Tim Stafford's Blog, page 3

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Family

This is #14 in a series of essays on aging.

All I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family

                  –Raffi

There is no greater joy than love in a family. You look into the soft eyes of your little girl or walk hand in hand with your spouse—and you know you love and are deeply loved. Even those who have never experienced family feel its pull. I volunteer with an organization that specializes in recovery. Many of the men I meet with have no relationship with their father. Nevertheless, they may ache to find him, to know him. They miss a person they don’t know because a chorus cries out from inside their very being: I want love in my family.

Yet it’s surprisingly common to feel disappointed with family as we grow older—–to endure a nagging sense of futility, or to dwell on failures that might seem petty to others. Disappointment nags, and often reveals deeper hurt.

Some disappointments spring from hard circumstance: death, mental illness, addiction, or some other misfortune that destroys close family ties. They leave a person angry or woebegone.

Other reasons for disappointment are harder to pin down. It may stem from a dispute that seems petty. Sometimes we can’t quite remember how and why our disharmony began. Nevertheless, it’s certainly there. As people age, they may place greater hopes on family. Too often, family can’t match those elevated expectations.

Family gatherings make a classic disappointment trap. Everybody’s coming for Thanksgiving, a happy event that promises to carry you back to an idealized childhood. The trouble is, you don’t live in that ideal childhood, and you’ve forgotten how miserable those Thanksgivings can be.

So Aunt Susie says something awful to Amie, who goes into the bathroom to cry and won’t come out. Susie apologizes and says it was meant as a joke, but then gets angry at Amie for making a mountain out of a molehill. It’s tense. The turkey gets overcooked. After dinner the TV goes on and adults sit in a stupor, watching a football game they aren’t interested in. In the whole long day, not a single conversation occurs that anybody finds uplifting or meaningful.

Yet quite certainly, they will all come back and do it again a year from now.

It’s very normal, but it’s disappointing. The same might be said of other holidays, of family birthdays, or Sunday family dinners.

Such disappointments multiply for those who live near family members and see each other regularly. Close proximity is wonderful, but it can bring latent disagreements into the foreground.

For example, your middle-aged children love their father, but they also find his absent-mindedness a trifle annoying. It’s become a family joke, and for children who live nearby and suffer regularly from forgotten appointments and left-behind items, the joke may stop being funny. Will they make a fuss about it? No, of course not, it’s trivial, but they feel the annoyance. And then they feel crummy because they let something petty spoil the day.

It’s those small rubs that create most of our disappointment with family. It can add up to sadness, because the love of family carries so much weight—as it should. And rarely, rarely, do we get more than a glimpse of its full satisfactions. Family is usually humdrum, as we are; flawed as we are. We long for more, so much more.

Our disappointments remind us that nothing short of heaven will satisfy us. We are not to look for ultimate satisfaction here.

And yet…. Family matters. Love in my family is what I want. We’ve always known that, but we know it far more poignantly as we get old.

The Inside of Aging: The Presence of Death

This is #13 in a series of essays on aging.

A few days ago a photo popped up on my computer. It was a snapshot taken at a family event not too long ago, with seven people smiling at the camera. What caught my attention was the fact that four of the seven are now dead.

Death has never been far from us. Even when we were children, Death kept watch next to our beds and followed us to school. If we weren’t aware of Death’s presence, our parents were. But only now in old age is its presence palpable. I go to many funerals.

I’m not talking about fear. We may feel fear of Death depending on our circumstances. If I am in an airplane tipped downward and filled with smoke, I expect something close to panic will hit me. If my doctor tells me that I have three weeks to live, my heart will race. At other times, however—that is, at 99% of all times—I ignore Death. It seems far away.

Nevertheless, whether I fear it or not, whether I even think of it, Death is near.

When I was a child, a woman was struck by a train near our house. On my bike, I crisscrossed the tracks, searching with horror and fascination for evidence—blood, or tissue. Death seemed like an awful irruption into life, like a volcano bursting out of the earth. I didn’t know that Death was always near. Now, I’ve watched Death claim so many friends. I know that everyone in my circle must go to Death, and not too long from now. Death is not so fearful as it was when I was a child. I see it like a dim and featureless figure emerging from the gloom of a smoky room. I don’t see it clearly, but I know it is always with me.

The apostle Paul refers to Death as the last enemy. He sees a close link between sin and Death, with Death the final punishment for sin. (The final outworking of sin’s destruction?) He proclaims that Jesus’ resurrection conquered Death, making a mockery of its power; and that, by dying with Jesus in baptism, we join with Jesus in conquering Death.

