+A NEW PATH TO THE FINAL DOORWAY   (rev. 3/10/14)

　

I am 74, and in fairly good health as far as I know. I might live another 20 years. What shall I do with them? I’ve already reviewed my life, made peace with the past, have my affairs reasonably in order in case I die soon, and so on. I’m proud of the best of what I have achieved, and I’m happy to remember the best of what I’ve experienced, but I don’t want the rest of my life to be just cranking out more of the same. I’m single, and would like to find a lover (lovers?) with whom I could find companionship in my final years. But companionship in what? Again, I’m thrown back on the question – what shall I do with my life?

I resonate to Tennyson's "Ulysses". There must be more to life than self- and mutual-care, appreciation of art and nature, grandparenting. There must be more to life than aging gracefully.

I value both spirituality and deep engagement in life. Tornstam’s "gerotranscendence" says to me something about spirituality. Lipsky’s "trauma stewardship" calls me to engage with life’s sorrow, Joan Erikson"s "gerotranscendance" calls me to engage with life’s joy. Finally, I draw from Judeo-Christian liberation theology tempered by the discipline of secular humanism.

"Gerotranscendence" is a sort of benign cosmic detachment from the strivings to do something and be someone that usually mark the earlier stages of life. Atchley, _Spirituality and Aging_, tells me that I’m not alone in my feeling that there is value in this detachment, though I’m not particularly on Tornstam’s or Atchley’s wavelength. (It is significant that "love" is not in the index of Atchley’s book, although there are plenty of entries like "transpersonal consciousness.")

Judith Viorst, in _I’m Too Young to Be Seventy, and Other Delusions_ has a nice poem about another road I'm not taking:

"If We Stopped Trying"

Though we tread the treadmill daily,
Give equal time to yoga and Pilates,
Pump iron, do our crunches, do our squats,
We are flabby of abs and of glutes.
Yet we stick to our sweaty pursuits because
Our bodies would be even flabbier
If we stopped trying.

Though we’re members of a book club,
Take seminars on Keats and chaos theory,
Play tapes explaining lieder, Jung, and Chi,
We can barely remember a word.
Yet we’re plugging away undeterred because
Our minds would be even fuzzier
If we stopped trying.

Though we march in demonstrations,
Write checks to fight injustice and diseases,
Defend the wetlands, ozone layer, and whales,
The whole world’s in a terrible mess.
Yet we persevere nevertheless because
We can’t let it get any worse,
And the world would become even worse,
The world would be a lot worse
If we stopped trying. 　

To me this feels too much like the life of "quiet desperation" Thoreau critiqued. (Thoreau doesn’t particularly have answers for me, but I love his questions.) Like Thoreau, I want a "broad margin" to my life. Rather than exhaust myself in being productive, I want to attend to the nuances of my feelings, having faith that they can lead me toward my personal truth.

　

In _The Life Cycle Completed (Extended Version)_ Joan Erikson, in her nineties, looks back on the famous Stages of Development she and her husband crafted. She rightly feels the 8th stage of "wisdom" and "integrity" sounds too ponderous. She proposes gerotranscendence as a 9th stage, but here the problem is being too ethereal. She coins the term "gerotranscendance" to speak to both soul and body. She loves her verbal creation!: "Transcendance–that’s it, of course! And it moves. It’s one of the arts, it’s alive, sings, and makes music, and I hug myself because of the truth it whispers to my soul."

Erikson died shortly after writing the above, but you can see her on YouTube. You can sense that she to a significant extent lived what she wrote. Her legacy was not a developed theory but exciting hints at what one might be like.

Viktor Frankl, in _Man’s Search for Meaning_ argues persuasively that open-hearted responsiveness to suffering is a principal component of a meaningful life. (The other two components are achieving and experiencing.) Can this be somehow combined with the benign detachment of gerotranscendence? Lipsky, in _Trauma Stewardship_ brilliantly faces the challenge of a related issue – how can workers on the front lines of intervention into traumatic situations avoid burnout? Her book is lovingly organized common sense, peppered with hilarious New Yorker cartoons. One source of Lipsky’s inspiration was Thich Nhat Hanh’s development of engaged buddhism to struggle against the Vietnam War while maintaining a core of equanimity. Nhat Hanh wrote her a wonderful endorsement, "Reading this book is like looking into a mirror."

What kind of suffering might we elderly be particularly called to respond to? We are subject to diminishment in areas such as life-expectancy, predictability of the future, physical and mental strength, and pleasantness of appearance and feelings (pain becomes more common). Frequently people who experience diminishment in some area irrationally generalize to their worth as persons. This is the problem of toxic shame or internalized oppression. How about we elderly using our intimacy with diminishment, our freedom that comes from "nothing to lose" and our spirituality to liberate first ourselves from toxic shame and then fighting to liberate humanity? We can take heart from Gandhi, who wrote: "I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings, and affronts levelled at them, in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them from that miserable condition."

