The Society of Elders

Seniors are bonded together in an informal society through a shared history of life experiences. Even though we may not have met, we often smile as we pass on the street.

We nod with respectful empathy when we see a fellow human being having difficulty walking, using a cane, or being pushed in a wheelchair. Those of us who are relatively able bodied understand that most of the physically challenged were like us once, and that we may be in their shoes some day.

We fully know the meaning of ‘temporarily able bodied’ that the physically disabled use to describe the rest of us.

When I was younger I often looked away in embarrassment, unable to look directly at someone who was struggling. I wouldn’t have known what to do if we’d made eye contact. Now I acknowledge them and wonder what it’s like being them. And I wonder how I’d feel if I were in their situation.

Sometimes I’m curious about what put them in their current state. If we make eye contact and smile, I’ve even struck up a conversation and heard a couple of compelling stories of courageous determination.

We’re an elite group who’ve endured and survived life’s trials and tribulations. Along the way we’ve lost friends and loved ones to natural or accidental death or suicide. We’re happy to be here, but we also miss those that didn’t make it this far.

We’ve lived to tell tales of youthful passions and indiscretions and outlived yearnings to scale fantasized mountains. Maturity taught us that the views from pinnacles often aren’t worth the personal cost of arrival. We understand the adage, “be careful what you wish for – you might get it.”

From our privileged position, we’re bemused by true believers who frantically dash around trying to save the world and themselves from one or another boogey-man or looming catastrophe. We’ve made peace with the crazy notion, learned as two-year olds, that we can’t stand it if the life isn’t fair.

We appreciate the balance in life and in the world. Sometimes we’re appropriately rewarded for our efforts and sometimes not, and fortunately sometimes we don’t fail as miserably as we richly deserved because of our human frailty.

We recognize the supreme values of love and kindness, and are tolerant of others’ pursuits of happiness.

Though our eyesight may be dimmed, our hearing dulled, and our muscles and joints ache, we have a heightened appreciation of the simple pleasures of hearing springtime peepers and anticipating the return of robins.

We’ve found a measure of strength in the problems we’ve survived, the suffering we’ve endured, and confidently face the unforeseeable challenges that lie ahead.

It takes a heap of living to receive the blessings of senior citizenship.

(reprised from 2007)

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I’m not talking about retirement as ending a work career. I’m talking about it as developing a different state of mind after withdrawing from the chaos in the work-a-day world and abandoning unrealized dreams of fame and fortune.

The time before retirement is like planting a germinated seed that will develop roots and a stem capped with a bud. Retirement is the bud’s unfolding for its season of blooming.

I’ve known people who struggled with blooming before dying. This is for those who like guides. The steps don’t have to be fully accomplished in order before moving on, but they put a sense of order in what can be a confusing, stressful time of life.

Step one: Wholeheartedly leave your status and roles in the work-a-day world behind. Join an elite group of peers who’ve also gained wisdom through enduring life’s trials. Accept and trust your intuition as you follow your curiosity. Be flexible. Trust your ability to adjust to an unfolding future. In other words, approach the last half of life like you did the first day of kindergarten.

Step two: Accept the gradual changes taking place in your body and in your mind’s thought processes. Embrace your slowing reaction times and declining strength. Adjust to your reducing tolerance for alcohol and some foods. Prepare for possible changes in balance and coordination and hearing and vision. In other words, respect and live within your changing personal limits.

I took a refresher course for older drivers and changed my driving practices. I fell on the tennis court, with only minor scrapes and bruises. When I nearly fell again the first time I returned to the court, I retired from tennis but kept the same buddies. The fraternity of elders doesn’t coerce or intimidate its members to risk going beyond themselves.

Step three: Appreciate that needs and desires for intimacy, sensuality and sexuality endure for a lifetime. Reflect on beauty and intimacy and what it means to be fully male and female during aging. The ways and means of giving and receiving intimate pleasures can adapt to changing circumstances. Vulnerability, curiosity and openness are important challenges to explore, understand, and deal with.

Step four: Strengthen old and build new relationships by learning to love more freely, openly and fully. Curate virtues of compassion, patience and tolerance. Unload holdover vices like self-imposed isolation, cynicism and fear that corrupt freedom and lead to disappointment and resentment.