I do not doubt it, but I can’t see it. Like everything associated with Death, these are matters obscured to our vision. We grasp them by faith, and faith alone. They are known by revelation, not experience. As I grow older and closer to Death, I think of these things more. This is good for me, I believe, because it makes me see Life in a wider framework. I know now (what I didn’t know when I was young) that there is a shoreline. I know very little of Life beyond the shore. God knows.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Mind

This is #13 in a series of essays on aging.

We lose our minds in two different ways. One is forgetfulness, which is annoying. The other is dementia, which is devastating. As I understand the state of medical findings, the two are not necessarily linked. However, one creates anxiety about the other. Many older people nervously monitor their forgetfulness, fearing that they are falling into a loss of everything.

We do forget. Or, more accurately, we temporarily lose our grip on certain words, usually nouns. Names. Film and book titles. Authors. Acquaintances. It is not that we don’t know the author of War and Peace. It is just that, right now, we cannot come up with … starts with T. That name seems to be dodging around inside our brain, just out of reach. We know it will come, but it does not come when we need it to come.

My wife and I have a saying: “It takes a village to remember a noun.” It starts with a T, one says. It’s short, just two syllables, the other says. We both wrack our brains and usually, two minds being better than one, we get it. Whereas, working alone, I may never remember the name of that flowering bush in our back yard.

Permanent forgetting also occurs. I cannot remember the name of my first elementary school. Maybe with the help of the internet I could come up with it, but it’s irretrievably gone from my memory. This kind of forgetting happens throughout life, and I’m not sure it increases with aging. Whereas, losing the ability to retrieve movie titles certainly increases with the years, if my experience is any judge.

Dementia is different. Forgetting is not remembering where you put your keys. Dementia is forgetting what a key is for. That’s an oversimplification, because dementia involves all kinds of forgetting. The point stands, nevertheless, that dementia is a global loss. It may start small but eventually it can take away everything—your recognition of the people who love you, your ability to find your way home, to converse, to follow a plot, to read—everything. That shatters your life, and the lives of those you love.

You can’t fight it. Doing crossword puzzles won’t stave off dementia. Some newly developed drugs slow down the deterioration, but so far they don’t change the outcome. It’s a dreadful disease, and many people fear it. For many people, aging is shadowed by this fear.

Like cancer, it functions beyond our control. That is part of the new world. We may not lose control of our lives, but we dread doing so.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Friends

This is #12 in a series of essays on aging.

My church has many older people, and consequently I’ve become close to many people older than I. Many are gone now; I attended their memorial services. In my own age group, death is still unusual, but I know from experience what is coming. I’m going to lose a lot of people in my age group. (Or they’ll lose me.)

As a younger person, I would have been filled with grief and disbelief over this. It is always deeply painful when someone dies before their time—a teenager, a recent graduate, someone newly married. When an older person dies, we are sad, we miss them. But we are not shocked. It does not come as an obscenity.

Older people aren’t asking, “Why did God allow this to happen?” as they might if a child were to die. They know this is part of life; old people don’t live forever. But they feel the loss. They feel the loneliness. They experience the empty space where that person has been. The atmosphere feels slightly chillier. Also, they are reminded of what they are coming to.

When we were younger, we found it impossible to believe that we would someday be no more. We simply could not imagine it, which helps to explain why young people drive too fast and jump off cliffs into lakes without knowing where the rocks are. The denial of death is a primary force.

In our older years, however, we gradually come to know that we are going to die. Sometimes, as our bodies break down and our friends disappear, death sounds almost sweet. Our friends beckon us from beyond. Fear diminishes. Fatigue makes us long for rest.

In the meantime, we feel lonely. We lose a lot of friends.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Sex

This is #11 in a series of essays on aging.

I don’t like writing personally about sex. It should be a private matter, I think. Therefore, I’m not going to say too much about aging and the loss of sex. I will say this: it happens.

Of course, it varies tremendously. In his nineties, New Yorker editor Roger Angell wrote in fury about busybodies trying to keep elders from sex. He meant himself. I can’t imagine that anybody cared about his sex life all that much—other than he.

Generally, interest in sex declines with age. (Maybe not, with Angell.)  It doesn’t disappear, it just gradually diminishes. It’s chemical: our production of hormones decreases. This is where it gets strange. Because while the body certainly changes, the mind changes less.

Some years ago I was talking to a friend, and I mentioned how odd it was that this powerful preoccupation, a focal point of thoughts for my whole life, was gone. “Gone,” my friend said, “but not forgotten.”

