Invisible Elders

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

October 21, 2007 

      A couple of years into his seventies, the surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland was playing tennis with his son.  “Hey, Pops,” the younger man said.  Don’t you think your legs are getting a little too skinny for those little shorts?” 

      Vanity is as good a reason as any, Nuland says, to begin taking better care of yourself.  Within a week he had joined a gym, and within a year he had strengthened himself more than he had imagined possible at his age.  This experience became part of his research for The Art of Aging, a 2007 book profiling people who have grown into their later years with good health, vigor, mental alertness, and joy.  Speaking with people like his mentor Dr. Michael DeBakey, who at 98 still practiced medicine at a pace that would leave most younger people exhausted, he sought the qualities that made their aging into a culmination of their lives rather than the beginning of a decline into death.   

      Nuland concludes that we are most likely to age with more grace and dignity if we attend well to the health not only of our bodies and our minds, but also of our emotional and spiritual lives.

      His own experience as well as research has convinced Nuland that vigorous exercise that includes weight training and aerobics will add years to our lives, as well as allowing us to enjoy the years we have much more.  He argues strongly for good basic health habits such as not smoking, enjoying food and drink in moderation, and making regular visits to healthcare professionals whose advice we then diligently follow.

      With the needs of our bodies thus cared for, he turns to our inner lives, and finds that we are more likely to live long and rich lives when our relationships with families, partners, and friends remain strong, and when we keep ourselves engaged in the life of the world, committed to some idea, activity, or group that enlarges our focus beyond our personal comfort or the needs of our own daily living. 

      Above all, Nuland says our older years are made happier and healthier if we can develop a sense of equanimity—sense of peace with what life brings our way.  We should not deny our changing abilities as we grow older or pretend that we are still young, he says, but be calm in spirit as we learn to work within the changing limits aging our bodies allow.

      Unlike exercise, though, we can’t decide at seventy to make up for a lifetime of living in isolation and self-focus by suddenly turning our attention outward.  There’s no gym we can join to stretch our atrophied spirits once or twice a week with a good coach.  We need to start young, developing in our young adult years the kind of enduring connections that will see us through a long life, and learning the skill of living out deep commitments to causes larger than our own personal well-being.

      It’s my good fortune to have a regular conversation with a circle of people rich in years who are willing to share with me and each other the experiences of their lives, both past and present, and the perspective they have gained.   This is our Active Minds group, and before I spoke about aging today I thought it would be a good idea to ask for their thoughts. The wisdom they offered on this subject echoes what Nuland has to say about preparing our emotional and spiritual selves for a long and satisfying life.  All of them have long been and still are vigorously engaged with their lives and with friends, families, neighbors, and former or current colleagues.  They are interested in the world, and especially in other people.  “As your friends and loved ones die, you need to make new friends,” one of them said, and avoid “freezing” mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  Many of them speak of the importance of feeling that they are of use, that they have an important task to perform; one of the hardest parts of aging is discovering what that task might be when it isn’t the kind of work or leadership we’ve been doing all our lives.

      For most, some part of their work has become remembering what others around them haven’t ever seen, remembering the times and stories they have lived through.  They have a perspective that can only come with time and experience, and their great task is to pass that perspective on—a task they can only do if we who are younger are willing to hear it.

      When I asked what they would most like to hear from people younger than themselves, their answers centered around acknowledgement—recognition of the realities they live with day-to-day, acknowledgment that their experience has value, and awareness that no matter what their age, they haven’t stopped growing, learning, and needing links and bridges to other people and the world.  They want us to recognize that their emotional life continues with the same reality and intensity as ever, and to connect with them in that life.

 I wonder sometimes how aware we are of the richness of the resources we have in our midst.  Most of the time, it seems to me that our elders invisible to us.  It’s a common Unitarian Universalist feeling that the good life is a life of achievement and accomplishment.  People who disappear from church leadership and pass it along to younger people seem all too often to disappear from church life.  We can fail to observe that there are many ways of being deeply engaged in community, or to respect the perspective and value of those who are no longer actively in the fray.

