Why is our response to aging and the old so intensely negative?
According to Lynn Casteel Harper, a chaplain to a retirement community, here is the answer:
“Older people expose what is true for people of all ages. We are vulnerable and finite…Elders point to our shared fate as living creatures — to slow up, to wind down, to die. It comes as little surprise that a society so phobic about the subject of death (people “pass,” no one seems to “die”) so readily dismiss those people we see as closest to death — old people. However, we know that not just older people die. We are all vulnerable, at any moment…Coming to terms with finitude is the ongoing struggle of the human spirit; it is soul work. To attempt to live meaningfully with the awareness of our mortality is work marked by courage…” (You can read her entire essay here.)
Dr. Kathryn Zerbe, eating disorders specialist, says much the same thing. “In our mothers’ generation, there was acceptance that your body wasn’t going to look the same at 50 as it did at 25. Today there’s not.” She goes on to say that extreme efforts to maintain youth “…is a way of trying to skirt the issue of aging and mortality.”
According to Rev. Harper and Dr. Zerbe, then, much of what we do to “look young” is based on fear of dying. So here’s my question: what if we weren’t afraid of dying? How much more richly would we live?
This is very thought provoking blog.
Thanks for sharing.
And thank you, Greta, for stopping by. Any future comments will appear instantly – no further approval process to go thru. BTW I checked out your website, too. Looks like a great place to get guidance for becoming “unstuck!” Best wishes.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. A big part of the fear of aging, certainly, is the fear of death. But I think there’s another element to it, namely the fear of declining in looks, mental function, and physical ability as one ages. I wonder whether a large segment of our culture believes that we can avoid decline or slow it down by doing certain things and using certain products. If a woman shows signs of aging, people can think–not that she’s aging–but that she’s letting herself go.
Absolutely. If you look carefully at magazines containing such “ever young” articles, there’s almost a sense of low-grade hysteria about them, like whistling past the graveyard. “If I still look THIS GOOD at 60, hell, I’ll NEVER die!” I personally would like to explore the opposite: letting go of the panic, and settling into the appreciation of all we have, and yes, all that it means. What if we worked on throttling back the very real fear, instead of pretending we’re unaware of it?
BTW sorry for the delay in responding to your comments. Just had surgery. Great outcome! I’ll write about it soon. All of your future comments will appear on the screen right away so no more of this waiting to see your words online. Thanks for commenting, Madeleine.