He put it well. A lifetime of sexuality trains your mind. You tune in to certain signals. Your eyes follow certain people. Sex can be a compulsive attraction. If my experience is any guide, those signals still operate as you age, but there is no corresponding response. No compulsion. It’s like flicking on a light switch when the electricity is off. Nothing happens. And that surprises me, time after time.

There’s nothing tragic in this. Good sex is a great gift, but if the drive is gone, you aren’t missing anything. If you lost interest in eating oysters, it would be the same—the oysters are still there, but if you don’t care, so what? In the last few years I’ve lost most of my sense of smell. Do I regret it? Not really. I miss smelling the roses, certainly, but I don’t miss some awful and disgusting smells.

Those are not true comparisons. Sex is a consuming drive, so close to our core. Unlike oysters, unlike the sense of smell, it is a huge and omnipresent force in your life. It binds you to your spouse. It enlivens you. When it’s gone, you miss it. It leaves a noticeable gap, like a huge tree that has fallen. You’re living in a different world now.

The Inside of Aging: Lost Drive

This is utterly mysterious to me. It came out of nowhere. Nobody warned me. It affects everything.

I’ve lost my drive.

Not all my drive. Maybe 20%. Or maybe 50%. It’s hard to say exactly because it’s invisible. I’m the same person I was before, and I still care about the same menu of concerns. It’s just: I don’t care as much.

The change is most noticeable in my work. I’ve always loved to write. After I got out of college I worked for a small magazine. There, I would compete to write more of the content than anybody else. My energy for writing was boundless. Overworked? That was a meaningless concept to me.

I wanted to be the best. I wanted to build a reputation for excellence. Riches didn’t drive me, but I sought the admiration of my peers. Writing was the engine that drove my life.

Then came the Internet. At first it was purely a benefit to my work, enabling quicker and better research, opening up blogs and other free publishing opportunities, and making my work more accessible to readers. What I didn’t see—and nobody did, I think—was that the Internet would undermine magazine revenue streams. A lot of magazines went out of business, and those that survived didn’t have the money to pay journalists for travel or deep research. Book publishing also changed so that bookstores closed and non-bestsellers sold fewer copies. Publishers became more selective, and the selection criteria circled around self-promotion. In essence, publishers wanted to know whether you had a million Facebook followers before they would look at your manuscript.

I was slow to realize that I needed to adapt. I needed to seriously invest in a social media presence, building up followers. New channels for my writing needed to be found and explored. I should hustle and charm and pitch myself to a whole new set of people who had never heard of me.

But something else had changed. I’d lost my drive. I saw what I needed to do, but I didn’t want to. Self-promotion was distasteful to me. My life didn’t depend on it. I would have liked to be on top of those worlds, but I didn’t have to be. What I’d already accomplished was okay. I could still write, I could still publish; I didn’t need to have a huge audience.

And actually, it is okay. I like what I do. I really don’t want to hustle and self-promote. But if I were still 25, I would feel different. I would have to feel different.

I see my loss of drive in other areas. My garden, which I enjoy immensely, gets neglected. A list of tasks needs doing, and I’ll get to them eventually—but I’m not too worried about them.  Home repairs, same thing.

Life goes on at a more relaxed pace, meandering through the days without much in the way of deadlines. Is this the best way to live? I’m not proclaiming it as such. People who are determined to get things done do, and I appreciate their productivity. Just as surely, though, I know I’m no longer one of them. I’m living in a different world.

Some people never had much drive to begin with, so it’s hard to say that aging has changed them. Some had so much drive that it’s hard to say that they have lost any. However, many of my friends seem to relate to my lost drive. They are ready to retire. They could continue functioning at a high level if they had to, but they don’t want to. At one time they were driven to fix whatever went wrong in their house; now they would rather call a plumber. Researching which insurance company will save them money would take too much out of them, so they stay with what they know. They don’t mind paying a little more for the sake of convenience.

Losing your drive is not all bad. Life may be easier for all concerned. Whatever you say about it, though, it’s a different world.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of status

This is #9 in a series of essays on aging.

If you visit a nursing home, you’re likely to come away depressed. It’s not primarily the smell of urine and ammonia, or the tile-floor facilities. It’s the residents, ground down into a gray pablum. They may sit frozen in front of a blaring television or lie pathetically in bed. Perhaps they are propped in a wheelchair in the hallway. Speak to them, and you may get no response. Or if you do, conversation can be as nonsensical as Alice in Wonderland. The residents appear to be almost interchangeable, having lost personality. Staff may carefully address them by name, but they could be anybody. Or nobody.

