On Aging

 

On Aging

August 1, 2021

(c) Thomas C. Sorenson, 2021. All rights reserved

 

 

What follows is something I began recently not as a blogpost but as a personal journal entry. It became something that I decided to post here. It started out with a mind of its own, going in a direction other than the one I had intended. Then I brought it back to that original intention and wrote on what I had originally planned to write on. For what it’s worth, here it is. I have edited here what I originally wrote in a journal only slightly. Any footnotes in what follows are additions meant to clarify things the meanings of which probably aren’t clear to people who don’t know me well or to add thoughts I overlooked when I first drafted this thing This piece has a sort of stream of consciousness nature to it. Please don’t expect reasonable structure. In what follows there isn’t one.

 

July 30, 2021, late evening

 

This evening the thought occurred to me to write down some things about being old. I’m must over one month away from turning 75. I’ve never had any particular thoughts about passing milestone years. I gave sermons that were reflections on turning 60 and turning 70, but I haven’t dreaded aging, and I’ve never tried to conceal my age. Yet somehow 75 feels significant. Perhaps it’s because I have no right to expect to live past that age. Or maybe it’s just that three-quarters of a century sounds like a very long time, and 1946 [my birth year] has started sounding like a long time ago.

So I’m old. I wasn’t supposed to live through my first night, and barring unforeseen circumstances I’ll make it to 75 years from that first night.[1] I guess I’ve known old people in my life. Mom and Dad grew old before they died.[2] I certainly have been pastor to quite a few people older than I am. Of course I’ve always known that there are only two possible paths through life, die young or grow old. I didn’t die young. I haven’t become severely disabled like my twin brother has.[3] So now I’m old, and there’s no way to know how much older I’ll get before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

It seems to me that I should be doing an inventory of the pluses and minuses of growing old, though I certainly don’t know why I should or what it would accomplish. One of the things about becoming old is that it comes upon you gradually. There’s no bright line between old and not old. Your view of yourself evolves gradually. At some indeterminate point you begin to think of yourself as no longer young. That awareness slowly morphs into an awareness that you are truly old.

Your view of yourself evolves over time, but you are still you. Not long ago I did some ruminating on just what personal identity is, what that you is that’s always there. I can’t answer that question. It seems to me to be a profound mystery, perhaps as profound a mystery as the mystery of God. Yet like they say, wherever you go, there you are. Certainly that you somehow functions physically, and physical changes in the brain can change or even erase a person’s identity. It has to work that way, for we are after all physical beings. Yet there seems to be more to identity, to that ever-present you, than the physical. There is something spiritual about it. Our bodies change. We replace all of our atoms and molecules many times in the course of a life, but your you remains. Our identity seems to transcend the merely physical. Positivists think it doesn’t, but I’m no positivist. I know that philosophical materialism denies a whole aspect of what it is to be human, the spiritual aspect, the transcendent aspect. Your you is with you as you age. It can evolve, but it doesn’t change nearly as much as your body does. It almost seems more permanent than the body, which isn’t permanent at all.

Yet how can it be that the you I was as a child is the you I am as an old man? I certainly am not the same person now that I was then, thank God. Yet once again there is no bright line, no discernable point of transformation. Life proceeds minute by minute, day by day. No one day feels different from the day before it, or at least that’s how it has been with me. There are milestones of course. Marriage. Parenthood. Educational accomplishments. New jobs, new homes, new relationships. But the you seems to remain constant through all of them. I guess it wouldn’t be possible to conceptualize individual personhood if it didn’t. Yet how it can, and even how it possibly can, be a constant remain for me at least a profound mystery.

It’s late, and I’m tired. So I’ll go to bed now. Maybe I’ll return to these rambling thoughts, maybe I won’t. As I’ve said so often in recent years, que sera sera.

 

July 31, 2021. 10:25 am.

 

None of that was what I intended to write about when I started last night. I intended to write about aging but basically didn’t. So here are some thoughts on that subject.

Aging, like most everything else, has its pluses and its minuses. The minuses mostly have to do with declining health. I’ve heard most of my life that most people run up a huge portion of their lifetime medical expenses in old age. I certainly am living that truth. Recently when I saw on my calendar that I had a few weeks with no medical appointments I was surprised and relieved. I used to go for a year at a time with no medical appointments, longer than that when I was really young. [Now of course I have one next week to talk about blood pressure.] I’m on numerous Rx meds for asthma (or whatever’ wrong with my lungs), high blood pressure, high cholesterol, afib, depression, and migraines. I take 8 Rx meds every morning and another two before bed. I’ve had laser surgery twice on my left eye to stop retinal bleeding. I’ve had eczema. Oh—also Rx for gastric reflux and high heart rate. I thank God for Medicare and the UCC Pension Boards for a good Medicare supplement plan. It’s expensive, but I’d be in big trouble without it. I’ve long heard it said that aging is not for sissies. Indeed, it is not.