Step five: Retirement is in full bloom and ready to be shared with the world. It’s time to live what you love. Serve. Mentor. Create. Pay our ancestors’ debts forward by leaving immortal legacies for future generations.

Step six: As the bloom fades, interests narrow and strength and vigor decline. Now it’s time to become a family patriarch/matriarch and community elder, cherished for your wisdom. With solitude, reflection and learning from other’s your wisdom continues growing.

One challenge is having the courage to speak out when opportunities present themselves. Another is being wise, not cranky and dogmatic.

Step seven: When the bloom is gone it’s time to retreat to a life of contentment, grace and peace. My role model for this step died at 102. After surviving earlier life’s usual tumult and aging’s vicissitudes her motto was happiness is having nothing. She corresponded regularly with her grown children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. While she lived she was the revered repository for family information.

Step eight: The final challenge is saying goodbye and offering blessings to others. Letting go of attachments, death comes naturally.

This is my gift to readers.

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The first part of life has unique joys and senses of accomplishment. It’s filled with nonstop, evolving activities of education, finding a partner and raising a family, and building a career to support physical wants and needs. But the good times can be blunted by existential angst over differing sorts of competition and social, political, career and work-site discord and intrigues.

During that time it’s tempting to occasionally fantasize leaving it all behind to luxuriate in retirement’s freedom and more relaxed pace. But dreamers are unaware that, before they can realize retirement’s rewards, they’ll have to accomplish the confounding task of personal transformation.

Jerry, a casual friend who retired a few months ago from a successful commercial real estate career told me he still meets with his buddies every day at 7AM. After that the days get really long.

His skills in salesmanship and closing deals are neither appropriate or adequate for successfully navigating life’s second half. While adjusting to deteriorating physical and mental skills, he’ll have to cope with life’s twists and turns that may impose irreversible consequences on him. He can’t buy or sell his way out of that situation.

Along with living on pins and needles, his greatest challenge will be finding meaning. Meaning expresses itself as reasons for continuing to live.

Meaning is the soul-renewing force that provides contentment, a feeling of belonging, of being at home in the human family. It satisfies the last half of life’s ultimate goal of making peace with life and preparing for death.

The hunger for meaning is insatiable. Inertia, anxiety over the future, depression and despondency and being negative or hyper critical are spiritually draining. Jerry’s restlessness over his long days is a message from his soul telling him to make something out of his new life.

The quest for second-half meaning flows naturally from the first half’s experiences and interests. By retirement some passions have run their courses. Others await opportunities to bloom. And potential others are nascent ideas waiting to be discovered and developed.

Despite its potential physical limitations, the second half affords opportunities to explore life’s mysteries, with child-like trial and error, while searching for fulfillment and pleasure.

One source of accomplishment comes with fulfilling our natural desire to leave our descendants with a better world. We can’t repay our ancestors for the benefits we received from their investments and sacrifices but we can pay what amounts to a social debt forward by investing in the future.

The concept of paying forward is a human natural trait traceable back to a Greek drama in 317 BC. In a 1784 letter, Benjamin Franklin explained that he had made a loan, not given a gift to the recipient. The debt was to be repaid by passing its benefits on to others. Today the nonprofit Pay It Forward Foundation has distributed over a million pay-it-forward bracelets in 100 countries.

On retirement, my parents watched their friends gradually decline in health and abilities.The expectation was that the elderly would became disabled and despondent and finally welcome death as a relief from life’s suffering.

Our generation has been gifted with better health, fewer incapacities and longer lives. We can pay our debt forward by creating a model of successful aging and better preparation for death for our descendants.

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The divorce is final. After 22 years. We communicate amiably, care about, and want the best for each other. There was no problem dividing up assets and furniture. She got the teakettle and food processor; I got the coffeemaker and toaster. But we couldn’t reconcile our personal styles.

Separation’s acute pain morphed into occasional longing for the unattainable fantasy. Anxious uncertainty evolved into lingering curiosity over how I’m going to shape my future. It was time to revisit places that played significant roles in my adult life to experience the feelings and thoughts they evoke and contemplate how we’ve changed.

I spent a week alone at the Lake Michigan cottage where we’ve vacationed for years. The familiar sights, sounds, and solitude assured me I was doing the right thing. I ventured away from my cocoon to play with the Scottville Clown Band in the historic hamlet of Arcadia, and to play in Pentwater’s Civic Band.

