We are never old to ourselves.

Some Eigenheimers ca. 1902

At Blackstrap Lake

“There has never been a person in an old people’s home that hasn’t looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.” (Barry, Sebastian: The Secret Scripture, p. 177)

I frequently mark passages in books I’m reading—if they’re my books—or I write page numbers and paragraph numbers on a slip of paper if I’m reading a borrowed book. The passage above struck me as pungent enough for marking; I have three siblings in nursing homes so I’m frequently among people who belong to “the club that no one wants to join,” to quote Barry.

It’s true, you know. The ship we sail in is a soul ship, not a body ship. Failing to understand how that works is at the core of our misunderstanding of the people who have had no choice but to join the club that no one wants to belong to. As do many of you, I have occasionally contemplated the meaning of my own possible future membership . . . not without considerable trepidation. Will people assume that my mind and soul have deteriorated along with my creaking body, or will there be people that realize that in my soul, I’m no older than I was when I was capable of running a mile, cooking a big dinner or chairing a board meeting?

I don’t mean that we remain up-to-date, hip if you will. Our souls may have been formed in an earlier time and the learning may not always have kept up with progress around us. But that doesn’t mean that club members lose their feeling of being people becoming, of being actors on the stage of life. The soul ship is always new, its sails always bright and trim, its decks always freshly varnished and clean.

Is this true? Is the discarding of the old then a crime against young souls? I’m not sure. I’m not sure because I don’t know what a soul actually is other than our consciousness and there are too many in the club I visit regularly whose consciousness is being usurped by the same processes that are ravaging their bodies. Dementia, we call it, the inability to capture the horses of memory that break out of their stalls and dance like banshees through our thoughts. Now here, now there, untamed and chaotic.

But then, even the very confused may still be “young,” may still be sailing in a soul ship whose course is recognizable only to them.

I just don’t know.

But this I do know. As I walk through the institution which is now home to one fourth of my family, I can feel the longing in the short conversations with residents. “Please don’t put me in the club, talk to the young person inside me. Sit beside me and we will talk like we did in the olden days. I am still here in this tired body.”

Two observations occur: Talk to the young person inside the old body and as you yourself age, don’t let the world shunt you into that club to which no one wants to belong. Nurture your young person, in other words, and never retire. Start something new instead.  

We are never old to ourselves.

For I am involved . . .

 "Full fathom five thy father lies . . ."

 EMC Cemetery on Highway 312

A host of good friends came over a few days ago to celebrate—or mourn—my passage of the three-score-and-ten millstone . . . er, milestone. It was a great party with enough gag gifts and cards and just as many of the warm, well-wishing kind to melt anyone’s heart, even that of a 70-year old curmudgeon (which, I suspect, doesn’t truthfully describe me). A friend reminded me that it wasn’t a significant date at all; that I’d actually begun my 70^th year a year ago. The jury is still out on whether or not that’s a distinction without a difference. A card I received said “Age is just a number . . .” and inside “. . . and yours happens to be a pretty big one!”

               My Blackberry Playbook told me the very next morning that Christopher Hitchens, renowned journalist, polemicist and irritating anti-religionist, had died of esophageal cancer at age 62. (It might be fair to say that he smoked himself to death—his consumption of cigarettes was said to peak at 130 per day.) You may know Hitchens from his best-selling diatribe against all religion: God is not Great, published in 2007.

               One day later, an acquaintance and sister of a near neighbour died peacefully at 104. Her very last thought—her sister told me—was about the imminent reunion with her mother.

               It’s been a week of passages and numbers and conversations about passages and numbers.

               I’m currently reading the diary of Jacob Klaassen, early minister in the Eigenheim Mennonite Church, and I’m learning from him what thoughts were raised by passages experienced in the 1920s. In my last reading, his good friend and brother-in-law, David Toews, survives a house fire in which his four year-old daughter dies; a teenage boy dies on the operating table in Rosthern from an overdose of chloroform and a man in Neuanlage is killed in a threshing accident. Jacob Klaassen mourns these deaths with understated poignancy, and usually adds something like a quotation from Psalm 39:4: “Show me, LORD, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is.”

               There are echoes in Klaassen’s diary of John Donne’s “Meditation 17” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, later published as the poem, “No Man is an Island.”