      Let us learn to see.  Let us learn to be aware of these gifts the years have given our whole community, and let us invite them to do what no one else can do:  To tell us who we have been, so that we might better become who we are and who we may yet be.  These stories have the power to connect us with the longer story of which we are a part. 

      Yet even as we learn to see and benefit from the presence of those rich in years and experience among us, we should be aware that the fact of their presence marks us as a community of privilege.  Though I appreciate Sherwin Nuland’s prescriptions for preparing ourselves to age well, there is privilege in his frame of reference.  Nuland says categorically that everyone can improve their lives by undertaking a rigorous course of physical activity. Everyone, he says, can and should get down to the gym and start working out right now. But this is clearly not true; his sense of “everyone” leaves out many, many people.  As I read about the near-miraculous effects of health-club membership, it suddenly hit me:  where are all the old poor people?  Who can afford to join health clubs?  Who has the financial and medical resources to discover what our personal risk factors are and to begin treating them while we are still young?  Who can take both the time and the expense to maintain the kind of healthy diet and habits that will give us a longer life?  And who cannot?

      I did a little searching, and found that the reality is that race and poverty cause some of us to age more quickly, in worse physical and mental health, and to die sooner than others.  A recent report from the National Institute for Aging celebrated the fact that life expectancy is increasing in our country.  In particular it noted that people who live past age 65 today have a much higher chance of living to their 70’s and beyond than they did even 20 years ago.  What the report doesn’t mention is that this positive statistic does not apply to many, if not mostAfrican American men, who don’t get past 65.  65 is in fact the average life expectancy for African American men.  Average life expectancy for white American men is 73.  The health care that aging people receive is differentiated by economics and race, as well.  A study reported in Milbank Quarterly, a health policy journal, found that among those elders living in nursing homes, poor people and African Americans at all economic levels were much more likely to live in the lowest tier of facilities—those with the fewest licensed and registered nurses, with the poorest records of health-related violations, with the fewest programs for life enrichment. 

      Sherwin Nuland and the wisdom of the Active Minds suggest that in our later years, the fact that we need to draw back from being busy and immersed in the world of work and action is a gift, allowing us the time to develop a deeper perspective on what makes life worth living and to share that perspective with our families and communities. What I realized as I looked at the effects of poverty and racial inequality on aging is that while elders in communities of privilege like ours may become invisible because we younger folks fail to make a place for them, elders in poor communities and communities of color become invisible—because fewer of them survive.  In those communities, which often have a high respect for the perspective and wisdom of age, far too few people live into the time when they can develop and share that perspective and wisdom.

      It is not only the individual lives of older people that are harmed by our tendency to make them invisible—or to let them die.  Their loss is the community’s loss as well.  There is a saying among traditional peoples that when an elder dies, the people suffer because part of our history passes away.  The remedy for that, of course, is to keep our elders among us, telling us our stories, so that we can incorporate their memory into our sense of identity and keep it with us even after they have gone from among us. 

      For a community to live without its elders is to truncate our identity, to allow ourselves to live only in the present moment, which is to fail in part of our unique capacity as human beings to be the tellers of stories who remember what was before and who connect the past with the present and the future.  To live without our elders is to force ourselves to learn anew lessons they might transmit to us with much less painful experience on our part.  It is to risk falling into errors and traps they might have been able to warn us about. 

      To live this way because of our own blindness is a tragic oversight.  To live this way because systemic racism and economic inequality create disparities among human beings with fatal consequences is a sign of cultural injustice and violence that should urge us to action.  In both cases, if elders are invisible we miss a precious part of the beauty and bounty that human life holds out for us.

      It doesn’t need to be so.  We can decide to see the richness of our whole intergenerational community, and to make ourselves part of weaving our elders’ deep and subtle colors into the fabric of our shared life.  And as we heal our own blindness, we can also refuse to accept that being born without economic resources or the privileges of being white should be equivalent to an automatic acceleration of the end of our lives. 

      We can accept that it is a mark of our privilege that we have so many elders among us, and enrich ourselves by taking full advantage of their presence.  But as we do so, let us also commit ourselves to making that privilege part of the life of every community.  Our whole human family needs to be rich in the wisdom that only those with years of experience can give us.  May we be part of making it so.