You know when you have a spare bit of time and you devote it to clearing out one of the storage bins so your kids don’t have to deal with all of it when you die? Sounds harsh, but that’s sort of how I view organizing the clutter these days. Thing is, statistically I won’t die for a few more decades, so there’s certainly no rush. But I stumbled upon some of my early college writing that reminds me that I didn’t always have this level of optimism when I thought about aging.
When I was a student in the social work program at Red Deer College in 1982, I actually wrote a paper called Aging (as if that narrowed the topic at all). To me it was just one big pit that we would all simply fall into sometime in the distant future. The outline of the paper goes like this: Old Age as the Last Stage of Life; The Concept of Death; Family View on Death; Conforming to the Norm; and Roles of Social Institutions. Sounds like I was really looking forward to this age I find myself at now!
Turn the page and the opening reads: ‘Graduation, marriage, birth of a child, children leaving home… these events mark the end of a personal era and the beginning of a new age. Until one reaches ‘old age’, these new changes in life are happy, hopeful and congratulatory. But old age itself is an event that leads to an end. Therefore, the family view may be one of pity and sorrow.’
Okay, please know that I was laughing really hard when I read this the other day! I would have been about 21 when I wrote it, truly old enough to know better especially since I still had both amazing parents as role models and a vibrant grandma who lived to be nearly 100. But there it is, a glimpse into the attitude of someone who seems very unlike me! I am now dedicating an entire communications platform to my belief that the contribution of aging persons is unique and vital! I truly celebrate our great big cohort! But I must share a bit more of the paper, because we can all use a good laugh these days:
‘Old age is a class all its own. Once a person reaches a golden age of 65, even family may label them as unproductive. Therefore, the family and even the elderly themselves seem to wait for the end, living in memories and preoccupied with death. The elderly can be a constant reminder of one’s own eventual decline and death. It is disturbing that one cannot control the forces causing their aging. At somewhat of a relief to family and society, though, the majority of elderly people conform to our expectations.’
Thank heavens I didn’t conform to my own expectations! I also wasn’t conforming to anything in those days by any means, so I must have been at deadline and just spewed whatever came to mind. It’s a very good thing for everyone involved in social work that I dropped out of that program after the first year. I do love the instructor’s comments on the paper, though: ‘The reader is left wondering what all this is leading to and what the point is.’ That makes two of us!