Consider the case of Lillian Rubin. She is a radical sociologist and psychotherapist who fought long for human dignity and social justice. It is poignant that in _60 on Up_, written in her eighties, she admits resignation to affliction by toxic shame: "... old people are revolted by themselves. I look at my naked body, at the flesh that hangs from my upper arms, the breasts that droop, the belly that bulges, and I experience a small shock, a shiver of disgust. I turn away, wanting to cover myself as quickly as possible...."

Rubin does not find help in spirituality. But I think there exists a spirituality that can invite corrective emotional experiences that liberate one from such slavery – a liberation theology! (I believe in God as a powerful metaphor, not as a Being Who could have prevented the Holocaust but for some reason chose not to.)

From Rubin’s description we see that being old can feel like being fat often does. Overeater’s Anonymous (in which I participated for several years), at its best, can heal its members from toxic shame. How does it do this? It has a spirituality that invites its members to think of themselves as made in the image of God, and a correlative slogan, "God does not make junk!" In its 11th and 12th steps it encourages its members to live with gratitude, love and compassion, and in its meetings to support themselves by supporting others. When people are sharing intense lovingkindness their faces become radiant with physical beauty. They are seen with eyes of love rather than with eyes of judgment. The Quakers speak of "holding someone in the Light." Blemishes fade in that Light.

12-step programs, which in their featuring powerlessness and anonymity tend to serve the patriarchy, are hardly an answer to overeaters’, seniors’ or the world’s problems, but aspects of them are helpfully suggestive. 　


Dorothee Soelle was a deep and powerful contributor to liberation theology -- yet, in her autobiography, _Against the Wind_, she recounts self-alienated distress at her loss of briskness due to age: 
 
When I climb stairs at my slow pace, I realize that I have become older.  I am afraid of slowing down.  When I cannot jump I become impatient with myself.  That is because I am brisk and feel a certain affection for everything that is agile, like mountain streams, little girls skipping rope.  I ask myself, how does one go about living more slowly, having time, becoming lighter? I would like to learn a bit more about that and find another relationship with time.  At the moment, growing old means for me that my impatience grows with me.  I hope that I may still learn to deal with this without entirely losing myself in the phenomenon of feeling ill or weak.
 
I would say to her: “Dorothee, 'how does one go about living more slowly?' is the wrong question.  A better question is: 'how can I continue to rejoice in the agility of mountain streams and little girls skipping rope now that age has deprived me of the ability to move briskly myself?'”
 
Dorothee’s gift of being particularly responsive to the brisk and agile in the world’s dance is an instance of those “talents” spoken of in the Gospel's parable – talents which are “death to hide.”  Judaism gives prominence to this theme.  Martin Buber: “By no means ... can it be our true task, in the world into which we have been set, to turn away from the things and beings that we meet on the way and that attract our hearts; our task is precisely to get in touch, by hallowing our relationship with them, with what manifests itself in them as beauty, pleasure, enjoyment.  Hasidism teaches that rejoicing in the world, if we hallow it with our whole being, leads to rejoicing in God."  Our particular delights as unique individuals have special spiritual significance.  In our uniqueness we are each made in the image of God, Who is unique rather than generic. 
 
Dorothee’s autobiography concludes with her contribution to a broadcast series in the form of a letter to her children on “what really counts in life.”  She stresses that to connect with God one does not need organized religion – she beautifully declares that God can be found “at the sea and in the clouds, in the candle, in music, and of course, in love.”  She continues, “Without grounding in the ground of life, this true joy is not there, and our joy is then focused always on occasions and things.  True joy, the joy of life, the happiness of being alive is not the joy that arises because there are strawberries....”
 
Strawberries are not my favorite fruit, but if they were I hope I would heed Buber’s injunction not to turn away from them. 

 

As well as a life-affirming spirit, my New Path requires humility and fosters empowerment. How can one do one’s personal best in the face of diminishment? Here we can learn from those who have nobly coped with other adversities, ones that are as complex and severe as aging or more so. I place humility before empowerment to stress the importance of eschewing demands for mastery that are uncompassionate or unsustainable. Frankl is good on this. One ingredient in his ability to survive Auschwitz was taking to heart the lesson of the story of Death in Teheran which he recounts in his book:

A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, "Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?" "I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran," said Death.

Sometimes the best decision is let fate take its course.

My New Path is congruent with the Serenity Prayer, whose spirituality also places humility before empowerment: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

　

With the value of humility established, we can now turn to considering empowerment – but empowerment in the service of what? I agree with Frankl on the importance of discovering/creating one’s personal mission(s). (These may change over time.) Writing this essay is part of my personal mission to contribute to humanistic gerontology. Here a specific area where I have some background (one of the most difficult challenges of aging), is coping with cognitive decline.