The picture changes if you know a little about their pasts. You may be meeting a symphony conductor, the mother of five children, an architect, a renowned high school English teacher. With a little probing you may engage in very interesting conversation about their lifetime of work, their family, their travel, their experiences. But probably not. Dementia and other illness may have taken away their ability to carry on a conversation.

All residents in a nursing home once had some kind of interesting life. If they can’t communicate it, however, they fade into gray for other people. That ability to talk—to be witty, to show curiosity, to carry the back and forth of conversation—may be the most important component of holding on to status. If you can talk, you still have a chance to be somebody to the world. If you can’t, your accomplishments will be forgotten very quickly. You will be forgotten very quickly.

A nursing home is the ultimate in lost status. Most of those who end up there are effectively disappeared. Even their family visitors have a hard time remembering their former dignity. That’s one reason many residents get few if any visitors. Family members wonder, “What’s the point?”

Most people don’t end up in a nursing home. It’s the endpoint for only a small percentage. All the same, it’s the extreme of lost status that all of us experience as we age.

**

Your loss of status begins with appearance: graying hair, balding head, wrinkled skin, stooped walk. Facelifts, cosmetics, hair color and workouts may delay these, but not forever. If you are old, you begin to look old.

People automatically dismiss people who look old. If seated with them at a wedding, they make a little polite small talk and then turn elsewhere for conversation. The judgment based on appearance is particularly harsh with women. Almost as soon as they get gray hair they stop counting as interesting. Younger people think it’s only natural: they (we) have a deeply engrained belief that old people are of little value. I know. I was young once too.

Retirement brings another layer of lost status. The question, “What kind of work do you do?” becomes hard to answer. Dedicated hobbies and volunteering will not bring you much respect. We identify work with worth.

Here, too, women suffer the soonest and the most. “Do you work outside the home?” can be almost equivalent to asking whether you have a meaningful existence. Men join this indignity as soon as they get their last paycheck. Don’t even bother saying, “I worked in software.” As soon as you speak of your work in the past tense, you have thrown away your claim to significance.

It can happen even before you retire. As a writer, I used to encounter people who recognized my name. I might meet them at a party, or in church, and they would ask, “Are you the writer?” Often they couldn’t remember what I’d written, but they knew that I had published, an accomplishment they respected. That rarely happens now. I’m still writing, but my work is much less visible. I can feel status draining away.

Yes, we know that our worth does not depend on our appearance or on our career. It does not ultimately depend on whether we can talk. We are creatures created in God’s image. Our true worth is built on his love. Nothing takes that from us. But remember the nursing home. That loss of status and dignity may be superficial, but it is real, and it affects us all. And so do the lesser indignities that come with an aging body. We used to be somebody. Now we are trending toward nobody.

It’s a new world. The question we all face is: can we live graciously and happily in it?

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Hearing

This is #8 in a series of essays on aging.

With all the losses involved in aging, it seems almost silly to mention this one. I mention it because people don’t. It’s invisible. People disguise it. It may seem trivial. However, I see it everywhere in my age group, and it makes a deeper impact than I ever dreamed.

About half of those 75 and older experience “disabling” hearing loss, researchers say. What constitutes disability I don’t know. I’m not sure if it’s disabling to have to turn up the TV so loud you can’t hear the phone ring. I don’t know if it’s disabling to drop out of conversations in restaurants because you can’t understand what anybody says. I do know that hearing loss is annoying to all involved. Wanting to be heard, people shout. When people shout at each other, they sound angry. The sound of anger turns you toward genuine anger. It can cost you a peaceful relationship.

To avoid that, people with hearing loss often fake it, nodding and smiling even when they have no idea what somebody said. They guess, and say something innocuous that they hope will fit. And often enough it does. The long-term impact, though, is that conversation dies. Real communication wanes.

Wearing a hearing aid is an admission that you are hard of hearing, and many older people hate that. No matter how cleverly miniaturized, hearing aids are not a fashionable look. Besides, hearing aids at their best need adjustment, often necessitating many trips to the hearing center for fine tuning. Plug and play they are not.

In sum, about half of older people have their lives degraded by hearing loss. A lot of the other half do too, because they have to live with people who can’t hear. That is a loss worth naming.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Health

This is #7 in a series of essays on aging.

Do you get sick more often as you age? Maybe not, but you feel it more. You are more fragile, and you know it. You know sickness can do you in.

Not everybody gets sick. I have a ninety-five-year-old friend who is as healthy as you could wish. You probably know somebody like that too. Lots of older people are healthy.

