Tools for the journey

Tools for the journey: How does one go about facing the reality of aging and dying?

I attended a Zoom workshop on aging this past weekend. None of us can avoid the process of aging though the effort to deny it is fierce. I was surprised at how many of the participants in the workshop I attended were most concerned about changes in appearance, especially wrinkles, as the focus of their feelings about growing older. But aging is far more than the appearance of gray hair, of facial wrinkles, of body changes of all kinds, though all of those physical signs are important. 

The process of aging offers ample opportunity to confront and deal with the changes this period brings. As our body changes, our energy diminishes and we witness the passing of time in so many small ways we are often shocked into the awareness that youth is not forever and that death really is on our future “to do” list. Face lifts, makeup, and hair coloring can create the illusion of youth, yes. But take a look at the hands of someone over 60 or so and those hands tell the tale of age that artifice seeks to conceal.

It is hard to avoid the pressures to appear youthful. How often do we see in movies or on television actors, especially women, who look over 40? Confronted with so many images of youth and so few of age, it is easy to fall into feeling that aging is a curse.

But aging also offers us a gift, an opportunity to go deep, to resolve painful issues, to work through regrets, to figure out exactly what we believe and value, and to move to a place of accepting and embracing our lives as we have lived them.

Facing aging can be difficult. It is a gradual process, reluctantly undertaken, for most people. There are practices that can help, that can open this process and assist in confronting and dealing with ourselves growing older. Following are some brief descriptions of practices that can help. Give yourself the gift of facilitating your own journey and take on some of them.

 Quiet: Seek every opportunity to sit in the quiet. Turn down the volume on the external world. Turn down the inner voices that chatter relentlessly. Sit in the quiet and listen. Just listen. As many of us now are more or less confined to home in the face of the pandemic, there is likely ample time for sitting in the quiet of our now much less busy lives.

Deep Breathing: Breath is our life force. When we focus on our breathing it brings our attention back to ourselves, into our bodies and an awareness of the inner world. Focus on the process of breathing and feel the breath of life move through your body. Slow and deepen your breathing, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through the mouth. Feel your mind calm. Allow what thoughts and feelings come arise to surface. Notice them and let them go. 

Journal Writing: Develop a practice of writing about the thoughts and feelings that arise each day. If there are unresolved issues or conflicts bubbling beneath the surface write them. Follow your feelings where they lead. 

Be in Nature: Spend some quiet time outside. Walk more. Turn off the phone and headphones. Listen and observe. 

Meditation: Develop a meditation practice. There are many different types of mediation and meditation methods. Choose one that feels comfortable to you or enlist the help of a meditation class or teacher. Buy a book on how to meditate. There are many meditation apps that can help you develop a practice. I have found the Calm app to be very helpful, but there are others as well. 

These tools are not magic but they can make the work of dealing with growing old and facing the inevitability of death more manageable by making room for that work to be conscious. The image at the top pf this post is of a fading flower. It is the aging of a beautiful deep red amaryllis. It is easy to see the beauty in the vibrant red flower when it first opens. But I was taken by another kind of beauty I saw as the flower faded and slowly died. And so it is with us as we relinquish the beauty of youth for a different kind of beauty, the beauty of age.

Living to Tell the Tale

An older human hand
An older human hand

A few years ago I taught a course at our Senior College called Conversations in the Third Act. Among other things we took photos of our hands, as hands show age in ways we cannot cover up as so many  try to do with the face. This photo is unmistakeable as one of an older person’s hand. It tells the tale of a life lived.

Living to Tell the Tale

The goal of all life, the end point, death, is what lies in front of us. In the third act of life it looms larger than it has before and is much more a part of consciousness. To be fully alive is to know that death lies ahead.

Between here and death, there is work to be done to deal with things left undone, to reconcile ourselves to our past, to seriously consider the story we have been living with an eye especially toward any changes we want to make in the remaining years.

A friend of mine, a woman in her mid-70’s wrestles with the conflict between the desire to do and the body that no longer wants to. And with the bubbling up of creative possibilities that she does not know she can bring to fruition. All of us in the third act are faced with having to prioritize in a new way, to come to terms with the certain knowledge that if there is something we want to do, want to create, we have to get down to work now because time is passing swiftly.

How to wrestle with these issues without succumbing to despair or melancholy and regret is a major concern. What does it mean to become old? What is old — 60? 70? 80? How do we come to terms with a body, a face that is not the face or body I carry in my mind’s eye of myself? How do we make sense of the story we have lived and consider how we want to live the last chapters?

Jung wrote in Memories, Dreams and Reflections:
“Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories”. Whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.”

The story of our lives is our myth. People in mid-life and later often enjoy looking back and spinning yarns about what we have experienced. One thing to keep in mind is that myths tell not so much about the literal part of our lives but how we experience events internally, our perceptions and emotional reactions. These reactions can be radically different from what one might expect based solely on what actually takes place.

Stories are how our ancestors wove the fabric of meaning and existence as they made their way in their lives. Human beings are myth makers, story tellers. We remember ourselves and our lives in stories — stories we tell our friends, family, strangers, ourselves. When someone asks you, “What happened?”,  you construct a story to relay your experience. Memory crystallizes into story.  This is how we attempt not only to portray ourselves in our lives but also to find meaning. Meaning, or the search for it, has always been at the basis of story. Telling stories is the most human of all acts. Exploring our life story not only provides meaning, but also constitutes a celebration of our lives.

