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Key points
- Much about growing older involves loss: of physical strength, mental acuity, and social relevance.
- Learning to view death as a prelude to something larger is a skill we can begin while still alive.
- As we learn to drop away the extraneous, the essential can shine through more clearly.
So much about growing older seems connected to loss: loss of muscle, loss of drive, loss of energy, loss of memory. If the first half (at least) of our life was all about growing a family, acquiring a profession, and building a nest egg, it can be very challenging to witness nature taking its course with our bodies and our minds and watch ourselves diminish, at least according to the metrics we’ve previously used to measure ourselves.
We become invisible to the younger generation. It hurts to feel tolerated rather than sought out, to recognize we are way down on the priority list with our adult children, who once needed us so fiercely, and to feel so much less relevant than we once were.
None of this is news to anyone over a certain age, but it’s not easy to talk about or even to acknowledge to oneself. I think it’s even harder if you reach this age unpartnered, and are alone in this reality rather than sharing it with another. What could possibly be an upside here? As our skin sags and our energy wanes, just what are we supposed to replace our youthful vibrancy with?
Every age has its challenges. Nevertheless, what are the psychological challenges specific to old age vs. the challenges—however grueling, of attending middle school, or parenting young children?
The answer, I think, is pretty simple: behind all the various losses of old age lurks one incontrovertible truth, that you are going to die. The failing health or hearing, the faulty memory, the diminishing energy, all point in one direction. Where we could avoid thinking about that uncomfortable truth earlier, these mounting losses of old age prepare us for the final and most irrevocable loss of all.
Here I think we split into two camps: Those of us who think that’s it; we die and there is no more, and those of us who believe death is a transition to another state. If you belong to the second camp, you might position losses in a different light.
In some important ways, we have been learning all our lives about the cycle of death and rebirth, of losing and being reborn into a bigger reality. Have you ever lost a job or a relationship that was initially incredibly painful, but learned, in retrospect, it was one of the best things to happen to you because it set you on a better path? If so, you have already experienced the truth of life, which is that there is no real death, but only a shedding of an existing form so that we can become a larger version of ourselves. We may have strong emotional attachments to the people we’ve come to know and love and when we lose these people the pain is searing. All the religious traditions point toward the same underlying idea, that we need to die for our limiting identities to expand into a fuller version of ourselves. We are not only a father or mother, brother or sister, dentist, doctor, or janitor. These are a part of us, but not the whole of us. As we expand into this fuller version, we are able to experience a fuller version of the universe around us.
Many years ago, I saw a retrospective of an artist’s life of work. I don’t remember the artist and I don’t remember the museum. I do remember the experience. The exhibit consisted of five rooms, one leading into the other. In each room were works from one decade of the artist’s career. I remember the experience of starting at the beginning and going slowly, room by room, deeper into the artist’s career. It was clear that at every stage he was extremely talented and creative. But with each successive decade, there was a clarification, and his works became more and more distilled, stripped away of more and more of the extraneous. I’ll never forget my experience, coming into the last room, by this point about two hours into the visit. In the last room, there was hanging in the middle some abstract piece of conceptual art. It felt to me like the artist’s soul was on display, twinkling, sparkling, emanating purity and beauty in an absolutely unique way.
I think our lives can be like this artist’s, where after we prune away (or have pruned away) all that is extraneous, we will end our lives as the purest possible version of ourselves. Sagging skin and failing memory do not have to define us. They can reveal us.