You can be quite healthy and yet deeply affected by illness, however. What changes is how many sick people you know. Everywhere you go, you hear the “organ recital.” Not only do many of your peers get sick, some get very sick. Young people catch cold (especially if they have kids in school), but old people get knocked flat. A cold may lead to pneumonia. Pneumonia lands you in the hospital.

Friends get cancer and die. They lose their memory and become a shell of their former selves. They fall in the bathroom and break bones. Younger people know of some such cases, but older people know scads. The longer we live, the more we know.

That explains why older people are more aware of, and more intimidated by, disease. It surrounds them. They have so many friends who are terribly sick. If they live into their nineties, half their friends are dead. They are like a battlefield battalion that has fought from D-day to the Battle of the Bulge, leaving countless friends fallen behind them.

Losing friends is a blow to the heart. I’m at the beginning of this. Most of my peers are still healthy. However, every time I pass by a certain neighborhood I think of a friend who died of cancer a few years ago. His face and his manner are still very vivid to me. He was so vital and alive, but I’ll never see him again in this life.

That doesn’t make me distraught. Death is part of life, and I believe in resurrection. However, I miss him. He’s a piece of my life, gone.

The worst is the death of a spouse. I look at my wife and know that she might die before me. Or she might become deeply sick and need extraordinary care, perhaps for years. Friends of mine are living with these realities, and I can see it’s a wound that doesn’t heal.

Like phantoms, these possibilities haunt life as we grow older. You can ignore them—most people do—but you can’t escape them. That creates distinctive challenges. How can you live a happy and fulfilled life when sick people surround you? Can you remain a hopeful person when the likelihood of severe illness grows greater every day?

The answer might come down to temperament. Some people are incurably upbeat. You can push them down but they bob upward like a cork. I’m not that type, however. I need something more. Most people do.

Faith becomes critical. If you can’t believe in anything but what you see, then sickness is truly an existential threat. You can—you will—be destroyed. If, on the other hand, you believe in Jesus, a man who died and was buried but raised up to eternal life by the Creator God, then illness and death are dreadful but they are not terrifying. They can be understood in context and accepted. Death is not the end of the story. It hurts us but it does not defeat us. Its presence can even help, by pointing us away from what is transient to treasure what is eternal.

I had a friend, Howard Claassen, who taught physics at Wheaton College in Illinois. We attended the same church and one week he told me he had been to his mother’s funeral in Kansas. After I expressed my condolences, he told me that all her life she had been a querulous and complaining person, who made it a chore for him to visit. Then she had a stroke and nearly died. While in that near-death moment, she saw Jesus. When she woke up, she was disappointed. She had wanted to stay with Jesus, and her bed-ridden life didn’t compare favorably. From that moment, her personality changed, Howard told me. She didn’t complain anymore; all she wanted to talk about was Jesus. She couldn’t wait to see him again, and happiness filled her because she knew she would. That was her state until she died.

Yes, that’s unusual. It’s the only case I’ve known. Would that we all could have such a vision.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Mobility

This is #6 in a series of essays on aging.

Only once in my whole life did I hear my dad swear. It was when his doctor told him he could no longer drive. I was there in the doctor’s’ office; I had set up the encounter by asking the doctor to deliver the bad news. I didn’t have the nerve to tell my dad myself; and I’m not sure he would have heeded anybody less authoritative than the doctor.

My dad loved to drive, and taking away his driver’s licenses was like taking off his arm. I knew that. But his dementia had reached the point where he wasn’t safe. Several times he had gotten lost and I got a call from a random stranger whom he had encountered. “There’s a man here who says you know where he lives.”

How will it be when my time comes? I hope I’ll realize I’ve become a danger before anybody has to tell me, but maybe not. I might be as outraged and angry as my dad. In America, it’s hard to get anywhere without a driver’s license. If you live in Manhattan or an equivalent urban area, you can walk or take mass transit; but for 90% of America it’s drive or stay home.

Let’s not treat that coldly, as something that happens to people when they get old. Let’s realize it will most probably happen to us.

Suddenly you’re 15 again, and you have to ask for a ride. And that is just the beginning. Here comes the walker. Here comes the wheelchair. It’s infantilization. You lose the capacity to decide for yourself where you want to be and where you want to go. They might as well wrap you up in a blanket and stick a pacifier in your mouth.

Okay, that’s exaggerated. Most people don’t end up utterly demobilized. But the loss of mobility is part of aging, certainly. Can you find enough inner space—in your head, in your soul–that the loss of outer space is not like the end of life?