One of the physiological changes that comes to nearly everyone who doesn’t die before it happens is loss of memory. I’ve heard for most of my life that short term memory goes first, and indeed it does. I think my first sign of it was blocking on words and names. It began to happen that I simply could not come up with words and names that I know perfectly well. More recently, it often happens when I’m writing that I’ll think of a word or even an idea I want to use, then immediately forget it. Most of the time I’ll recover it, but sometimes not. That experience really is quite annoying.

It’s annoying, but it certainly isn’t the worst thing loss of memory can do to a person. In cases of dementia people sometimes get to the point where they don’t remember and can’t recognize even their own spouse and children. That is of course an extreme example of what loss of memory can do, but it does less extreme things too. I often can’t remember if I’ve done some simple thing or not. I have to check the calendar I keep on my cell phone to make sure I don’t forget some commitment or other. I used to say to my father when he would say he couldn’t remember anything anymore, “Dad, you could never remember anything. That’s not a change!” But if course it was a change for him, and it is a change for me. It is one of the less pleasant about aging.

Another unpleasant thing about aging is that you outlive many of the people you have loved or even just known over the years. The first family members I lost were grandparents. Then some aunts. A couple of my cousins just disappeared. In my adult years the losses have been more frequent and often more painful. My PhD advisor Don Treadgold, the man who taught me how to be an historian and how to write, died only a few years after I completed my work with him. I had a dear friend, the Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes, a Presbyterian minister, who mentored me when I decided to enter seminary and become a minister myself. He died a few years ago way too young.

Then there are the more intimate losses. They are the most painful. My twin brother is still alive, but he is severely disabled and has advanced and progressing dementia. I think death would be a blessing for him. He’s still alive, but he is nonetheless effectively gone. My first wife Francie is gone. We were together for thirty years. She was the mother of my two children. She died of breast cancer nineteen years ago yesterday. She was a bright, caring woman who became a professional American Sign Language interpreter. She devoted her personal life to our children and me. She devoted her professional life to serving Deaf and Deaf-Blind people trying to make their way in an uncomprehending and uncaring world. She was the first love of my life. Losing her is the hardest thing I have had to live through and live with.[4]

Then there are my parents. Perhaps reminiscing about one’s parents is itself a symptom of old age. In any event, please bear with me while I do a bit of that here. My mother, Claris Elizabeth Sorenson, nee Calnan, was an intelligent woman and something of a feminist pioneer, though she always denied that she deserved that honorable title. She earned a law degree from the University of North Dakota in about 1942. She never became a lawyer after she moved to Oregon in 1947. She worked first as a legal secretary, then as a paralegal working on divorce cases. At her memorial service the Honorable Ann Aiken, United States District Judge for the District of Oregon, who Mom always called Annie, said that Mom had taught her how to practice law.[5] She also said that in the divorce cases Mom worked on the one thing she always cared about most was that the children were well provided for. She never said anything about that to me. Perhaps she didn’t think it that significant, but of course it was. It was an expression of her caring side, something she definitely had but did not express easily.

Mom was a really good cook, and her door was always open to my brother, me, and our friends. Sometimes we’d stop by unannounced around dinner time. She’d always ask us to stay and somehow she always managed to feed us really well. She’d say “I’ll just go out to the kitchen and throw something together.” That something was always wonderful. The last years of her life were difficult in various ways. She died of a heart attack in 2006 at age 87. She always denied her own abilities, but we all knew she had them. I miss her a lot.

Then there’s my father. He died in 2009 of multiple infections at age 92. He was a Navy veteran. He should have but did not receive a medal for saving his ship, the USS Sangamon, an escort aircraft carrier, from capsizing after she took a kamikaze plane through the flight deck during the invasion of Okinawa. Like I said, except perhaps for one of my grandchildren whose intelligence is off the charts, he was the most intelligent person I ever knew—and I’ve known a lot of very intelligent people. Yet that wasn’t his most outstanding characteristic. On top of his great intelligence he was the wisest person I have ever known. Perhaps some of that wisdom came from the difficult life he lived as a young man. When he was in high school in a tiny town in North Dakota in the 1930s his father, a blacksmith and machinist, lost his business, became an alcoholic, and left his wife and two children alone as the went elsewhere. The only reason Dad got to college is that the director of the University of North Dakota bands heard him play the clarinet, which he did quite well. The director said that if Dad would come to Grand Forks and play in the university band he would help him find a job. I suspect those words sounded like magic to Dad under his circumstances at the height of the Great Depression. From there Dad went on to become a tenured professor of history at a major university. His really is a remarkable story. Perhaps those experiences combined with his war experience in the Navy gave him the wisdom he had about life. I just know that his wisdom helped me more times than I can recall.[6] And now he’s gone, as one day we will all be gone, and I miss him terribly.

