player who, when I demurred kissing on our first date, told me I was never going to have many dates that way. I was reasonably good-looking and outgoing, so I thought that was funny, but figured that since he was a freshman and a football player, perhaps he hadn’t figured out the boy-to-girl odds at Rice. My high school steady came home for the summer and we picked up where we had left off with sweet, closed mouth kisses at the door. In the second half of my sophomore year, I began to date another football player who was a senior and not playing after the season. We were snuggled on a school bus coming back from an out-of-town basketball game with a throw around us. He not only started open mouth kissing, but touching my upper body in ways that suddenly made me understand what the big deal was about sex. I’ll be honest…I never actually had sex with anyone before I married. But I really enjoyed dating that guy. But at the end of the school year, when he asked me to marry him, I realized I didn’t love him in the same way I did my high school boy friend. It really was just about sex. I don’t think I can claim the moral high ground on sex because of what havoc many of us so called “good” girls in the fifties caused the guys we dated for any length of time.
God cleverly made sure humanity procreated by having sex be very, very pleasurable. When people were marrying at fourteen and fifteen, that may not have caused as much havoc. Having more than one wife probably helped on one level also. But times changed. And society’s attitude toward sex has gone back and forth between extremes ever since. And I don’t think the illusive far-off possibility of hell ever stopped anyone. The total life changing shame my generation of women experienced from pre-marital pregnancy limited me to just torturing my football player for the pleasure and not because of love. I’m pretty sure, I wasn’t in the minority.
One of the problems with the changes in society from one generation to the next is that as parents, we didn’t recognize that the next generation would be living in mixed dorms with the freedom to make out in your own room, and movies and books making it look like everybody’s doing it, so our attempts to teach them the hazards are insufficient for the new freedoms and temptations.
More to come on the changing issues of each generation and our difficultly preparing the next to find solutions that don’t turn sex into a toy or make women the only gatekeepers or gays/lesbians being the only ones that don’t make mistakes and have abortions or divorces with children who end up the losers in our social attitudes toward sex.
A Wake Up Call to Wholeness
~An Excerpt from a Blog by The Geriatric Pilgrim
I find more blessings to count,
more for which to be grateful,
after having been broken open
by the deaths, destruction, decay around me,
some of which I’ve caused,
some of which I haven’t deserved,
and some of which is just life
Without looking at my grief,
I’m not able to recognize my joy.
And I don’t mean glancing at loss
the way I rubberneck
at an accident on the highway.
I mean reentering the suffering,
scrutinizing the fears,
which means talking
and writing about them.
~My urge to create begins in loss,
my gratitude begins in fear,
my compassion begins in pain,
and my joy begins in sorrow.
~All of which, I guess, is to say:
I’d rather be whole than happy.
We Cannot Expect Women Without Faith to Face Death or the Likely hood of Life in Dire Poverty for Both Themselves and their Child
Since there really is no point where we can be sure a soul begins, abortion is not a simple issue. I chose to risk death rather than abort, but after being an agnostic I had found faith. During my fifth C section from a pregnancy that happened even though we were using birth control, I began to hemorrhage, and chaos was going on with shouting and someone knocking over the glass IV which broke leaving me hearing feet crunching on it and feeling life going out of me. My faith was new and strong enough to accept dying and to trust God to give my children a good mother. But without that faith, I could not have done that. Christians cannot make decisions for women who are still children themselves, who have other children that need them, or are risking death without that faith. Many miscarriages happen through no fault of anyone. No loving God is going to keep those souls separate from their mother in heaven. That is a stupid belief made up by men who have never had a wife or children, never the less carried them in their body. Today’s attitude toward sex is as a toy for pleasure , rather than a help in bonding with another person enough to grow in love for them until you can love them more than yourself. In today’s world casual sex is in movies, books, magazines, music, advertising all around us. The freedom teens have now makes it incredibly difficult to wait for the one you are willing to live with all your life. Our whole culture shouts “pleasure is what life is about.” Christians should be loving others enough to make them want the faith and love we have. We should be helping those unwed mothers and their child survive in a culture that promises happiness through pleasure, but doesn’t support those who are paying a price for that. Our love should help them find Jesus.
This I Know
We are each one of a kind. We filled a place in the universe at a certain time that no one else could. Not better or worse than any other, just unique for a purpose not necessarily recognized or valued by ourself or others. We each are part of the known and unknown and connected to all of it, like it or not. If our last years strip us of ego, it’s like losing a mask, a pretend importance, because none of us got a vote over who we were born to be. We weren’t dealt the same hand and we’re only accountable for the one we actually got in the complexity of personality, intelligence, family, opportunities, era of being, etc., etc., etc. And losing what we value in ourselves isn’t necessarily a loss in the greater scheme of things including the effects both pleasant and unpleasant our losses have on others.
The Spiritual Journey of a Liberal, Born Again, Spirit Filled Christian
Despite living most of my life in the South, I am a liberal in pretty much every way there is to be liberal. My father was an award-winning investigating newspaperman fighting injustice from early on. On the Saint Louis Star Times, he took on the largest arms manufacturer during World War II by exposing their selling defective ammunition that blew up in our own soldier’s rifles. He won several Journalism awards, but then he ended up in the army having to use their bullets.