The next week I expanded a return trip to the area for a daughter’s wedding into what I call aimless wandering. I ambled the streets of Pentwater, undergoing gentrification with romantic out-of-towners buying, fixing up and enlarging older homes. There may be more boats in the new marinas than year round village residents.

I planned being there on a summer Thursday so I could play in the band on the Village Green that evening. In its 65th year, the event hasn’t changed: same music, adults sitting on lawn chairs and blankets and greeting each other with handshakes and hugs, kids rolling down the hill and dancing to the music, dogs, popcorn and ice cream. Pentwater has gracefully changed while maintaining its traditional charm. It’s Americana at its finest.

Ludington and I have outwardly changed a great deal since I left over 25 years ago. I’ve slowed down, look aged, and developed a painless, unexplained hitch in my get along. The city has transformed its waterfront with parks, condos and marinas. Wandering the streets felt like being home, though I didn’t know anybody. Having a leisurely dinner with an old friend seemed like I hadn’t left.

The hospital, newly opened when I moved there in 1967, is much larger and more sophisticated today. And the hospice I helped develop is a major resource for the area.

My daughter’s wedding, beside the river at picturesque Barothy Lodge, was a glorious celebration. My kids and grand kids, nieces and nephews and even an ex brother-in-law I haven’t seen for 40 years were there.

Making a last minute change, I decided to stay in Big Rapids rather than risk driving home in weekend traffic. Passing through Baldwin, I noticed that Regional Health Care (RHC), a system I helped design, develop and stabilize in the early 70s, is still operating. Before the War on Poverty and RHC, health and dental care services in Lake County were sketchy at best. Seeing the modern building, hearing about the services delivered there, and thinking about those tumultuous times brought a smile to my face and a warm feeling in my heart.

I was disappointed as I meandered around Big Rapids. There were 500 students when I entered Ferris 65 years ago. Quonset huts and the Alumni Building were the only structures. The President, Deans, faculty and students regularly hung out together in the Coffee Cup across the street. We knew some by their first names; names that now grace buildings. Students lived in rented rooms in private homes or in homes converted into apartments.

After driving around town a bit, and sitting a spell on a bench on the new river walk, I realized there’s nothing in Big Rapids for me to identify and reconnect with now. Ferris and I both realized our dreams. It wanted to grow and expand; there are 15,000 students now and the campus sprawls across the highway. I wanted to go beyond pharmacy and become a physician.

So I left there for the room I’d reserved eight miles, a ten minute drive, and a world apart from the ticky-tacky chains, big boxes and franchise strip malls clinging to Ferris’ skirts. I found a pleasant surprise in the Inn at the Rustic Gate. Two sisters, one a nurse and the other in financial services, and a friend bought an extinct dairy farm and converted it into a B&B and pastoral retreat.

There was one other guest, a friend of theirs. I was invited to join them for an elegant dinner of fresh Greek salad made with fresh garden vegetables, house-made dressing, iced tea and home-made cookies. With several hours of casual, satisfying conversation, I knew I was at the right place.

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I’m sometimes called a Pollyanna because I’m incurably upbeat and believe that if I am true to myself and do what I think is right the future will take care of itself.

Curious, I found Pollyanna, written by Eleanor H. Potter over a century ago, in our local library. Pollyanna was an eleven-year-old living in an orphanage after the death of her father, a minister. Her mother had died several years earlier.

Someone discovered she had an Aunt Polly living in the village of Beldingsville, Vermont. Contacted via the church, Polly reluctantly agreed to have the child she didn’t even know come to live with her.

Beldingsville was a small town, probably pretty much like today. There was poverty, isolation, crabby people who were despondent, squabbles amongst townsfolk and troubled families.

The problem in Pollyanna’s family began when Polly’s 20 year-old sister, destined to become Pollyanna’s mother, chose to marry an idealistic minister instead of the wealthy man the clan preferred. Besides that, Aunt Polly was stranded on the rocks of a love-affair’s spindling miscommunication.

Also in Beldingsville, disabled Ms. Snow stayed in bed all day, every day, with the shades drawn. Her caretaker, whose family depended on the meager earnings, had the impossible task of finding something acceptable to the old woman. John Templeton, who rarely came to town, was a snarky miser living in a mansion on the hill. Dr. Chilton’s life appeared to be contained within the two rooms he rented: an office and adjacent sleeping room. And Pastor Warren’s parish was wracked with petty controversies that were wearing him down and tearing the congregation apart.