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

               Then there’s that other view of death from the pen of William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar: Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their deaths / The valiant never taste of death but once." Julius Caesar (II, ii, 32-37). In other words; why should the fear and anticipation of old age and death characterize us? Death will come when it will come. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s characters leaned toward predestination, both in the inevitability and the timing of significant events.

               I believe more in the significance of influences around us and their effects on critical constructions in our minds: more simply put, if my experiences and thoughts circle increasingly around aging and death, I can easily come to see the world as characterized by aging and death. The reverse, of course, is also true: if I remain fixed as much as possible on deliberate, ongoing participation in the events of the world, that will be the world view for which I will be known and by which I will continue to know myself. But as a TV ad says: “Good luck with that.”

Don’t retire; retool. The universe exists in your head.  

Next week, I hope we can all joyfully get on with it, whatever “it” is, as another ad says.

                

              

              

I Will Wear my Trousers Rolled

 Endings

Beginnings

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--

(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!")

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--

(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")

I’ve had occasion recently to revisit T.S. Eliot’s masterful stream-of-consciousness poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and since several of the lines are currently impressed like skipping tracks of a vinyl disc in my head, I decided to ease the repetition by writing a bit about that whole subject—aging and the reflection on the meaning of what we have been.

In my case, the “with a bald spot in the middle of my hair” would be understatement—by quite a bit—and “how his arms and legs are thin” could be replaced with “how his midriff is preceding him,” but I recall how my father’s clothes were all too big on him when he reached three score and ten, and I can empathize with Prufrock.  Besides his hypersensitivity about his changing appearance, Prufrock is plagued by world-weariness, the “why bother” syndrome; why keep up the rituals of coffee times and repetitive, mundane, silly conversations:

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

Being “elderly” grants permission to be honest, frank, impolite if necessary when faced with the same-old, same-old of conversation for conversations sake, but will one have the courage?

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

But knowing finally that we have settled for “shallow” in a universe that cries for “depth” may not be of much use when the truth of the matter finally comes home to roost:

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worthwhile,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question . . .?

There must be a word for that; I think it’s part regret, part too late and part would it have made any difference. Perhaps the right word is ennui.

            Whereas old age used to be an arm’s-length, somewhat mythical phenomenon belonging to a culture that was not mine, I now live in its midst. I have come to appreciate what has been called the wisdom of age in, for instance, my 98-year old neighbour who recently bought herself a new house and asked me a few days ago to help her locate the biography of Mahatma Gandhi’s wife because she’s interested in the life of that forgotten woman. And I’ve seen its opposite, the interminable assembly of jigsaw puzzles in seniors’ centre foyers, the tedious search for tiny pieces of the universe that will fit, and the exultation when a picture that was scattered has been made whole. What a metaphor!

            And yet, it’s hard to assign blame to whatever sadness accompanies old age for many people. My mother-in-law lamented as she approached 90 that all her bosom friends were dead. That recognition alone must be daunting to even the strongest among us. I’ve seen the powerful need to grasp whatever intimacy is left in the world in people in nursing homes and seniors’ centres. I’ve seen how their eyes light up with the hope that my entrance will mean someone to talk to, someone to attend to their existence.

Our institutions for the elderly are wrong, somehow. Like our prisons and hospitals, they group people with similar needs together and isolate them from the population. The reason for this might be obvious; we are so afraid of being old, sick and/or terrified of deviance that we can’t stand to be reminded of our fragility by seeing aging, by seeing illness, by seeing the variety of hurts and angers that combined to make criminals. (I’m exaggerating for effect, here.) Or else we just couldn’t possibly find the manpower to service their needs except we house them close together.

Resignation is the ubiquitous option, isn’t it? I find the penultimate lines in Prufrock as compelling as any in modern poetry:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Perhaps that’s the inevitable finale: I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .. Resignation? Acceptance? Feeble excuse?

Take your pick.

Eat a peach.

My Great grandparents, Mr. & Mrs. Jacob D. Epp, ca. 1860

When I am an Old Woman, I shall Wear Purple. The book was published in 1987 by Papier-Mache Press, and is an anthology of poems, essays and stories about getting/being old. The title piece was written by Jenny Joseph and includes some memorable lines on the subject: “I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired/And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells/And run my stick along the public railing/And make up for the sobriety of my youth.”