That’s one of the things that happens when you live long enough. People without whom you would not be who you are die. They drop out of your life. You live with the knowledge that one day you will be the person who dies and drops out of the lives of people for whom you have been important. You don’t have to like that reality. You don’t however have any choice but to accept it.

Then of course there’s the issue of death. Of course I’ve known most of my life that, just like everyone else, I’m mortal. That ultimate fact of human existence is a lot easier to ignore when you’re young. Yes, of course young people die too. Hell, even children die. Yet the reality of mortality becomes more apparent and more pressing in old age. I know that every new medical symptom I develop could be the beginning of the end for me. I know that my time in this life is a lot shorter than it used to be. Of course, I don’t know how long I have or what will cause my death, but I’m more aware than ever that someday something will. I guess I experience that awareness as a negative because I don’t want to die, but that awareness is very much a part of old age.

So what are the pluses of old age? Life experience. By the time you get to told age you’ve lived and lot and lived through a lot. I suppose that doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom, but you have a better shot at wisdom than young people do. One thing it hasn’t done for me is make me more tolerant of people’s foibles, especially destructive or even just stupid ones. I have no more tolerance for stupidity than I had fifty years ago. As Don Treadgold said of me once, I do not suffer fools gladly.[7] If I have gained any wisdom over the years it is only that love is all that makes life worth living. Love is the greatest gift any person can give to another person. Both giving and receiving love is one of life’s few blessings. I don’t mean romantic love, although that’s wonderful too. I mean the deeper love of caring for and sharing your life with another human being. That’s as close as we can get to divine love, God’s unconditional, wasteful love for each and every one of us. Truly to care for another person more than you care for yourself. To be cared for in both simple and complex ways. To trust another with your whole being and be trusted that way in return. I’m reminded of Kris Kristofferson’s line, “From the coalmines of Kentucky to the California sun, Bobbi shared the secrets of my soul.” I’m not sure what the secrets of my soul are, but that’s the kind of trust, of love, I’m talking about. With it life can be full and rewarding even after we lose it to death or dementia. Never having had it renders life superficial and dry, or so it seems to me having been lucky enough to have had it twice.

Perhaps more because I’m a professionally trained PhD historian more than anything else, I am wise enough to know the power of history over current reality. I know that the world changes, but it changes slowly and not always in a straight line. I know that ideas matter. Most Americans are still living in the changes in human thinking that began when Rene Descartes said cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am] nearly four hundred years ago, though given the massive failing of the American system of public education most of them have no clue that that’s what they’re doing or that the leading edge of human culture has moved beyond the Enlightenment, its rationalism, and its reduction of truth to fact. I am wise enough to agree that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, but to say that it does so slowly is a gross understatement. And I know that far too often it unbends some and goes in the wrong direction. I am wise enough not to expect the realm of God to break out on earth any time soon no matter how much we may want it to.

I understand that the Bible greatly oversimplifies human nature when it says, as it does so often, that people are either good or bad. The truth is that we are all some of both. We all have within us the potential for great goodness, and we all have within us the potential for great evil. None of us is ever perfectly good. There certainly are historical figures who seem to be perfectly evil, but even Adolf Hitler loved his dog.

I am wise enough to know that because none of us is perfectly good we all need forgiveness. We need to forgive one another for the harm we do whether intentionally or unintentionally. Beyond that, we all need God’s forgiveness, for as Psalm 130 says, if God should mark iniquities who could stand? Maybe it’s because I know that we all need God’s forgiveness that I so believe that God’s forgiveness is already there for each and every one of us even before we ask for it.

I am wise enough to know that spiritual riches are more to be treasured than any material riches no matter how great. I know that the pursuit of wealth as one’ s ultimate concern is idolatry and that it frequently destroys both souls and lives. [I mean here the pursuit of material wealth not spiritual wealth.]

I know that the greatest advice anyone ever gave anyone else is—be yourself. I spent at least from 1978 to 1997 trying to be someone other than who I am.[8] That’s only nineteen years though it feels a lot longer than that, but it damned near killed me. I recently saw someone online ask what advice we would give someone using only four words. I knew my answer immediately: “Be yourself not someone else.” OK that’s five words, but it’s still my answer to that question.

