Eldering
I remember my circle of elders gratefully . . .
A lovely, dignified verb I’ve been musing about lately—is eldering. It seems a good alternative to aging—fuller, more complex, more intentional.
The role of the "elder" is vestigial in mainstream American culture--tribal elders who guide the young through rites of passage, councils of elders who gather to pool their collective wisdom, the elders of the early church who oversaw doctrine and discipline, have mostly receded into collective memory.
Popular culture has contributed to this dwindling recognition of elders’ significance. In too many films "little old ladies,” bewhiskered grandpas or crotchety neighbors serve as amusing, irrelevant foils for the presumably more interesting escapades of the young. There are exceptions, of course--Alec Guiness as Obi Wan Kenobi, for instance, or Maggie Smith and Judi Densch in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel—but as exceptions they serve mostly to prove the rule: old may be amusing, but it is not vitally interesting.
My grandmother wouldn’t have stood for such foolishness. I don’t think it occurred to her as she opinionated at the dinner table that she didn’t have a natural edge on us younger lot by dint of her many years of teaching, moving around the country, surviving three wars, a depression, poverty and the impertinences of the sixties without losing faith in God, proper English, or her own resilient self.
Her sense of humor helped. She did not suffer fools gladly, tolerate incorrect grammar or slovenly habits. She expected to be greeted when she entered the room, and taken leave of properly. She taught me to read when I was four, to recite the 23rd Psalm, to shell peas, and to laugh over characters’ foibles in Winnie-the-Pooh. She also served as one of four adults in our three-generation household who provided safe space and boundaries for my brother and me as we grew up. Sometimes all that adult correction and scrutiny seemed burdensome. More often, it provided us with usable models of problem-solving, relationship-maintenance, and worthwhile conversation. What we had to say at the dinner table was heard and taken seriously, but we were never led to believe that what we had to say was necessarily of equal value to the more informed, seasoned reflections of our elders.
My point isn’t to romanticize elders or downplay the physical, medical, financial, and social challenges of aging in a culture where the upward-shifting demographic is creating new challenges. I know that elders are not necessarily wise. But most elders have something to teach. Some of that teaching is inadvertent. Some is brutally direct and comes in the form of complaints, or taboo-busting candor that seems to be the privilege and mark of those who have little left to protect and little need to keep their powder dry.
In hope of learning what we can, I’d like to suggest a few ways in which a sharper focus on eldering might be of value to us all. And I’d like to offer a challenge to the many of us who now find ourselves in that category to take on the final season of life with renewed intentionality and, if I may put it this way, political will. Eldering could and should be an active verb.
Let’s think of it as a skill set. Those of us who are elders have likely asked ourselves, “How do I do this well?” Those of us who are caring for elders (and some of us occupy both categories), wonder “How do I help older people claim their place and thrive? Many in their 80s and beyond have been conditioned to think of themselves as useless, diminished, and obsolete. The radical idea that even those well into dementia have gifts for the rest of us needs resuscitation. The Amish, for instance, teach that the old, sick, and mentally challenged are gifts to the community: their needs provide an occasion for caring to come forth.
Let me suggest three reaffirmations that might help reframe our culture’s often condescending vision of elders. These need to be delivered directly, authentically and frequently to the elders among us, for some of us that means saying them into the mirror.
1) You deserve to be honored. However humble your circumstances, however impaired your faculties, however uninterested you may be in receiving it, you bear in your bones, manners, speech and even in your needs, a history and legacy others need to remember. You have done whatever it has taken to survive life on this planet this long, and even your mistakes have added to the repository of human knowing we all draw upon.
2) You are a resource. You may give younger folks some measure of how relationships to friends, family, neighbors, and the earth shift and change over time. “Normal” has changed meaning dramatically and repeatedly in your lifetimes. You can witness to the tradeoffs we’ve gradually accepted in what we have normalized.
3) You are in a participant in an historical experiment. Never before have we faced a population with such long life expectancy. We have to find new ways of housing, producing and sharing food, providing medical care, reducing waste, and equipping the rising generation to cope with problems that aren’t going to go away. They will have to live differently from any of previous generation. We can enable and equip younger people by allowing and embracing opportunities to change—holiday traditions, the form and frequency of communication, food habits, notions of career and family.
It may also be that elders can offer more practical gifts. Some volunteer to listen to children who have no one at home to help them practice reading aloud; some tutor or teach piano. Some gather in classes for “lifelong learners” and bring what they learn back to their families. Those who are too ill to do these things are presenting an important, necessary challenge to the rest of us to develop new, lifegiving models of caregiving that will, in time, serve us all.