The Far Shore of Aging - Mark 4:35-41
A college football player had to skip some of practice everyday to go see his father in the hospital, He’d been in the hospital for some time now...awaiting a heart transplant..
We live in a period of a new old age.
A mother who is also a grandmother is preparing for a lengthy time away, as her mother has taken a turn and is needing more help. She is not sure what this means for her, what her responsibilities may be in the near future..
we live in a period of a new old age.
Parents sit down with their adult children to talk to them about things to consider as they get older, their desires, plans they are making, and who might take on what responsibilities.
One of the children gets up and leaves during the conversation.
After a recent cancer diagnosis, adult children attempt to talk to their parents about what they may be thinking down the road for care. The parents change the subject.
We have entered into what has been called a period of a new old age.
So much about how life is lived has changed in the past 100 years.
One significant change taking place before us is the nature of aging.
Like all changes, this has an upside and a downside.
She wrote a memoir entitled A Bittersweet Season: Caring for our aging parents--and ourselves, which she wrote as her mother went through a long decline after her mid-80s.
Jane Gross says poignantly: "We live too long and die too slowly."
Jane Gross, born in 1947, doesn’t remember a lot of older people around when she was growing up. By the time she was born, only two of her four grandparents were alive. One died suddenly; he had been a vibrant man and then, kerplunk, in the street the next day.
This is how my great-grandfather died as well. literally, from vibrant getting around to Kerplunk in the street.
Fast forward to 20 years or so later to the time when my grandparents were dying, and these were long drawn out deaths, thanks to so-called “advances” in medicine.
My grandfather, for example had a living will, had a heart attack when he was 93, but they resuscitated him anyway, and he spent his last several months of life in hospice care, during a period he called, the worst days of his life.
I have visited with any number of parishioners who are living this new old age reality, they or their relative is living this in-between time that didn’t used to exist to the extent that it does now, and we are all trying to make sense of it.
I loved visiting with Alice Martinez of my church in Santa Fe who was 95 when I met her. She would insist I visit her once a week to plans her funeral. She would tell me, “I’m dying.” If her daughter, a nurse and the primary caregiver was there she would say, “Mom, you’re not sick, your heart is healthy; You’ve got to die of something!”
When considering this new old age reality the first question we have to ask:
Is it okay to talk about this topic of aging and dying?
Something everyone can relate to, but not everyone wants to acknowledge.
When geriatrician, Joanne Lynn asks her audiences of health experts: "How many of you expect to die?" Not everyone shoots up their hands!
In the period of a new old age --
Everybody wants to believe that we are going to be perfectly healthy, climbing the Himalayas one day and dead the next.
But the reality is something like what Jane Gross experienced with her mother who was fine and independent and then in 100 small ways, none of which were going to do her in, was not fine and became dependent on other people, strangers, her children.
