LYDIA SOHN JUNE 4, 2019
I have a great privilege of working with
people who are double and even triple my age. This is not the case for many, as
the workforce is stratified.
My preconceptions about older people first began
to crumble when one of my congregants, a woman in her 80s, came into my office
seeking pastoral care.
It is a strange and wonderful feature of my job
that I get to be a confident and advisor to people at all stages of life. She
had been widowed for several years but the reason for her distress was not the
loss of her husband. It was because she had fallen in love with a married man.
As she shared with me her story over a cup of
tea and kleenex, I tried as much as possible to keep a professional and
compassionate countenance, though, internally, I was bewildered by this
realization that people still fall in love in that teenage,
butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of way even into their 80s.
I have a great privilege of working with people
who are double and even triple my age. This is not the case for many as the
economic structure and workforce are stratified in that people are employed
within their own demographics.
But because I am a minister in a mainline
denomination with an aging base, the people I primarily interact with are over
the age of 60.
I came into my job assuming that I, a
Korean-American woman in my mid-30s, would not be able to connect with these
people from a completely different racial and cultural background. It did not
take long for me to discover how very wrong I was.
We all have joys, hopes, fears, and longings
that never go away no matter how old we get. Until recently, I mistakenly
associated deep yearnings and ambitions with the energy and idealism of youth.
My unconscious and the unexamined assumption was that the elderly transcend
these desires because they become more stoic and sage-like over time. Or the
opposite: they become disillusioned by life and gradually shed their vibrancy
and vitality.
The initial realization that my assumptions
might be wrong set me on a trajectory of further researching the internal lives
of older people. Using my congregation as a resource, I interviewed several
members in their 90s with a pen, notebook, a listening ear and a promise to
keep everyone anonymous.
The
interviews
I did not hold any of my curiosity back and
asked them my burning questions about their fears, aging, sex lives or lack
thereof. Fortunately, I had willing participants, many of whom were flattered
that I was so interested in them as American society tends to pay less attention
to people as they age.
I began each conversation by asking if they had
any regrets. By this point, they have lived long enough to look at their lives
from a very broad perspective so I knew their responses to this question would
be insightful.
Most of their regrets revolved around their
family and how they wish relationships, usually either with their children or
between their children, turned out differently.
These relational fractures, I could see on their
faces, still caused them much pain and sorrow. One of my interviewees has two
children who have not seen or spoken to one another for over two decades. She
lamented that this, among all the mistakes and regrets she could bring to mind,
was the singular thing that kept her up at night.
I then moved onto the topic of the happiest
times of their lives. Every single one of these 90-something-year-olds, all of
whom are widowed, recalled a time when their spouses were still alive and when
their children were younger and living at home.
As a busy young mom and working professional who
frequently fantasizes about the far away, imagined pleasures of retirement, I
quickly responded, “But weren’t those the most stressful times of your lives?”
To which they all agreed. There was no hesitation though, that those days were
also the happiest.
“The
U-bend of Life”
Their responses intrigued me as it contradicted
the well-known article on happiness in The Economist that went viral
in 2010, “The U-bend of
Life”.
This was a common topic of conversation among my
family and friends during this time as it had a particular resonance with
people in both its counter-intuitive yet completely reasonable analyses.
The theory of the U-bend came about as
researchers discovered consistent findings from independent research projects
on happiness and well-being all over the world.
That is, happiness, pleasure and enjoyment are
most tenuous during the middle-ages of life, starting in the 20s with
depression peaking at 46, which the author described as “middle-age-misery.”
The happiness of peoples’ youth however, not
only returned but were experienced in higher levels in their 70s.
Researchers hypothesized that middle-age-misery
was due to the overwhelming number of familial, professional and financial
demands during these years and that people became more self-accepting, less
ambitious and more mindful of living in the present moment instead of the
future as people approached their 70s.