In the early 1950’s in Houston, Texas with Dad still at the paper on an election night, our doorbell rang in the wee hours and I started down the stairs thinking maybe dad had forgotten his key. About halfway down, there was a loud boom at the front door sending me running back up the stairs. We called Dad, he called the police, and they called the FBI. The FBI decided that the bomb that left both sharp pieces of slate and confetti packing stuck in our door and the walls of the entry to our apartment was set off because as City Editor of the Houston Post dad had written an editorial supporting a black woman for the school board. It wasn’t even an issue of integrating the schools, just about getting some representation for segregated black schools. I struggled to understand how anyone would want to maim or kill someone they didn’t even know. And for the first time I had a glimpse of the fear black children and their parents live with all their lives.
Later, my father was in the running for the Pulitzer Prize after winning all the other Journalism awards for writing an expose of a pressure group that was secretly getting liberal University of Houston college professors fired.
In the nineteen sixties, I was married and living in Nashville, Tennessee. I started actively working for Civil Rights after one of my college-educated Junior League friends, who worked as a volunteer at our Catholic hospital, bragged at a party that she had refused to carry a “nigger” baby out to the car in front of the baby’s parents, I began tutoring children who couldn’t read in a black elementary school. Then I started interviewing blacks at the NAACP headquarters who were looking for work. I then tried unsuccessfully to find businesses in the white community to hire them. I was working in the NAACP offices the day the buses for the March on Washington stopped there. The sheer hatred for whites by the young SNCC and CORE members in those groups was as strong as white prejudice. I began to fear the threat of a bloody race war.
Martin Luther King spared us that.
As a Catholic from birth, I had four babies in my first five years of marriage. Because I was unable physically to deliver any of my babies without having Caesarian Sections, I was told that I was in danger of dying if I had another child in the next two or three years. Since the church taught that using birth control was a mortal “go to hell” sin, I asked our priest what to do. His response was that many children have had good stepmothers. After much soul searching, I decided that men who had never had wives or children should not be making this kind of decision for women. So, I quit the Catholic Church and because I had unknowingly made religion my God, I threw the “baby out with the bath water” and stopped believing in both Jesus and God.
For several years I lived a fun, but increasingly meaningless “party” life and dulled my unhappiness with alcohol. I had begun a search through classes on philosophy and World Religious at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Then, when my father died at only fifty-two, I intensified my search. After reading the whole bible, I took some introductory classes at other Christian denominations. I even read some of the “God is Dead” literature. But nothing brought any real enlightenment, though the book of Acts made me wistful.
Becoming alarmed about my struggle with feelings of inadequacy as a wife and mother and my need for alcohol to stay functional, I found a counseling group for alcoholics started by a Presbyterian Minister who had been though a similar battle. After a few months I broke down in the group weeping and admitting that I was so overwhelmed by the challenges of my life that I didn’t feel capable of loving anyone, not even my husband and children. Instead of judging me, the people in the group seemed to care and even feel sad for me. The next day as I was vacuuming my living room, I felt freed of self-hate somehow. As I stopped to just savor this new feeling, I had a sense of someone putting their hand on my shoulder in a supportive and loving way. My first instinct was it had to be Jesus, but then I questioned whether I even believed in Jesus. So, I put it in my mental file labeled, “Need more information.”
About that time friends of ours decided Earle would give up his Vice Presidency in his father’s company and sell their house so they could go to work as missionaries for Campus Crusade for Christ. I was shocked, but also a bit jealous that they had found something that mattered enough to give up their safe and very comfortable lifestyle. When they came back to town almost a year later, Judy asked her sister, my best friend Hilde, to host a “Christian Coffee” where several women would tell about the positive changes in their lives since they accepted Jesus as their Savior and Lord, I pitched in to help with it, telling people jokingly that I hadn’t known that our usual coffee get togethers weren’t “Christian,” but the talks would be short and we were going to have great refreshments.
The women’s descriptions of changes in their values and relationships appealed to me, but I still felt unable to make that leap of faith. So, when they led us in saying a prayer accepting Jesus as our Savior and Lord, I didn’t join in. And as the others were hugging and celebrating, I went into the kitchen to wash dishes. After a few moments the woman leading the group came in and asked me if I had said the prayer. I confessed that I had not, because I didn’t believe in Jesus or God. She didn’t blink or hesitate, she just said, “Well, why don’t you say the prayer this way, ‘Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, the Son of God and our Savior, take my life and help me to become the person God created me to be.”
I hesitated, but it seemed like a no-lose proposition, so I just nodded and said the prayer that way. She hugged me and congratulated me and I went back to washing the fragile china by hand, wondering how I would recognize an answer.
Suddenly, pure joy began bubbling up inside me. A feeling of being both known and loved in a way I had never experienced before overwhelmed me. I felt so joyous I was afraid I’d explode. Driving home I sang “Jesus loves me” at the top of my lungs with tears of joy streaming down my face.
This is the just the beginning of my journey as a liberal, born again, baptized in the Holy Spirit, Christian. My hope in writing this is that I will be able to flesh out the reality that a spiritual journey can include both liberalism and Jesus as Savior and Lord.