Being yourself isn’t as easy as it sounds. To be yourself you must know who you are. Not who your ego thinks you are but who you are deep in your inner being, deep in your soul. That’s where you connect with the divine. That’s where your true self lives. That true self wants to be discovered and lived into, but so many of us so bury it beneath other’s people’s expectations of us that we never discover who we really are and thus have no chance of living into who we really are. So go deep within yourself. Do the inner work necessary to get to the depth of your true self. Get professional help and guidance if you need to, or maybe even if you don’t need to. [I did, and I think I mean even if you think you don’t need to, for really we all do.] You will never know the fullness of life until you discover who you really are and do the often hard, the often seemingly impossible work, of living as your true self.

Another aspect of being old enough to be retired is free time. I’ve heard some people say that they’ve never been so busy as since they retired. That has not been the case for me. I have lots of free time, almost nothing but free time, and that I guess is both a plus and a minus of my age. I usually experience it more as a minus, for much of the time I don’t know what to do with myself. Yet I know that I should see it as a plus. I am only rarely constrained by anyone else’s schedule, or at lease I was before we got Rennie.[9] Now I’m constrained by the fact that we won’t yet leave him home alone, but that’s a personal choice that Jane [my wife] and I have made. I don’t have to be anywhere at any set time unless perhaps I have a medical appointment. For the most part I can structure my time however I want. That ought to be a good thing, but too much of the time I don’t know even how I want to structure it. So I write things no one reads, take photographs almost no one sees, and wonder what the hell I’m doing with myself. That of course is a personal failing of mine not a necessary aspect of age.

So what’s the bottom line on aging? I guess that it is that until your health gets so bad that death is a blessing (it being after all the ultimate analgesic), aging is better than its only alternative, dying young. It gives a different perspective on life than you have when you’re young. It’s like you can look at life from above it or outside of it, although you are of course neither. From that new perspective you can understand life differently. You can understand what’s really important and what isn’t. I remember all the years in my life when I was all about career and making enough money to support my family. I remember the times when I had to make decisions about my work, my career, and being without work or career wasn’t an option. That way of structuring priorities seems so foreign to me now. The last thing in the world I want is to have to work, or at least work under a boss, to make a living. I can’t imagine having the constraints of employment on me, not even the constraints of self-employment. I find the thought of having to live up to someone else’s requirements or expectations absolutely abhorrent. It is a luxury to be able to say that and live it even with the very modest income I have in my retirement. That I can do so is a primary reason that for me, now just short of 75, aging is better, a lot better, than its only alternative.

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[1] I was born about a month premature as the second and smaller of twins. The doctors who attended my birth told my parents that I wasn’t going to live through my first night. I’m not sure why they thought that, although I suspect it had to do with underdeveloped lungs. For most of my life I had a scar on my right thigh from the IV feed they put in me there, I suppose because that was the biggest muscle I had, not that anything about me was big.

[2] My mother died at age 87, my father at age 92.

[3] In 2007 my twin brother suffered a severe stroke. He has been significantly disabled ever since. He is totally paralyzed on his left side. In the past few years he has suffered from severe dementia.

[4] I have remarried. My wife now, the Rev. Jane O. Sorenson, is one of the greatest blessings of my life. It’s just unfortunate that Jane and I never would have happened but for Francie’s death.

[5] Judge Aiken’s first law job out of law school was in the law office where Mom worked. That’s how they met, and it’s why Mom called her Annie.

[6] Here’s an example of how his knowledge of universities and historians helped me greatly one time. As I was about to graduate from the University of Oregon with a degree in history I applied to several graduate schools around the country to work toward my own PhD in history. I was offered admission to several. One of the schools I applied to was the University of Washington. They required that I submit a writing sample. I was fussed about that requirement. I didn’t think I had anything that was nearly good enough to impress the people at the U of W. Dad knew that I had spent my next to last year as an undergraduate on an exchange program between the Oregon State System of Higher Education and the University of Stuttgart in Germany. While there I had written a paper in German about Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the founders of the German social democratic party. Dad said send them that one. I said they don’t want to know how I can write German. They want to know how I can write English. Dad said trust me on this one. I did. That German language paper not only got me into the University of Washington, got me financial aid there.

[7] Donald W, Treadgold was a prominent American historian of Russia and was my PhD advisor at the University of Washington back in the 1970s.

[8] Those are the years in which I entered law school and in which I entered seminary.

[9] Rennie is the Pembroke Welsh Corgi that we got as a very young puppy back in October, 2020.