In 1998, after a year of alarming cognitive decline, I was diagnosed at UCLA with Alzheimer’s. (Currently my neuropathologic situation is unclear.) Although afflicted by forgetfulness, fatigue and disorganization I retained considerable intellectual ability, and got the idea that holistic neuropsychological rehabilitation for traumatic brain injury might be adaptable for Alzheimer’s despite its progressiveness. In the Nun Study, ".. 8% of participants with the most severe spread of Alzheimer disease pathology ... did not show any symptoms of memory impairments." (Snowden, _Annals of Internal Medicine 139 (5)_, 2003). This and other evidence indicates that Alzheimer’s pathology should be viewed as a stressor rather than a sentence of doom. Along these lines I published "Dementia Survival–A New Vision" in _Alzheimer’s Care Quarterly_ (Apr.-June, 2003). My work contributes to my optimism about psychosocial intervention in cognitive decline and more generally in the challenges of aging.* 　

　

No matter how splendidly we respond to the challenges of aging, Death will have the last word. I agree with a lot of thinkers that it is valuable to come to terms with death. (Buddha said, "Of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.") Here are my personal reflections: 　

I believe we are part of nature, and that whatever happens after death will be natural. It will be similar to what happens to conscious animals like dogs, dolphins, bonobos after death. I believe that in responding to the sufferings of animals we probably have a valid intuition regarding what quality of life is preferable to death. In tragic circumstances we have the right to choose death over a life with little quality.

I don’t believe in heaven or karma. I believe that chance plays a significant role in the universe.　I do not believe in a continued individual existence.　

Maybe the hereafter will be in a way like a leaf becoming compost, or a wave after hitting the shore, or a candle being extinguished. I believe that nature is largely benign. If it seems "red in tooth and claw" that is because survival requires us to have an innate tendency to pay attention to threats. Nevertheless we children of Nature can and should judge our Parent as flawed. I agree with those who assert that thinking about death can enhance the quality of life, making its colors glow against a dark velvet background. Of course, this enhancement requires the ability to put thoughts of death aside. But I don’t see that as especially difficult.

Death gives shape to life, like the hole does to the doughnut.　Death is not an evil, although untimely death is. (Analogously, pain that warns one to protect a wound is not evil, although chronic pain is.)

Despite chaos and entropy we have the capacity to produce noble deeds, just as water can crystallize into beautiful snowflakes or clouds can produce rainbows. Clouds should not be blamed if they fail to produce rainbows, although the thoughts and feelings that constitute blame are natural and have a degree of usefulness.

I like this poem quoted in Soelle, _The Mystery of Death_:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the gleam of diamonds in the snow,
I am the sunlight on ripe grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the gently rising rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the gentle stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there; I did not die.

Of course the poem does not mean that you shouldn't be sad.　Rather, it speaks of an admixture of something beyond sadness.　

In sum, aging is an adversity, but I don't see it as essentially different from other adversities. Life has all sorts of challenges but it has many opportunities for confronting them nobly or effectively. Age can make life shorter, more uncertain, more painful, less productive, but compared to being in the Warsaw Ghetto it's generally a piece of cake. Among the most inspiring books I've ever read are Israel Gutman, _Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising_ and Joseph Rudavsky, _To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity: Spiritual Resistance in the Ghettos and Camps_. The victims have given us a wonderful legacy of human dignity and life-affirmation. How can we apply it to aging?

Another source of inspiration for me is Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers. "Outspoken and fiercely determined in her activism, Kuhn refused to bow to convention in her personal life as well." I wish to build on her work, with particular attention to empowering persons with cognitive limitations (a cause that was beyond her scope). This is in the service of abolishing toxic shame no matter where it dwells. "The stone that the builders rejected shall become the chief cornerstone." (Psalm 118).

One way to approach the question of “What shall I do with the rest of my life?” is to ask “How do I want to be remembered?”  For me the answer is: “I want to be remembered as a mensch, that is, as someone who was both a good person and an interesting individual.”  Here Maggie Kuhn and Joan Erikson are exemplary.  And in the area of combating toxic shame I find inspiration in a wonderful Talmudic legend: 
 
One day Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi was meditating near the entrance to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, in the Galilee, when he had a spontaneous mystical vision in which he encountered the prophet Elijah.  He used the opportunity to ask Elijah a number of important questions, including “when will the Messiah come?”  Instead of answering Rabbi Yehoshua’s question, Elijah suggested that he go and ask the Messiah himself.  Rabbi Yehoshua expressed wonderment as to where he would find the Messiah and how he would recognize him, and so Elijah instructed him to go to the entrance of the gates of Rome and there he would find the Messiah sitting among the poor, the sick, and the wretched.  How would he tell the Messiah apart from the others?  While all the others are busy untying all their bandages and then retying them all at once, the Messiah will untie and rebandage each wound separately (one at a time), saying to himself: “Should I be wanted, I must not be delayed.” Elijah then took Rabbi Yehoshua on a mystic vision to the gates of Rome, where the rabbi encountered the Messiah and asked him when he would be coming.  The Messiah replied simply, “Today!” whereupon Elijah explained that “today” refers to a passage from Psalm 95: “If only you would heed His voice.” 

 

Earlier in this essay I noted that (literal and metaphorical) strawberries are things we may be obligated to rejoice in.  This mitzvah (sacred act) is sometimes surprisingly difficult, and deserves a webpage Strawberries of its own.


________________________

*Wilson et al., _Neuropsychological Rehabilitation: Theory, Models, Therapy and Outcome_ presents the sort of holistic intervention that can be adapted for Alzheimer’s. I believe its spirit of skillful means in the service of healing and empowerment where there is severe and complex trauma can be broadly extended to all those afflicted by diminishment.