People were cautiously civil to one another, but there was precious little “joie de vevre” in Beldingsville. Then along came Pollyanna, named for her aunts, Polly and Anna. With a forlorn sense of duty, Aunt Polly prepared a tiny, sparsely furnished attic bedroom. To keep flies out, the window had to be kept closed.

Polly assumed her duty included teaching Pollyanna the basic skills a future woman would need, like sewing and cooking. But Pollyanna much preferred doing what she called living, exploring and meeting people.

Before long she’d introduced herself to everyone she’d met. She was excited to teach them the “just be glad game” her father taught her. The object was finding something positive in every situation and everyone.

She’d tell people, for instance, that when the Ladies Aid sent packages to the orphanage, she’d once asked for a doll. But the package contained children’s crutches. She decided to be glad she could walk and run just fine and didn’t need crutches. The “glad game” takes lots of practice, she advised. But if you looked long and hard enough, you would find it.

She found that Mr. Pendleton was only crabby on the outside. He was warm and friendly inside. And the reason the town’s seductively dressed, over-cosmetized woman was always fighting with her husband was that they’d not found each other’s good sides. They are always there, she said. You find what you’re looking for.

Before long, everyone she’d met liked Pollyanna. Then one day her youthful enthusiasm got the better of her; she ran in front of a car, was hit, and knocked unconscious. When she awakened, her legs were paralyzed. She spent weeks in bed, wasn’t allowed visitors, and became discouraged.

Her friends came to leave small gifts and messages of how their lives had been changed by the glad game. They wanted her to know they were pulling for her to find something from her accident to feel glad about.

Months later she was glad to find that she’d learned to use her hands to knit and make things for others. A year later she was glad to discover that she could take a few steps. She could hardly wait to see how much further she could walk over time.

Written when my mother was a child, Pollyanna quickly became a children’s classic. I bet she read it. Growing up in poverty, with an absent father, she was nevertheless unabashedly positive.

I don’t remember any specific words, but I became a proud Pollyanna at her knee. I learned to keep my chin up, mind open, find everyone’s good side and search for new opportunities in adverse events.

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Before retirement age the internal glow of happiness can be independent of external circumstances. Despite the gloom and doom during the great 2007-09 economic recession, a Time Magazine survey found that 90% of Americans considered themselves optimistic about their health, finances and relationships.

In one of my favorite stage dramas, according to conventional wisdom, forty-two-year old Shirley Valentine was happy. She is healthy, her children are on their own, she has a stable marriage and a husband with a steady job.

But she was miserable. Fixing dinner and sipping a glass of wine, she was talking to the walls that seemed to be asking why she didn’t just leave. She couldn’t do that, she replied, she wouldn’t know where to go or what to do. A friend calls and invites her on a two week vacation. Free. Leaving dinner on the stove and a note for Joe saying she’d be back, she leaves for Greece.

Sailing with the wind in her hair, surf on her hands and a horizon stretching out forever, she falls hopelessly in love with the idea of feeling alive again. She decides she’s through fulfilling prescribed roles and pretending she’s happy.

Joe comes to rescue her from her insanity. As the play ends she tells him he’s welcome to stay with her in Greece, but she’s not returning to the walking dead wearing masks and sterilely greeting each other.

Reflecting on the play, I wondered how happy my father felt when I was growing up. The oldest of 10 in a desperately poor and often malnourished family, he got his barber’s license while in high school to help feed the family.

We had what I considered a happy, stable middle class life. We felt loved, were comfortable and without want. We lived over Dad’s downtown barbershop in a farming village. He was articulate, had perfect grammar, did crossword puzzles during work-day lulls, and was treasurer of the school board. His hobbies were occasional rounds of golf, Thursday night choir practice and church choir on Sunday.

Daily, he’d trudge downstairs to work at 8 and return after 6. Fridays and Saturdays he stayed open until 8, but it was often much later before he was done. He spent many Sunday afternoons lying on the couch with a headache.