What will we do when we are old (like tomorrow) to make one last attempt at flair, particularly if we never dared to be ourselves in the public square before? Will we be 80 before we “learn to spit?”

I chatted with the owner of an auto repair shop this afternoon as the insurance assessor was analyzing the dent I’d stupidly put in our brand-new Ford Focus. We got around to the subject of age and nursing homes when I told him that my mother-in-law’s cousin had died two days ago . . . at age 105. “We haven’t gone to the nursing home since my mother died,” he said. “My wife’s afraid of death.”

“Aren’t we all,” I replied.

“Oh, but she’s different. She chooses denial as a way of dealing with it, and nursing homes make her very uncomfortable.”

We watched a few episodes on video of the British sitcom, Waiting for God, with friends on Sunday evening. It’s set in a retirement home and concerns an aging man and woman living next door to each other. She’s playing out a cynical last act to a cynical life, and he’s compensating for his frustrations by taking trips of fantasy into a world of adventure, romance and grandeur, a life as different as is imaginable from his forty years as a functionary in a large accounting firm. Together, they find new ways to be old. They are two people who in their final years begin to dare to “ . . . go out in slippers in the rain/And pick flowers in other people’s gardens . . ..”

I don’t want to romanticize old age, anymore than I want to perpetrate the myth of the noble savage or energetic youth. At the same time, I want to keep in mind that although aging bodies decay and gradually fail, they are often the vessels for “young” souls and minds betrayed by the perverse cynicism of mortality.

Driving to Edmonton a few weekends ago, it suddenly occurred to me that I would turn 70 on my next birthday. I told Agnes that I’d just done the math and it felt like I’d lost a year of my life somewhere between Lloydminster and Vermilion. She corrected me, of course, and I realized that I’d taken 2011 as the current year (I’d just worked on some budget figures for 2011 at the Station) and just beyond Vermilion going west, I got my year back.

“ . . . I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.

When I a old - a reflection

When I am Old – a reflection^©

By George Epp

An article in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix today related the story of a former executive and dedicated church worker who in recent years has sunk into a form of dementia that has robbed him of his self concept, his behavioural judgment, his conversational ability and severely affected his memory functioning. He’s about my age.

According to his wife, he fixates on three objects obsessively: his wallet, his palm pilot and a T-shirt with Christ on the cross and the statement “Jesus Christ: Rebel with a Cause” emblazoned across the front. The T-shirt was what he wore while doing street work with homeless and destitute people.

After I had read this, I began to wonder what objects I would fixate on, given such a condition.

Did the wallet obsession spring from the fact that his working life had focused on profit/loss, budgeting, money matters, etc.? Did the palm pilot receive his continuous attention now because he had lived to the calendar and the clock, and had always had appointments to honour and deadlines to meet? Did the T-shirt symbolize his sense of duty to his Christ, and the great commission of which he had felt his life to be a part?

Were those three symbols distillations of the core and essence of his life?

On what, then, would I fixate? Would I sit at this keyboard pecking away at keys randomly, no longer able to tell one from the other? Would I carry a book around with me wherever I went, unable to read it but frantic without it? What would it say on my T-shirt? “Volunteer – RJC Centennial?” “Carlsbad and District Habitat for Humanity?” (Those are the only T-shirts I have with slogans on them.)

My sister suffered a major assault on her brain in the form of a cerebral aneurysm on Boxing Day. Since then, she has struggled to regain her mobility and mastery of her thought processes. It’s been hard going. One day I sat with her in the hospital and noticed how she examined the sheet with which she was covered in minute detail. She has always been a can-do kind of person, and I judged that her careful examination of the fabric, the seams, the hemming and the worn condition were connected to the memories of her life residing in her muscles and brain that the onslaught hadn’t been able to erase.

Since then, she has made fantastic progress. Her conversation and the things she notices reflect the tenor of her life, I’m sure, even though we sometimes have a hard time following her conversation. At other times, she seems well . . . and getting better.

If dementia ever overtakes me, I hope I fixate on family pictures more than on my wallet. I hope that I carry books around, not clocks or lottery tickets. I hope I eschew T-shirts all together, and feel most at home in a plain old shirt, with a tie, possibly. I hope I wear pants.

The man’s wife, naturally, was living her days in deepest mourning for the man who was leaving her without . . . leaving her. That’s one of the great sorrows of aging, and always will be.