“The best dreams may be the ones we least suspect” - Ian Brown in “Sixty”

Today, I offer the second in a three-part essay inspired by Ian Brown’s excellent book, “Sixty”. Read slowly at bedtime, this book gave me three months of opportunities to think about what aging means to me and to compare and contrast my views with the author’s. The first part of this essay is available at http://last100mondays.blogspot.com/2016/09/maybe-this-is-what-part-of-being-alive.html

In “Sixty”, Ian Brown writes that one of the key challenges of aging is to choose to use the fact that our time is limited to focus our energy on making the most of the time we have. This resonates for me. While I hope to share decades of life yet with my loved ones, exploring the world around, and within, us, I know my life could end at any moment. While I make plans on the scale of months and years, I try to stay alive to the minutes and seconds I am sharing with those I care for right now.

I want to use my time, and abilities, while I have them. I accept that aging will mean real physical changes, challenges, and limitations. This is inevitable and I hope I will be graceful both about accepting those limitations I cannot overcome and about working to overcome those I can. I have watched a neighbor, only 10-15 years older than I am, lose about 90% of her vision and struggle with worsening dementia. We do what we can to help, and feel such admiration for her positive attitude and her husband’s loving support for her.

I watch my father struggling at times with isolation. He seems happy much of the time, yet he is missing out on time with his great grandchildren as he chooses not to engage with them as much as he could. I know his hearing loss is an issue even with his hearing aids, and he tends to want things his own way. I see that it’s hard for him to accept some of the changes he is experiencing, too, and I hope he doesn’t feel too isolated. I call him and make time to spend with him when I am there. Still, I wish he’d let himself take more joy in the children.

What a contrast this is to an 83 year old man I met at the hardware store in in our town recently. He suffers from COPD and some memory loss, but treats his breathing exercises as meditation and considers the change in his mental state a different, normal, state of consciousness. We talked about this during our chance meeting as two strangers, and he shared that he is learning to make the best of this new way of experiencing the world. He was there to buy some painting supplies for a very creative furniture finishing project he’s working on and was looking forward to realizing his vision. Meeting him brightened my day and opened my mind to another way we can choose to age. I hope I’ll be lucky enough to see him around town again some time.

Brown writes about the fear and depression that we can experience in the face of a health crisis for ourselves or our loved ones. I can relate to the risk of despair in the face of a bad diagnosis but hope I would find a way to rise above the fear and depression and to stay engaged as long as I could. Of course, I hope even more that I’ll never again face a challenge like this. My own experience with serious illness a few years ago challenged me to rise above limitations and scared me into a new focus that I think benefits me. That heightened sense of the preciousness of the time we have to share has never left me and I know I am even more motivated to live the love I feel to the best of my ability.

In “Sixty”, Brown also struggles with the idea that aging may be an increasingly lonely process and his vision of the end-game of life is pretty bleak  It is curious that he is finding greater peace in more solitude as he ages and yet has written that aging involves increasing loneliness. I know from my own experience that time alone can be very different from loneliness. I wonder how he sees these differences.

I don't think I agree with Brown that getting older is necessarily a process of getting lonelier. I think this can, and does, happen but I don't think it has to. To me it seems that the elders who work to stay engaged with family and community have less of this accumulating loneliness.  Still, one night I ended my reading with this line in the book. “The only thing you can hope for is that it doesn't get too lonely too fast“, and I felt that deeply and thought to myself “Man, does that feel true”. I know I’ll be doing what I can to stay connected instead of being lonely and hope those connections help lessen the loneliness for those I love when they are far away, or should they pass on before I do.

He writes that there is no reason for tenderness to decline with age, and I agree. I think our tenderness may evolve, as many things do, but that doesn't necessarily mean decline. Certainly, I deal with my own feelings of loneliness, depression, and self-doubt, but these don't seem to be age related so far for me. It seems it has always been an effort for me to find peace and it can still be as I age. Tenderness, and closeness with my loved ones in general, seems to be one important balance to the loneliness, and the joy they bring helps me find peace.

In the course of his sixtieth year, Ian Brown faces the death of his father and he writes of grief and loss and of the comfort of spending time with loved ones at these times. He also struggles with his fear of the nothingness that he believes follows death. I felt sympathy for him as I read this part of the book, but not empathy for I don't share those feelings. I am deeply grateful for my beloved wife, Sue, and all my loved ones, and I don't look forward to being left behind here by the death of any of them. Yet, if that is the shape my future takes, I will continue whole as I feel the grief that comes with the compelling illusion that we must part for a while.

If I should die before some of my beloveds, I imagine they will continue without me and bear their grief as whole people. We are each complete and I am so glad we have come together to make each other’s lives sweeter and richer. I trust it will have been enough in the end. I also have faith that love never ends. That we are in fact all part of some fabric of love that is endless beyond space and time.

I have confidence that if I keep working to do what I feel in my heart is right, and if I love as fully, openly, and courageously as I can, remembering that this courage includes loving quietly when that's best, I will be able to forgive myself for my inevitable mistakes and be satisfied that this life was the best I could make it. And better for having been shared with those I love.

I will finish these thoughts in part three next Monday.

(The photo at the top of this week's essay is of my father with his parents)