My interviewees’ contradicting thoughts on the
happiest times of the lives led me to reflect upon the complex nature of
happiness and possibly the changing understanding of happiness as people age.
When we are younger, perhaps we think of happiness as a feeling than a state of
fulfillment, meaning or abundance, which my interviewees were associating it
with.
Regardless, their responses came as a sobering
reminder for me to fully appreciate and soak in these chaotic days of diaper
changes, messiness and minimal me-time. They may just end up being my happiest
times.
Love,
family, and relationships
Another subject I was dying to know about was if
their spouses of many decades were the loves of their lives. As it turns out,
this was true for some and not for others. In both cases, it did not keep them
from trying to make their marriages work.
I got the sense from what they were sharing that
after they had children, their marriages became much less important to their
happiness than the overall nuclear family dynamic.
This focus upon the family unit, however, did
not mean that their sexual and romantic passion went away. They still longed to
be wooed and pursued. They still experienced intense attraction to people who
were not their spouses and continue to experience intense attraction for other
people to this day.
Of course, sex becomes more tiresome, as well as
masturbation, but the desire for companionship is as present as it was during
the height of their youth.
On
beauty and aging
My interviewees’ thoughts on beauty and their
aging bodies were also varied in that their changing physical appearances only
mattered insofar as it mattered to them when they were younger.
Those who were valued for their good looks or
athleticism experienced much more grief in regards to their current bodies than
those who derived confidence from admirable qualities that were much less
time-fixed.
A great example of this is one interviewee who
was well-known in her community for being a writer and columnist in local
newspapers. When I asked her if she was saddened by her aging appearance, she
responded, “Well, I never thought I was pretty to begin with so, no.”
The ones who did experience greater negative
emotions about aging though, shared that the peak of that grief occurred in
their 70s and has diminished since then.
It’s
not the death, it’s the dying
The same woman who told me she wasn’t bothered
by her aging appearance also shared with me that she wasn’t afraid of death but
of dying. I found this to be a profound distinction.
She believed in an afterlife, as one might
expect given that she is a church member. She had an assurance that she would,
in one way or another, be well taken care of after her time here came to an
end.
She is still very physically and mentally
healthy so it was that final leg of her journey that worried her. Would she be
restricted to a hospital bed, just a mess of tubes and needles? Would she still
recognize family and friends? Would she be in constant pain?
Being old didn’t bother her until it affected
the quality of her life in an incredibly detrimental way. In fact, being old,
she shared, brought a lot of advantages: more time, more perspective, less
hustling to be the best and most successful and urgency to strengthen the
important relationships in her life.
On
accomplishments
This radical relational orientation of all my
subjects caught me by surprise. As someone who is entering the height of my
career, I expend much more energy on my work than my relationships.
And when I imagine my future, I envision what I
will have accomplished rather than what my relationships will be like. These
90-something-year-olds emphasize the opposite when they look back on their
lives.
Their joys and regrets have nothing to do with
their careers, but with their parents, children, spouses and friends. Put
simply, when I asked one person, “Do you wish you accomplished more?” He
responded, “No, I wished I loved more.”
My conversations challenged me. I certainly
won’t be giving up my job to hang out with my family more because I also
recognize that satisfying careers and financial stability are great sources of
fulfillment, which in turn, affect family well-being. But these different perspectives
helped me to focus on what really matters in the face of competing
responsibilities and priorities.
That sermon really does not have to be the best
sermon in the world when my son is starving for my attention. My husband really
does not need to get the highest-paying job he can find if that means I can
spend more time with him.
However, the biggest impact they left on me was
not reprioritization but being okay with aging. I confess that prior to my
conversations, I had an intense fear about growing old.
This, I realize, was what motivated me to begin
this research in the first place. I assumed the elderly lost their vibrancy and
thirst for life. That couldn’t be further from the truth. They still laugh like
crazy, fall in love like mad, and pursue happiness fiercely.
This article first
appeared on Considerable.
No comments:
Post a Comment