"The Courage to Grow Old"

Last year in this country, there were 19.5 million people over age 75.  This group made up 6.2% of the total population.  By 2026, just 12 years from now, Census Bureau projections indicate there will be about 10 million more of these elderly residents and they will be more than 8% of the population, growing another 10 million through the subsequent nine years to almost 11%.

So Barbara Crafton has written a book on growing old.  We know we don't need to justify any particular choice of topic for her writings, and her own reason for writing on this seems to be that she herself feels she is beginning "to grow old", as is evident in the Preface and Chapter 1 of the book.  Still, and perhaps too obvious to deserve mention, this is a topic of broad general interest, and her comments on several issues and her impressions of this time in our lives are significant for many people and their publication significantly timed, as illustrated by our data above.

Some of the topics are practical: among others, how do you convince your father that he shouldn't drive a car anymore?  How do you handle really elderly parents who want to live at home or in your home?  How do you conduct yourself on a date?[!]  Also, quite logically but with great feeling, how do you imagine approaching death and dying yourself?

So we have taken a step right here in what Barbara wants us to do.  We're talking about this.  We've already taken a courageous step.  See what she says on page 8:

In order to help those who love me deal with my death, I must come to terms with it myself.  It will help to think about death in advance.  Trust me [she says], this gets easier to do with practice – those things of which we refuse to think don't disappear meekly in response to our refusal:  they go underground.  There they grow in apparent size and virulence, becoming larger and more unthinkable than they really are.  What will happen to me in my death is that I will join the billions of human beings who have died; everyone who has ever lived has managed to do this.

We have already had experiences in our lives like this: major losses, traumatic events.  We realize that in order to function more fully as time passes, the best way to handle those experiences is to face them head on.  Our own death is no different, apparently.

One chapter talks about pain, and Barbara is quick to distinguish between acute pain and chronic pain.  Acute pain sends a signal:  oops, your finger is too close to the candle flame.  Ouch!  Then you take action to stop it.  Chronic pain is different.  You have to learn to live with chronic pain and counteract its source or compensate for it.  For instance, maybe your knees won't let you genuflect in church?  Then bow instead [that's what we ourselves have to do!].  She says these strategies take courage too; from page 35:

I think chronic pain teaches courage.  Real courage, I mean, not bravado – it teaches the kind of courage that looks unwaveringly at the way things really are, rather than the strutting, noisy kind that asserts power it doesn't possess and control over events that human beings don't really run.  No, the courage chronic pain can teach us is the slow kind, the patient kind – maybe "maturity" is a better term for it than "courage."

One more notion, an impressionist metaphor: "The Two Baskets".  We are in a basket that is nested in a bigger basket.  Page 80:

Baskets are woven, of course: strips of grass or straw or wood thread intricately over and under one another again and again . . . . But there is space between the strips, however tightly they might be woven.  You could peer out one of those spaces, if you wanted to. . . . Yup, there's something out there all right.  But you can't see it very clearly through that tiny opening.  Besides, who cares?  This basket is beautiful.  It contains everything you need.

One day, though, the smaller basket begins to fall apart . . . .

So you get the idea of where that image is going.  Barbara helps us understand that we have been inside the bigger basket all along.

In addition to Barbara's two baskets, we realize that we've actually seen a third basket.  A friend who lately became a grandmother showed us a picture of her grandson smiling at us – from the womb.  The wonders of ultrasound let us see inside and there was little Luke, inside the basket inside the basket inside the basket . . . .

Barbara Crafton's book The Courage to Grow Old is published by Morehouse, an imprint of Church Publishing, Incorporated.  It is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, in both paperback and Kindle or Nook editions.