In his 90s, he told me about visiting my mother in Ypsilanti when she was in college. Walking past a barbershop with an open chair, he paused to wonder if he might be able to work there and go to college. “I wonder what could have happened …,” his voice trailed off. There might have been time as my mother’s mother wouldn’t allow her to marry until she obtained her life-teaching certificate.

For over a decade after retiring they had an active social life in Michigan in the summer and in their small Florida mobile home park in the winter. They walked for exercise. He sang in a church choir, continued doing crossword puzzles, played golf regularly and joined a shuffleboard league. He continued playing golf and doing puzzles until developing stroke-related dementia a few months before dying at 95.

Unfortunately, my mother’s story is very different. Retiring a little early, she missed teaching second graders and her Richmond book-study club. Saying she was retired, she stopped driving. Her mind gradually withered and descended into Alzheimer’s. She died strapped to a bed while being tube fed so she wouldn’t suffer the supposed pain of starvation in a Florida nursing home. If she could have seen herself, she would have been mortified. We were horrified.

I believe she began dying not long after retiring. There were few opportunities available then to continue the level of intellectual engagement with life she’d been thriving on.

Masterpiece Living, a nonprofit corporation spawned from Live Long, Die Short, written by Roger Landry, based on research sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, is facilitating communities dedicated to enhancing opportunities for retirees’ lifelong personal growth and development.

Four Pointes, in Grand Haven, Michigan, is a national pilot community-based Masterpiece Living program. The four points are social, physical, intellectual and spiritual wellbeing. With 1700 members and forty-five monthly programs, it promotes the vitality and well being of older adults. Many program ideas come from members.

With aging, the enigma of happiness gives way to the need for continuing satisfaction and contentment from living. In other words, living long and dying short.

My father did that. It’s too bad my mother couldn’t.

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(from 2009)

Gifts of intimacy are bits of private information about personal experiences, thoughts and beliefs, and dreams and fears that are shared in trusting relationships.

People in trusting relationships are privileged to know each other better than few, if any others do. They talk effortlessly about selected topics and willingly reveal sensitive information about themselves. Trusting relationships have spiritual elements that are readily understood, if not easily described.

Giving, humbly receiving and asking for gifts of intimacy requires curiosity, courage, patience and practice. Some in trusting relationships find each other interesting and want to get to know each other better. They bravely ask questions that go beyond superficial conversation.

Intimacy requires patience while listening as a friend struggles to reveal himself. It’s tempting to jump in and finish another’s sentences or thoughts. But an occasional nudge is the most you can do.

And intimacy requires suspending judgment and remembering that the goal is improving understanding between closer than usual friends. It isn’t psychotherapy.

Tom and I are friends and tennis buddies. He’s terribly lonely and hasn’t successfully grieved and transformed himself after his wife’s death 13 years ago. The other day he told me about a problem he’s having with a woman friend who wants to take him under her wing and be his lover, wife and mother.

He’s made it clear he wants nothing more than friendship with her or any woman. But she presses on and is even jealous of his other female friends. When I asked what he likes about her, he broke eye contact, looked up and away and, after a pause, could only say that she’s a nice person who means well. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of their relationship.

Perhaps my question prompted him to appreciate his lack of strong feelings for the woman who would like to save him from himself. If he asks, I’ll tell him that, until he successfully grieves losing his wife, there’s little hope of his forming a sturdy relationship with any woman. I want to be his friend, not therapist.

Intimacy comes naturally in trusting relationships. Through their 30 years of marriage, John and Mary had lived very different lives. He worked in retail; she was a high profile, high energy corporate executive secretary. I’d known her personally and professionally for a number of years.

As he lay dying from cancer in the hospital, she optimistically looked daily for signs of improvement. I wasn’t his physician, but a nurse who knew of Mary’s and my relationship told me he had confided his wish that his wife would accept his situation. She noted that in the chart.

Just then Mary appeared, smiling as always, impeccably quaffed, and asked at the nurses’ station how John was doing. I took her aside, asked if I could show her something, and opened his chart for her.

As she read the nurses note I sensed the wall protecting her from reality crumbling. Her smile faded. The color drained from her face. Looking down, she relaxed her shoulders, slowly exhaled, and softly said, “OK.”

A couple of days later, with her at his side, he died peacefully.

Sharing innermost experiences, thoughts and beliefs, and dreams and fears with trusted others is worth the risk and effort.

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