Writing your life story is one way of exploring the meaning of your life and an important one. Another is through depth psychotherapy.

 “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” – Brené Brown

In the Third Act

A rose blooms in winter

Almost 12 years ago I taught a course I called Conversations in the Third Act at the local branch of the University of Maine’s life-long learning center. If life is a drama in three acts, then all of us over 50 are in the third act and dealing with a whole new set of issues, questions, and challenges.

In the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and Waning make one curve. ~ C.G. Jung

Coming to terms with the loss of youth and the dawning realization that life is finite is intrinsic to later life. Much has been written about the passage into midlife and we have no doubt all heard of the Mid-Life Crisis. One person may experience the fear of losing control and the sense of self that once worked. Another may feel the fear of further losing areas of self-expression. Frequently, there is the existential fear of mortality and diminishing time, the realization that half of life is gone. And for those of us in our 60s and 70s and beyond, an even deeper recognition of the finiteness of our lives.

It is common  to experience anger or depression in response to lost time and opportunity for more authentic experience. Depression and underlying regret may reflect an emerging sense of emptiness and the superficial relationship to life of the “adapted self.”

These are calls to attend to life issues which have been neglected. As Jung said,

We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning,
for what was great in the morning will be little at evening,
and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

In drama the first act is used to establish the dramatic situation and introduce the main characters. At the end of the first act, an inciting incident complicates the story and moves the screenplay into the second act. — This is childhood through young adulthood, when we set the stage for our lives, choose our work and relationships.

The second act, commonly described as “rising action”, typically depicts the protagonist attempting to solve the problems caused by the inciting incident. The Climax, which ends the second act, is the scene or sequence in which the main tension and dramatic questions of the story are brought to their most intense point. —  This is the time from 35 or so to the 50s even 60, what has classically been known as midlife. At the end of this act, there is a dawning awareness of the end, even though it does not seem imminent.

Finally, the third act features the resolution of the story and its subplots. It is the third act that I have become most interested in, the time I myself now inhabit, This is the time in which life’s loose ends, unresolved plotlines, that is the denouement of life.

I know that I am younger at 72 than my mother was. Already at my age, she was old and seemed to have moved into just waiting for the end. Women become invisible around age 40 when we are seen as faded flowers, no longer attracting the eye of young men. That fading is even greater as we enter this last act of life. We are scarcely seen in movies or on television, in magazines or popular culture. In the last election, Hillary Clinton, younger than Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump or Joe Biden, was sometimes subject to open speculation about whether her age made her a bad choice for President. Men can be elder statesmen in the 70s; women of that age, no matter their accomplishments, are expected to disappear.

But this is a time of great possibilities as well. Look at me — I published my first book just 2 years ago . If you have HBO, watch Grace and Frankie — women in their 70s who are filled with ideas for new things to do, new businesses to launch while their husbands believe they must surrender to age and retire. 

There is work to be done in this act. It is our last opportunity to make revisions to this story we living, the last chance to reconcile holes in the plot and to move the story forward to its inevitable end.

No Going Back

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are

that possibility you were.

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

You have become a sort of grave

containing much that was

and is no more in time, beloved

then, now, and always.

And so you have become a sort of tree

standing over the grave.

Now more than ever you can be

generous toward each day

that comes, young, to disappear

forever, and yet remain

unaging in the mind.

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

 ~ Wendell Berry ~

Time is on my mind

My daughter texted me today to ask me when she had her measles vaccination. She will be 43 this year so it was a long  time ago. Except that in old age, distant events sometimes feel more recent than last year. A trick of time and memory that lends a vividness to long ago. 

I dream about a little boy and in associating to it in an effort to reveal and understand what my psyche is telling me about my life today, I have a very vivid memory of walking with my son when he was 3. I can feel his hand in mine as we walk along the street and I can almost hear his stream of commentary about things  he sees. Yet that day was forty years ago. 

In another dream I see my grandmother’s kitchen, a room I have not seen in more than sixty years.

How can it be almost 20 years since that Fourth of July weekend when I flew to Detroit to meet the man I am now married to? A vivid image of the fireworks I could see from the window of the plane as I flew back to Maine and feeling they were for me, celebrating what I felt after that wonderful weekend.

Another dream: Pauline sends me a suitcase with gifts for me and another person important to us. Sent from beyond perhaps as she is dead.

People long dead. Places I have not seen in decades. My little boy with a little girl of his own now. My daughter who posts pictures of dinner parties she throws. 

I am almost 73 now. I look in the mirror and see an old woman. My dreams bring me myself as a girl. A young mother. And I am aware of the reality that the time left to me is steadily shrinking. Even as it stretches backward, I feel time speeding by rapidly.

It is spring. The lilacs have nubbins of greenleavesnow. The maples have swelling buds. Tulips and daffodils up in the garden. My town has a project to plant a million daffodils all over town, 100,000 per year. Nine more years to go. I wonder if I will be here to see them all.

Take a look if you will at the post, Dream Time, by my Twitter friend, Martha Crawford. You will be glad you did.